(L-R) Mohammed Alam, Head of SAP’s Product & Engineering; SAP CEO Christian Klein; and Chief Technology Officer Philipp Herzig at a press meet at SAP Sapphire 2025 in Orlando, USA
SAP Labs India’s 41-acre campus at Devanahalli in Bengaluru will be ready by the second half of the year, generating a seating capacity of 15,000 more. SAP Labs India, which has been in operation since 1988, is home to 14,000 employees across five cities: Bengaluru, Gurugram, Mumbai, Hyderabad, and Pune.
“India is one of our largest development centres and our new facility, which will be opened later this year, will add to our capacity. From a product engineering perspective, given its size, the facility will be a self-sufficient and decoupled environment, said Mohammed Alam, Executive Board of SAP, and Head of the company’s Product & Engineering. He was responding to a question on the impact of trade restrictions imposed by the US and visa restrictions, if any, on the company, at SAP Sapphire Orlando: 2025.
SAP Labs Bangalore – the company’s largest R&D hub outside Germany – is innovating key Artificial Intelligence use cases and drivers across the entire solution base – from S/4 HANA to HXM and the latest sustainability suite of solutions. One quarter of patents filed by SAP come from India, said a company official.
The company’s CEO, Christian Klein, said its campuses in Palo Alto, Berlin has a lot of colleagues from India. Colleagues from the US work out of Bengaluru and other India locations. “So far, we have not seen the impact of all the trade disruptions on business and IT,” he said.
The company has not seen any delays in any of its IT projects. However, there could be disruptions in the supply chain, shift in manufacturing, change in logistics and enhanced delivery out of Indonesia, compared to China. “This is where clients need technology more and we are super relevant these days,” he said.
Philipp Herzig, Chief Technology Officer, SAP, earlier speaking to newspersons from APAC, said the main development team of Joule — SAP’s natural language generative AI co-pilot, designed to enhance user interaction with SAP business systems — is actually coming out of India, together with the teams in Germany.
“The team in India is doing amazing things with Joule’s core team building, the Joule framework technology. We have all lines of businesses in India,” he said.
To actually make this huge progress, say to deliver 1,600 skills (check the stock level of material X in the warehouse is a skill), is the result of great collaboration that happened last year. “We put all the developers in India, across all the various teams, in one room and made it happen _ we delivered across all lines of businesses. This amazing experience that we have today came out of SAP India Labs.
“Nearly 400 people in the India Labs worked on Joule, and continue to work on it. The number would be even more if you count the peoplecontributing indirectly as well, he said.
Manish Prasad, President and Managing Director for SAP Indian Subcontinent, said SAP India’s growth story is in sync with that of SAP. “India is now a strong and vibrant market for SAP. Business is growing across all verticals, including automobile, healthcare and retail. Indian companies are adopting AI at a really fast pace,” he said. “We are also tapping the tier-2 and tier-3 markets,” he added.
On the greenfield facility coming up at Bengaluru, Prasad said the new centre, which is likely to be inaugurated in July-August, will have a Centre of Excellence, Concept Centres and a major focus on AI
(This writer is in Orlando at SAP’s invitation).
Published on May 22, 2025
