The Phone Took 75 Years to Touch 50 Million Lives, Angry Birds Took Just 35 Days: Adaire Martin, President, SAP at IIM A

Adaire Fox Martin, President, SAP Asia Pacific Japan, recently interacted with the MBA (PGPX) Class at IIM Ahmedabad (IIM A) as part of the Speaker Series organised by the Class of 2016. Martin shared her perspective on hyper-connected economies and the role SAP plays in it.

The session was peppered with interactions between the students and Martin and started on a humorous note: on being presented with a bouquet of flowers, Martin quipped that she hopes her presentation is worth the flowers. The witty comment set the tone for the rest of the evening.

One of the key focus of Martin’s talk was ‘disruptive innovation’ and how it is changing the face of business.

She shared how many companies are struggling to keep pace with the change – “The telephone took 75 years to touch 50 million lives, but Angry Birds did so in 35 days. Today, when the cycle of change is shortened every minute, technology is the underpinning force for businesses to survive. As lives are moving from the real world to the virtual, data is being generated at a rapid pace and to succeed organizations need to unlock the potential of this data.”

SAP has reduced the lead time for producing a Harley Davidson from 21 days to a mere 6 hours

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The cloud presents an opportunity to provide easy access to this wealth of data to more people so that the data can be analysed and used in business decision making. And with the cost of online memory reducing significantly, it is more cost effective for businesses to transfer their data from servers to the cloud.

In this context, she shared how SAP’s product HANA has fundamentally changed the architecture of technology by providing myriad solutions – from office solutions to solutions for traffic operations at Hamburg port to providing data analytics for Indian Premier League and Formula One.

Martin quoted examples of how SAP has reduced the lead time for producing a Harley Davidson from 21 days to a mere 6 hours and how it has introduced technology in John Deere trucks to predict maintenance schedules for trucks.

PGPX students posed a number of questions to Martin and she answered all of them in detail. On being asked about SAP’s plans for the Indian market, Martin spoke at length about how SAP is bullish about the Indian market where there is a lot of pent-up demand and welcomes the shift of the Indian government to e-governance.