SAP to double headcount in India

SAP, a global leader in business software solutions, has announced that it will double its development team in India to 3,000 from 1,300, by the end of 2006.

The company has already invested ¤20 million and is in the process of investing a further ¤20 million for expansion.

Peter Zencke, member of the executive boar of SAP AG, said: "SAP Labs India has emerged as a strategic development centre for SAP globally and it is proud to announce that today over 10 per cent of global patents filed by SAP are generated from SAP Labs India."

Currently, the Indian unit undertakes 16 per cent of the global R&D work of SAP and has become the second largest development centre, surpassing the Palo Alto centre in the US. Development centre in Waldorf, Germany, tops the list.

The company has said that it aims to triple its Indian business in the next couple of years through "accelerated growth plans."

The Indian market, currently, accounts for just around 0.03 per cent of the corporation's global customer base and India is one of the top three emerging markets for SAP in Asia Pacific. During the last calendar year, the company grew by over 70 per cent in India.

According to International Data Corporation (IDC), SAP has the largest marketshare of 57.4 per cent in its flagship Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) market in India, and 26 per cent in the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) segment.

The company has stated that its recent launch of SAP NetWeaver, an open integration and application platform, offers the biggest growth opportunity for Indian IT companies since SAP R/3, its flagship ERP offering.

NetWeaver helps companies align IT with business, obtain more business value from existing IT investment and deploy enterprise services architectures.