SAP Labs India has announced new business solutions that have been produced at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Bangalore. Valued SAP India partners Arteria Technologies Ltd., MindTree Ltd. and Wipro Technologies have worked jointly with developers at the lab to create cutting-edge solutions including an insurance claims analytics solution and a new workflow and mobility solution, both of which are being jointly demonstrated and showcased to customers.
The SAP Co-Innovation Lab was launched at the SAP Labs India campus in Bangalore on April 24, 2009; joining existing Co-Innovation labs in Palo Alto, California, and Tokyo, Japan. In its first twelve months of operation, the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Bangalore, has played a catalyst role with customers and partners in India, and made a jump start with many customer needed solutions coming out of the labs, harnessing the power of the local and global partners operating out of India, leveraging their large pool of talent working on these solutions. SAP Co-Innovation Lab, Bangalore supported the projects from conceptualization till creation of a solution asset, with wide array of SAP expertise involved to guide and support, get a quick start into the infrastructure needs required for these projects and packaging the solution assets in order to bring the visibility and experiences to the customers.
The Global Co-Innovation Lab network offers a hands-on environment for SAP, independent software vendors (ISVs), system integrators (SIs) and technology partners to work together with customers on current and future technologies to showcase how companies can increase competitive advantage and improve efficiencies. It provides a physical and virtual environment for SAP, customers and partners to collaborate on solutions and offerings that will help solve and address today’s most pressing business challenges and opportunities.
“The SAP Co-Innovation Lab facilitates and nurtures Co-Innovation with our ecosystem members. The SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Bangalore has been in the forefront since its inception in 2009, in delivering customer driven solution innovations. In the last one year, the lab has witnessed active participation of SAP Global and Regional partners based out of India driving co-innovation projects, and we clearly see growing demand from our customers and partners to co-innovate with SAP” said Axel Henning Saleck, head of the Global SAP Co-Innovation Lab Network within the Global Ecosystem and Partner Group, SAP AG. “What we have achieved in the very first year of operations is remarkable - for example, all completed co-innovation projects have moved from a lab experiment stage to solutions which customers can readily deploy now.”
Traditional roles of systems integrators, independent software vendors, and resellers is going through a sea change with customer demands shifting to getting solutions from the enterprise applications and the needed content to users more quickly and cost effectively than ever before. As a result, partners who used to play roles purely in the sale or implementation of enterprise solutions are shifting focus to high-value innovation, to increasingly able to deliver added value by building new solutions in the form of solution assets or packaged service offerings to meet the customer expectations cost effectively.
"India is seeing an explosive growth in the software industry. Today, there is a clear need to foster close collaboration with our partner ecosystem to steer innovation and develop customer ready solutions for our customers” says V R Ferose, Managing Director SAP Labs India. “In the past one year at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, we have successfully collaborated and developed cutting-edge and customer-oriented solutions along with our partners and customers in India, germinating new standards of technology and providing faster ‘time to value’.”
The Lab hosts state of the art facilities, heterogeneous datacenter integrating hardware and infrastructure software from SAP and participating sponsors, a hands-on environment where members can work on proof-of-concepts and build and test new business processes, promotes new and innovative applications and technology solutions to SAP customers.
GIS enabled Mobile Solution for Real Estate Industry
Real Estate Sales and Tenancy business, typically in emerging markets, is largely a manual process with system interactions pushed more as a back-end activity. MindTree Ltd, a regional SAP Service partner, with their expertise in implementations of SAP Real Estate solutions has worked in COIL to build a mobile application that automates sales and leasing for real estate.
MindTree’s mobile solution provides real-time visibility to the sales personnel with geographic information of the property, details on enquiries, creation of prospects/ customers and even generation of the sales orders on a mobile device. Additionally, sales personnel can check the availability of the units on real time basis and get details like selling prices, utility costs, taxes and more. The significance of this solution is that this application works in Nokia-S60 and Sony Ericsson devices which are more popular in the segments which MindTree is targeting.
“Our expertise in SAP Real Estate implementation and partnership with SAP Co-Innovation Labs (COIL) in Bangalore led to the development of this solution. COIL provided an excellent environment for our team to brainstorm and work with SAP mobile development experts to build an effective solution. Our development team used SAP-provided state-of-the-art technology infrastructure with ready access to the latest technology and expertise,” said Amit Banerji, Vice President - ERP Practice (IT Services), MindTree Ltd.
Providing rich insights to Property and Casualty (P&C) insurance carriers
Wipro Technologies, a Global SAP services partner, developed its Insurance Claims Analytics solution, combining its experience in business intelligence (BI) and strong global insurance domain expertise with SAP® BusinessObjects™ XI 3.1 solutions. This solution is now readily available and being deployed in large global insurance companies.
“Leveraging business intelligence and analytics is vital to identify potential fraudulent claims, analyze litigation/supply chain costs, and provide improved business insight in management dashboards to make better decisions. Wipro has addressed this need of its Global Clients through Insurance Claims Analytics (ICA) - an integrated solution accelerator with dashboards and predictive analytics. The solution is architected on SAP BusinessObjects & developed in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab at Bangalore, India,” says Pawan Kumar, Vice President, Business Intelligence & Information Management Practice, Wipro Technologies
Business workflow approvals in Nokia Devices
Arteria Technologies, a SAP NetWeaver services partner, has been involved with SAP Co-Innovation Labs, Bangalore right since its inception and has collaboratively developed innovative solutions in demand in India Region. Arteria Technologies developed the mobile application and mobile client interface in SAP Co-Innovation Lab.
Parag Jain, Chief technology Officer, Arteria Technologies said “SAP Co-Innovation Lab program has helped us collaborate very closely with the SAP development teams and accelerate the deployment of latest NetWeaver technology in our products and services. Our work with the Lab allows customers to leverage newer channels like mobile and empower users with anytime and easier access to their SAP implementation. The program is also a great example of SAP and partners working together in strategic areas to accelerate solution development for SAP and Arteria customers.”
The mobile solution built on SAP NW Mobile is the very first mobile client interface certified by SAP. mApprove is a mobile application developed on SAP NetWeaver Mobile 7.1. The application provides the users with a mobile Inbox for all their approval tasks like Leave Request, Travel, PO Release, etc. The users can take action on the approval request, on the Go, using their mobile device. This eliminates the need to connect to the corporate network from the computer, since with the mApprove mobile application, approval tasks will be now be pushed to the mobile device for immediate action. The application supports most commonly used Symbian S60 devices like Motorola, Nokia, Sony Ericsson, LG, Samsung, etc. as well designed to run on Blackberry and Windows PDA devices. The solution is currently available in SAP EcoHub, the SAP hosted online marketplace for Partner solutions.
The SAP Co-Innovation Lab Bangalore is the SAP storefront for co-innovation in India. It engages with frontrunner customers and partners as co-innovators with SAP, and enables the joint collaboration on projects spanning relevant end-to-end business scenarios and technology solutions. Rajamani Srinivasan, Vice President, Solution Engineering, SAP Indian Subcontinent has been closely associated with SAP Co-Innovation Lab, identifying the solution ideas arising from market and customer need gaps and taking the project deliverables to enhance value delivery to the customers.
Rajamani said “Customers and partners today are looking to collaborate with technology leaders like SAP to capitalize on opportunities while addressing their business challenges. Co-Innovation India Lab, aims to keep our customers and partners centre to the business and co-innovate to build solutions with unique value propositions in our focus industries. With expert guidance, proven domain knowledge and strong partner ecosystem, we will enable our customers and partners to innovate faster, achieve dominance over competition and meet the dynamic needs of the market.”