Kulmeet Bawa, MD & President, SAP Indian Subcontinent goes vocal on 'Project Nakshatra' for India and its long term impact on startups

SAP India has launched its new initiative, 'Project Nakshatra' for Indian startups. Kulmeet Bawa, MD & President, SAP Indian Subcontinent, made an announcement about the project on Day 1 of TechSparks 2021.

“Over the ages, we have read about nakshatras and constellations and how they played a very important role in guiding travelers right to their destination. Taking inspiration from that, I'm proud to announce Project Nakshatra,” he said.

In a fireside chat with Shradha Sharma, Founder, YourStory, Kulmeet goes all vocal about the new project, its impact, and how SAP aims to help propel the Indian startup ecosystem to further contribute towards India’s aspiration to become an economic superpower.

“Today, a lot of startups are growing and taking as little as 18 months to become unicorns. At SAP, we want to make this journey seamless for startups by enabling businesses not only to manage their day-to-day operations but also to have that ability to innovate as they become larger and get into the future,” added Kulmeet.

SAP is today serving about 450,000 customers globally across 26 Industries, which is phenomenal. Having recently completed 25 years of launch in India, SAP knows how to scale, understands what it means to take a business global, and what it means to arm that business for robustness, as well as agility, he said. 

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How Project Nakshatra aims to create an impact?

SAP is looking at Project Nakshatra to help startups and digital natives prepare for hyper-growth, help them build products for scale as well as go global. 

The startups will get a byte-size starter pack that has been created keeping in mind the changing landscape.

As Kulmeet shared, all SAP offerings today are cloud-native, which can allow startups to have a very modular approach to their scale, based on their appetite and how they want to scale and grow.

The project stands on two key pillars:

• Ensuring value realisation: Over the last 25 years, SAP India has invested in teams, in processes to serve this segment already, not only to get these solutions positioned with the startups but also to help them ensure adoption to ensure utilisation and value realisation, which is where the aha moment or the maximum benefits are derived.

• Co-innovation for startups: India today has a bigger and much real transformation opportunity. The success of businesses will lie in creating global markets for themselves, especially the US and Europe, sitting out of India.

According to Kulmeet, this is where SAP’s deep industry partnering expertise with a huge customer base can help. The company has opened up a lot of its laurels over the years for the startup community to help them forge different partnerships or commercial models so that it's a win-win for everyone.

“But in essence, Nakshatra has been launched with the intent that we definitely want to become a long-term partner of choice for Indian startups like we've done with most of the other segments in the last 25 years,” he added.

While SAP is already working with a number of startups, going forward, the team aims at increasing the number further with Project Nakshatra. 

“We are helping lay the digital core for one of the leading electric scooter manufacturing companies while partnering for growth with one of the largest online pharma companies in India today. So we are already in it, we are only trying to see how we raise the bar,” he concludes.

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