In previous posts, I share insights into how TCS has developed an award-winning SAP practice by enhancing our consulting services and addressing the soft skills required for large scale IT-enabled business transformation. Here, I will take a look at how we closely collaborate with SAP to bring benefits to our clients.
This collaboration is essential given rapid technology advances and recent changes in SAP’s software products for the cloud and focus on S/4HANA. Already, SAP counts more than 70 million cloud users of its technology. It projects its cloud revenue to grow more than fourfold between 2014 and 2020, to at least $8 billion (which would be a third of SAP’s $24 billion revenue last year).
Our clients rely upon TCS to provide strategic guidance as they build roadmaps to adopt new technologies and evaluate how IT can best support the business. To deliver on this, our SAP practice actively collaborates with SAP at multiple levels to stay in sync with their strategic direction and product plans. The fact that we’ll be presenting our client successes and expertise in eight sessions at SAPPHIRE NOW, May 5-7, in Orlando is testimony to our partnership with the Walldorf, Germany-based software company. If you are attending SAPPHIRE NOW, I encourage you to attend our sessions to hear from executives at API, British Gas, Cardinal Health, Hasbro, Performance Fibers and Tetra Pak about the ways they leverage SAP to deliver benefits to the business.
As an SAP Global Partner, TCS is committed to strengthening our relationship with SAP from the highest levels of our organization. In recent years, we set up a new alliance team with SAP, which created even stronger bonds between our SAP practice leaders and their SAP counterparts. And our partnership is a major reason why I moved from Mumbai to New Jersey in 2012: to get closer to SAP’s leadership group, whose U.S. headquarters is outside of Philadelphia.
In addition to continuing to make big investments in SAP specialists, TCS opened a global Center of Excellence in 2011 for our work on SAP HANA at our facility in Cincinnati, Ohio. Then last October, we opened another center there to develop applications for improving the SAP user experience—based on SAP’s Fiori and Screen Personas software. What’s more, we set up an SAP innovation center in Paris last year. Since they opened, we’ve brought more than 200 TCS clients into these two SAP centers. These concentrated areas of expertise enable us to innovate with clients and demonstrate the power of SAP technology, running simulations and test cases that build sound roadmaps.
Our partnership with SAP is destined to get even stronger over the rest of this decade, as both organizations take our collaboration and shared objective – to help large, global companies synchronize and run their operations in real-time – to new levels. As technology continues to change at an increasingly rapid pace, we look forward to bringing together TCS experts across the business, from industry specialists to consultants focused on cloud, the Internet of Things, mobility, robotics, etc., to advise our clients with holistic technology answers that will keep them competitive.
“Mutuality is the hallmark of organizational collaboration” among alliance partners, wrote Harvard Business School Professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter in the Harvard Business Review. “The best alliances try to maximize the value of the whole relationship, which then makes it more valuable to each partner.” In working with SAP in the years ahead, we couldn’t have stated it any better. I look forward to SAPPHIRE NOW and the many opportunities that our team will have to sit down with SAP leadership and product experts to discuss their vision and announcements that may come out of the conference that we can then bring to our client engagements. Please share your questions with us and let us know if you’d like to meet with our team during SAPPHIRE NOW.
