SAP looks to double headcount in India by 2010

by Venkatesh Ganesh

More and more tech giants are betting heavily on India. After Accenture, IBM Global services, Capgemini, Cisco, it is the turn of  Europe's largest software company, the German major SAP to hire more people for its India operations. It plans to double its headcount in India to 8,000 by 2010.

Though unwilling to give details, company officials said some high-end product development work for the next generation of enterprise resource planning solutions would be designed out of India.

Speaking on the SAP summit, Alan Sedghi, the president and CEO of Asian sub continent said that India is on top of its agenda, in terms of developing, supporting, sales, marketing and maintaining its products.   He added that the company sees a huge potential in the Indian domestic market.

"We have acquired 394 customers in 2007 till date and small companies number about 350 out of this," said Sedghi. On the need for deploying solutions such as SAP, Alok Shende, research director of Frost and Sullivan said that small and medium sized companies in India are going global and need to compete with companies abroad on even keel.

Also, a lot of localisation of solutions that are India specific will be done out of India and that is one of the reasons for the company's huge hiring plans.

Some of the India specific functionalities that have been released for SAP include features like electronic clearance services mandate for banks, late payment charges, and security deposit enhancements, localisations like Roster Management for Reservation Candidates, Employee Self Services for Reimbursements (Claims), Loans, Leave Encashment, Increment Processing and features for real estate Management includes India specific requirements like TDS computation and deduction for lease in process will be undertaken out of India

www.hindustantimes.com