SAP Partners with Indians

I have always been a believer in the win-win situation of business outsourcing. I do not mean to offend to citizens coming from wealthier countries who have been complaining about jobs lost from them through outsourcing. What I am trying to say is that from my perspective, outsourcing helps companies save money on expenses by spending a relatively lesser amount on salaries from poor countries while trying to help the latter with their problems on unemployment.

I was elated to learn that he Global IT Services Division of Wipro Limited and SAP AG had announced that there is an expansion of their existing collaboration and this expansion is related to enhancing development and implementation of high end business solutions that SAP is known for. This is research has particular focus on enterprise service-oriented architecture (enterprise SOA). In the agreement, Winpro will establish a solutions laboratory in Bangalore, India which will exemplify the best practices in the industry, models of innovative service delivery models and the benefits of enterprise SOA.

The Indians are known to excel in information technology around the world so there quality outputs can be expected from this laboratory. As a commitment of SAP to deepen its engagement with India's local engineering talents, it has come up with initiatives.

SAP is implementing a scholarship program which is being coordinated with the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Bangalore (IIIT-B) and the Birla Institute of Technology and Science (BITS) at Pilani in Rajasthan. Screening for this scholarship program is very tough as students undergo a technical entrance exam, interview on soft skills and assessed in their behaviors. As scholars, these students also work at the SAP Labs on part time basis. Once they finish the course, they will be hired by SAP.

The campus of SAP labs will have a 350,000-square-feet facility. This can house up to 2,000 employees.

This will surely be a huge boost on the economy of this vast third world country. I think the world has a way of making things fair. For richer countries like Germany where SAP comes from, many people can easily travel from one country to another so they can get the best jobs they want. But for Indians, many of them get stuck in their country due to prohibitive cost of travel. This project is a way of bringing the best job to the deserving citizens of India.

And for SAP, they can get the same world class IT skills at lesser price. The 6.6 billion SAP has set a target of 100,000 customers base by 2010 around the world. Currently it has 41,000 customers worldwide. The country's client base in the last 12 months has doubled to about 2,000 and is expected to parallel Britain's and France's in the next five years. SAP Labs India will surely be a strategic location of the company's expansion.

With India's big population and high percentage of the people having great IT skills, both parties will surely gain from each other in the years to come.