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The Next Big Thing in Enterprise Apps

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PANKAJ
New Update

What will be the next big thing in Enterprise Apps this year? What disruptive innovations can organizations expect in this space?

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Adoption of Cloud Computing as a business model is definitely growing, and happening in Lob functions like HR, procurement, supply chain, etc. Organizations are far more open for cloud solutions here, apart from the infrastructure side of things. This will be one big driver in 2014 and beyond. Cloud adoption in India is still very low, but growing pretty fast.

Here, SaaS will grow at 28% as per Gartner. SAP is also bullish in this space, and we've witnessed triple digit growth from across industries. In fact, we see cloud adoption from a wide range of industries, and different lines of business-procurement, HR, supply chain, transformational projects.

Close to 60% of our installed base in India are SMBs in terms of number of customers. Specifically for cloud, we see penetration from both. Large enterprises are looking at driving business transformation using the cloud.

Another hot trend in this segment is that organizations are looking at revamping their CRM. We see that the adoption of CRM apps is much quicker in both B2B and B2C segments. In B2B, organizations want to use CRM to connect with their dealers and distributors to bring them on one common value chain. While in B2C, telecom and retail are actively looking at CRM adoption.

Organizations are also trying to be more innovative in their marketing. So leveraging social media for digital marketing has become a norm today, especially for consumer focused businesses.

What sort of Integration can be expected between social media and business apps?

Over a period of time, social media has become an important and critical source to tap into feedback from customers, how they perceive your brand, and how they react to your campaigns. Are there any key influencers? What's their reaction to your ads? What is the intent of viewers of your advertisement? What's the competitive comparison and how's the category of products you're offering doing overall? Before releasing new products, organizations can float ideas on social media and get feedback before adding any improvements. There's a long list of things we can achieve through social media.

Here, analytics can play a big role and is becoming critical. Plus, it integrates with CRM to analyze brand performance and reaction to campaigns. With CRM, we can also plan marketing and what sort of marketing initiative can be adopted, etc. It could even go back into the PLM to improve product design.

It is relatively new and the scale at which people are demanding and analyzing brand performance is going to increase in the coming year. Earlier, people were trying to understand how it works, but now they're trying to react and plan their social media strategies.

For instance, look at TRP ratings. Some TV programs have low TRP, but if you look at the value of these programs on social media, people take into account that when deciding its pricing. The program Satyamev Jayate for instance was rated very high on social media, though its TRP was not very high. But the product pricing for advertising in this show would be impacted by the influence it has created on social media.

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Where are Indian enterprises still lacking while leveraging the full potential of their enterprise apps?

Any software we buy, it's not possible to utilize all its features. That's why about 5-10 years ago, there weren't too many success stories of getting the maximum value from software. In fact, there were more failures than successes. Today, the Indian market has learnt how to leverage software to become more innovative, and there are enough stories in the market for that.

Where are the improvement opportunities?

Organizations will have to differentiate between what's mission critical vs what software offers competitive advantage. The treatments to approach them would be different. You won't expect RoI from mission critical apps, as that's required for your survival. ERP is a fine example of mission critical software. What organizations now need to look for is software that will give them a competitive edge? What will help them connect with the external world, improve their supply chain, improve customer response time, etc. So BI and analytics are examples of apps that offer a competitive advantage. Big

Unfortunately, there's a bit of ignorance amongst CXOs on differentiating between mission critical apps and competitive edge giving apps. That stems from a CEO's view of enterprise software projects. We see CEOs delegating mission critical and strategic enterprise software projects to someone below without understanding that its' a business transformation project, and not an IT project. So a general understanding of how to leverage IT to drive continuous business improvements is a must. We're now seeing see drastic improvements in this area, including Indian SMEs, who want to leverage IT to grow.

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How Enterprise apps help deal with key sore points of most Indian customers-quality of service and customer support/satisfaction? What drives the requirement for better service?

Customers are becoming far more demanding. With the younger population getting using tech more aggressively, there's more awareness about quality of service. Some industries are becoming more efficient, like telecom, banking, insurance, or even a happening industry like dairy, where people were buying milk right at their door steps, but now they are buying branded milk products.

How can enterprise software help?

Fundamentally, before we even talk about that, customer service and quality is an attitude of an organization. You can have the best software, but if you don't have the attitude and vision to serve your customer, then nothing much can be achieved. Software is just a tool. An organization needs to first starts with an intention to improve, for which they need to be open to getting inputs from customers. One way is to use social media analytics to understand what their customers think about their service. Then, they could integrate it with a CRM application and look for ways of acting on that feedback. They could further integrate that feedback with the PLM software.

Where is mobility heading from a business apps standpoint?

Mobility is the fastest growing segment in enterprise software today. We've bundled mobility software for a variety of business processes that will get executed on the mobile-viewing reports, BI, etc. That will be the fastest growing segment as far as enterprise software adoption goes. If you see the number of smartphones in metros is soaring, and it is going to grow at a rate of 10-15 % YoY for sure.

BYOD is also catching up, but the key thing there is to be able to manage security and data that will be residing on the mobile app. When we build an application, we'll have to get it certified on different platforms, else BYOD won't work. From SAP's standpoint, whatever business apps we release, it's predominantly released on most platforms. A Lot of innovations will happen and new business models will evolve. We have an SME customer who switched from traditional RDBMS to SAP HANA, and wants to run an MRP in real-time. Existing ERP vendors are moving to new innovations.

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