Keynote session for SAP Asia Pacific

The keynote session of the SAP Summit was held yesterday, with SAP Asia Pacific COO Colin Sampson touching on governance, risk, compliance management and spiralling customer costs in the SAP arena. On the plus side for SAP, Sampson was also able to elaborate upon the greater ease of passage of India into SOX/SEB compliance and India, Inc. into a strategic opportunity management hub.

SAP Labs India head Georg Kniese spoke of the state-of the art initiatives planned for India to shape it into a SAP compliant country while SAP itself becomes increasingly enterprise-specific. Kniese also elaborated on the ongoing relationship between SAP and Microsoft, positively pumping the interaction between Microsoft and SAP engineers in Hyderabad. IT head of business Nitin Aurora, meanwhile, reported on the new relationship between Sony and SAP.

Aurora said that the SAP solution is intended for sixty users and will eventually scale up to 400 users in house and in Singapore. The solution will go live in October. Aurora added the future installation may or will include finance, controlling, human resources and business warehousing. “The interface is also in process,” Aurora said. “Project SAP is going to be a mix of client server and web based interfaces for local users and the web based interfaces for our users in Singapore.” Juergen Reinhardt of SAP Asia elaborated on challenges facing CIOs in India in general, specifically the consideration of specific SLAs and a SLA on responsive and corrective action.