SAP lab readies 14 solutions in a year

A year after SAP set up its co-innovation lab (COIL) in India, the Walldorf, Germany-headquartered business software company has completed 24 projects and produced 14 solutions ready to go to market.

The ERP major started SAP COIL last year in Bangalore to collaborate with technology, service and software companies to develop new solutions. It is the third centre of the company after Palo Alto in the US and Tokyo in Japan.

Axel Henning Saleck, head of the global SAP co-innovation lab network, said on Wednesday that around 30% of COIL projects come from the Bangalore centre, which that employs over 4,200 engineers.

Saleck said SAP has partnered with 11 technology companies including Wipro, Cisco, Arteria Technologies, MindTree and others to help take ideas from the conceptualisation stage to development and finally, to the market.

He said the intellectual property (IP) of the solution developed would lie with the partners; the solution would become a part of SAP offerings if it gained popularity with customers.

Vasant Kumar, director of SAP COIL in India, said solutions developed in India would take another year or two before they could be monetised.  “As per our (monetisation) model, partners will go through three stages before their solution reaches the stage when it is integrated into the SAP standards,” he told DNA.

Kumar said the company had not yet worked out the modality of the revenue-sharing pattern with partners. But if a COIL-developed solution evoked a good response, SAP may even look at acquiring the technology, he said.