“The R&D workforce of India is the backbone of SAP. All of our innovation at scale comes from here. The doubling (of SAP Labs) workforce will be the major growth driver for SAP in the future,” said Thomas Saueressig, SAP SE’s executive board member. “The hiring is not due to labour arbitrage or cost benefit purposes but reflective of huge growth seen in the cloud business,” he said while addressing the media on his visit to Bengaluru.
“It will be a perfect ecosystem because we have our customers such as Unilever, Shell and Boeing located there. It means working closely with our customers for collaboration and innovation,” said Sindhu Gangadharan, senior vice president and MD of SAP Labs India. The arm will hire 3,600 employees this calendar year and has already reached the half-way mark.
The arm has 14,000 people currently in the country across its five locations in Bengaluru, Pune, Mumbai, Gurgaon and Hyderabad. More than 70% of the country’s GDP and 50% of corporate tax is touched by a SAP system. Also, the India labs team is the only team globally to work across its entire suite of solutions and products such as sustainability, enterprise resource planning and supply-chain solutions.
Also, a majority of new advancements done in artificial intelligence and machine learning are done out of Bengaluru, “Visual inspection solution that brings quality processes to a production line based on videos or images in our Concur expense management solution, we have a fraud detection feature that is AI-powered–both these solutions rely on data treasure we have on the cloud,” said Saueressig. The company has 130 such use cases of AI/ML till date in its portfolio.
