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We have over 34K clients leveraging AI globally: SAP Asia Pacific Prez
German technology major SAP yet again showcased that in an uncertain macro environment, businesses will rely on technology. The firm's Q1 2025 revenue grew 11 per cent in constant currency and operating profit was up 58 per cent, giving it confidence of a double-digit growth. SAP also called out India as one of the regions with 'outstanding' performance in Cloud adoption. Simon Davies, president, SAP Asia Pacific, in an interview with Shivani Shinde, on the sidelines of SAP NOW AI Tour, talks about his priorities for the region. Edited excerpts:
You completed about 10 weeks in this role and your appointment also saw a change in the regional division. Why the shift from Asia-Pacific Japan (APJ) to Asia-Pacific (APAC) and what will be your key focus areas?
Historically, we have operated as APJ, and Greater China was a separate region. We saw two trends — one, there was an opportunity for SAP to bring its capabilities at scale across geographies by combining them. This allowed us to offer best-in-class innovation around artificial intelligence (AI), data and Cloud, among others. We also saw that customers in APAC were increasingly coming together as a region. By merging the two company groups, we are now in a much better position to support our customers and leverage co-investments. For instance, we have a great footprint in India, with SAP Labs. It is the second-largest research and development (R&D) footprint for SAP and China is perhaps our third-largest R&D hub. So now, being a part of one APAC team, we can truly leverage the economic opportunities in these regions for our customers. My top three priorities for APAC are: First, to help customers unlock the power of AI. Secondly, to support their continued journey to Cloud. And third, to scale with our partners so that we can achieve the first two priorities.
Have you seen any impact of the tariff wars on your customer spends or tech roadmap?
We've been in business for 50 years now, and we've seen all kinds of business challenges — how they evolve and how processes adapt. Nearly 86 per cent of the global commerce touches SAP. So, our focus is to help make businesses more resilient.
What are some growth drivers in APAC for SAP?
First, AI is real— we have more than 34,000 customers globally leveraging AI capabilities and embedded features. Today, we showcased more than 200 embedded AI use cases, and we've committed to increasing that to 400 by the end of this year. These 400 use cases will demonstrate how we've embedded AI into the daily workflows of employees and business processes, improving productivity. We've seen productivity gains of up to 30 per cent just by summarising information better or analysing processes with an AI assistant. Cloud is another growth driver. For our customers, moving to Cloud unlocks many of these AI capabilities. While AI and Cloud are fuelling momentum, it's also about customer ambition — what they want to achieve. It's no longer about replication, but about reimagining the next generation of processes and capabilities. One area with huge opportunities is data Cloud. We've seen a unique challenge — as AI becomes more central, data becomes more important.
The richest contextual data sits within the SAP environment. Many organisations struggle to combine their internal data with external sources.
We have seen that organisations have struggled to correlate and combine external data with their existing data. Many have created data lakes for different use cases. Our big focus is going to be data Cloud, which means bringing together data products from the SAP environment. We have partnered with Databricks to get the external datasets.
India has been one of the fastest-growing regions for SAP. What is driving this?
There are two key drivers. First, many large enterprises in India already use SAP and are looking to transform and move to Cloud. In India, we have over 200 customers live on our public Cloud — the highest for any country globally. That accounts for 23 per cent of our global public Cloud customer base. Second, we have a significant presence in the mid-market segment.
In fact, 76 per cent of our customers in India fall in the mid-market and small and medium business (SMB) segment.
Over 40 per cent of digital natives are also our customers.
During the past 10 weeks, I've met over 100 customers. What I've realised, based on their feedback, is just how critical SAP is to their businesses. Everyone is trying to understand how AI can help them. Many have experimented with AI but haven't achieved the outcomes they were aiming for. The fact that we have 200 embedded use cases, and that customers can quickly see productivity improvements and time savings, is very compelling — especially as AI becomes ubiquitous in business and expectations are high. For example, Wipro, which also uses SAP, expects to increase consultant productivity by 20 per cent using AI. Another observation from my travels over the past 10 weeks is that APAC is being viewed as a growth market by businesses here. It's no longer just about serving Europe and global markets —these regions are now driving their own growth.
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