SAP Labs is the research arm of the Germany headquartered technology company.
“We are already engaging in deep research with some of the universities and will continue to do so in areas where we want a deeper focus. We are also looking at cross university collaborations with German universities where we are quite well established,” SAP Labs India chief executive Sindhu Gangadharan told ET.
The company has created a curriculum at IIIT-Bangalore to build AI managers of the future, she said. Some of the areas the company would focus on in the short to medium term are metaverse and quantum.
Gangadharan said SAP Labs was tapping into all parts of the local ecosystem, ranging from partners and startups to academia. A lot of the core innovations that SAP Labs is building for its global customers are now being done in India, as they directly engage with customers’ offshore units which are located here. “Global customers who have their global capability centers here are helping drive business through co-innovation and leveraging the power of the ecosystem,” she said.
India is an important development hub for the company, which has about 14,000 employees across five Indian cities. Earlier this year, it announced it was setting up a second campus in Bengaluru and would be doubling its headcount by 2025.
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SAP Labs runs the SAP Startup Studio, where it has incubated 51 early-stage startups so far.
It normally looks for early-stage enterprise tech companies in areas that complement its portfolio, Gangadharan said. Once these startups are certified and on the SAP app center, they have access to the company’s half a million global customers.
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