In this blog series, I’m talking to leaders from across our global SAP practice to bust myths, share successes, and find out what makes them tick. Today, I spoke with Aravind Ramamoorthy, who leads PwC India’s large SAP practice.
Martin: To kick off our conversation, what SAP myth would you like to bust?
Aravind: The traditional perception of SAP is that it takes a long time to implement, and it’s only really suitable for large global corporations. That view is now outdated. In the last few years, SAP has reinvented itself. Public cloud and the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model have changed everything. Implementation times have shrunk significantly. SAP has taken complex solutions, templatised them and come out with plug-and-play offerings. This has made SAP far more attractive to mid-size companies as well.
Martin: What excites you most about the PwC SAP alliance?
Aravind: PwC is one of the top three SAP partners globally, and in India we’re in the top two. I love that the relationship between PwC and SAP is a true partnership across all 360 degrees of our businesses.
What do I mean by that? We sell SAP solutions and services to our clients, but we also sell directly to SAP. Across our firms in India and Germany, our PwC consultants are delivering services to SAP and also working with SAP labs, co-innovating and co-developing solutions with them. The relationship isn’t just one-way: SAP upskills us, gives us leads, and helps us win deals. We do the same for them, helping SAP grow and sell licences, bringing them leads and helping them shape deals.
Beyond our commercial strategies, we use SAP ourselves. In fact, at SAP Sapphire 2024, Muhammad Alam, SAP’s Head of Product Engineering, pointed out that PwC is SAP’s largest public cloud customer.
The strong alliance between our two businesses is evident at every level of the organisation. Our alliance with SAP is one that is truly mutually beneficial, and that’s something very special.
Martin: What’s the most exciting project you recently worked on?
Aravind: As the PwC India SAP practice leader, I would like to call out a few projects that have been the most impactful and where we have enabled clients to achieve end-to-end digital transformation across multiple business units using several suites of SAP products – such as RISE with SAP, SAP Analytics Cloud, SAP Digital Supply Chain, SAP Ariba for procurement, and SAP Business Technology Platform (BTP) for innovation.
We are currently working on SAP led business transformations (RISE with SAP) for two large pharma companies, a supply chain transformation using SAP IBP for one of the largest agrochemical and BioSolutions companies, and a public cloud implementation for a large IT services company, to name just a few. We are delighted to be part of these engagements and we’re enjoying bringing the client’s visions to life.
Martin: Thanks Aravind. Now, over to you. What other developments are you seeing across the SAP landscape in India?
Aravind: India has been SAP’s fastest-growing market for many years. In parallel, our SAP practice at PwC India is having a phenomenal run. We’re the fastest-growing practice in India, and we bring in lots of deals.
We’re winning lots of awards, too. Both last year and this year, we won 10 awards at the SAP Ace awards, including prizes for end-to-end transformation, procurement, customer experience, finance transformation, and BTP innovation. The award winners are selected by a jury comprising industry leaders, and they favour projects that deliver tangible business outcomes. We’re proud and honoured to have won the most awards of any service provider.
PwC India supports SAP’s entire solution portfolio. We have been able to upskill our consultants and grow our practice substantially and we now support every solution that SAP sells. We have strong market positions in our key priority sectors.
We support many global engagements. Our SAP practice was founded to serve the domestic market in India, but we now also play an integral part in large global projects across multiple territories, helping them to sell and deliver SAP projects for clients around the globe.
As an early adopter of public cloud, we’ve gained first-mover advantage. PwC was one of the first public cloud practitioners in the Indian market. We’ve now done multiple public cloud implementations for clients, and, as I mentioned earlier, PwC is SAP’s largest public cloud user. Public cloud is a key growth area for us. We’ve developed industry templates on public cloud that we’re using here and for other territories. And we’re upskilling our consultants on public cloud, too.
AI is another big focus. In particular, we’re using AI to boost efficiency in delivery. Plus, we’re working with SAP Business AI to identify promising AI use cases for our clients.
The common thread across our successes is that we bring sector expertise and a razor-sharp focus on business outcomes, alongside our deep experience in SAP. That’s a powerful differentiator.
Martin: That’s very impressive. Managing such a large SAP practice must keep you busy. When you’re not at work, how do you like to spend your time?
Aravind: I’m a sports buff. I support Manchester United and I love watching the English premier league. I also enjoy watching and playing cricket, going to matches in person when I can. Next on my bucket list are seeing the tennis at Wimbledon, and watching Manchester United at Old Trafford.
My other big passion is travel. My favourite recent family holiday was a trip to the south of France, including Nice and Monaco.
Day to day, I also enjoy good food, following the stock markets, and investing in startups.
My conversation with Aravind was inspiring, and I was particularly impressed by the rapid growth of our practice in India. I’m planning to reveal insights from more leaders across our global SAP alliance soon, so stay tuned and thanks for reading.
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