The Hindu : Business : SAP NetWeaver to drive future growth

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Nov 24, 2004

Business

Business

SAP NetWeaver to drive future growth

By Our Staff Reporter

BANGALORE, NOV. 23. Enterprise software maker, SAP AG, has brought its international technology exhibition and conference on its products to India at its Bangalore base of SAP Labs India Private Ltd., where some 1,300 software developers work.

SAP has been working with Indian `ramp up partners' such as Infosys on its latest offering, NetWeaver, a technology platform. Bringing the exhibition, TechEd 04, to India was another indication of the growing importance of the region in the overall scheme of things for the German software company. "Outside Germany, India has become our largest Global R&D base,'' Peter Zencke, a member of the executive board of SAP, told reporters here today.

"The share of SAP Labs India Private Limited in that work has gone up from 12 per cent to 16 per cent. In a year's time, we plan on increasing the number of developers from 1,300 to about 2,100. An additional 500 people may be added on services side,' Dr. Zencke said.

A company release says SAP will have some 3,000 employees by 2006. Outside, in the $20 million campus, as some 1,100 delegates met informally, the exhibition itself was buzzing with excitement over how everyone would do more business around NetWeaver.

Participants, who had put up stalls to showcase the work they did with SAP, included the software divisions of other multinational firms, such as Siemens Information Systems, and Indian software companies such as Satyam and Infosys.

NetWeaver

This latest offering from SAP, "is a technology platform that allows users to integrate different applications, even if those applications are not built by SAP,'' Dr. Zencke explained. SAP rolled out NetWeaver in March last year as a general enterprise platform. This year, in TechEd 04, road shows in Europe, the U.S. and Asia Pacific, it has made a series of announcements on how the platform helped customers in two key areas — embedded analytics, "the dream of application developers'' as Dr. Zencke said and a `virtual machine container' technology. With customers grappling with terabytes of data, the analytics software is said to offer in-memory computing and advanced searches. For customers using blade servers, the combination would offer significant value in terms of `total cost of operation,' he said.

Martin Prinz, Joint Managing Director of SAP Labs India, said last year, business in India had grown by 70 per cent.

In terms of the growth of the company itself, SAP had identified, in addition to India where it made early investments, China and Bulgaria to set up development centres.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Business