Exceptional women in customer success| SAP Labs India
Dharani Karthikeyan is a technologist and a leader whose love and passion for technology brought her to the positions and role she aspired to. With more than two decades of overall industry experience, she has been specializing in the field of data and analytics for several years. As the Vice President and Head of Engineering for Analytics of SAP Labs India, she has raised the bar of the organization. Since its inception 50 years ago, innovation has always been at the core of SAP. The company promotes a culture of innovation within SAP Labs India through various initiatives. The company’s vision is to help the world run better and improve people’s lives. However, its mission is to help every customer become a best-run business. It focuses on bringing out technological innovations that will address today’s and tomorrow’s challenges without disrupting its customers’ business operations. Its objective is to create a positive economic, environmental, and social impact worldwide, with a special focus on climate action, the circular economy, social responsibility, and holistic steering and reporting.
SAP Labs India is the second largest Research & Development center outside of Germany for SAP SE, the world’s leading provider of business software solutions. It began its operations in 1998 with headquarters in Bangalore and offices in Mumbai, Gurgaon, Hyderabad and Pune SAP innovations help thousands of customers worldwide work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively. It offers a variety of product solutions to its customers. SAP provides proven and best-in-class on-premise and cloud solutions for every business using the latest tech innovations in app development tools, generative AI, and clean cores for cloud ERP. With a global network of customers, partners, employees, and thought leaders, SAP helps the world run better and improve people’s lives. The sales organisation, SAP India, has maintained the mantle of being the fastest-growing country for SAP for many quarters. For APAC (Asia-Pacific), they finished eight quarters as the No.1 business region, in terms of increasing contribution to the APJ business.
“I love technology and people”
Dharani, who is from a small town in southern India where farming and agriculture are the main industries in the neighbourhood, found that a career in technology was an intriguing option. She was always intrigued by the positive influence that technology could have on such communities and the massive transformations that it could bring to improve people’s lives.
She started her career in tech two decades ago, starting as an engineer doing hands-on coding in various programming languages and later moving across various technologies and domains. She has also been specializing in the domain of analytics for the past years, helping customers get maximum value and insights from their huge treasure trove of digital data. Her journey and learnings within SAP have been incredible. SAP is a very inclusive company and respects people with the utmost care. She claims that because of her great experience with SAP, she has not only developed professionally but also improved as a person in general.
“I love technology and people,” says Dharani. The fact that technology is rapidly changing and that she is able to align her teams to leverage the evolving technologies and trends to build valuable products for customers makes her current position very special. She continuously works with her customers, which in turn helps her and the team build innovations and re-imagine the company’s product roadmap. She feels honored to work with passionate individuals and organize her team for customer success and operational excellence.
Dharani utilizes and reserves a few hours every week diligently for upskilling in new technologies. To get an understanding of new technologies and how she might use them to improve and reimagine the company’s products, she attends seminars, reads blogs, watches educational videos, and gets hands-on experience with them.
Exploring Innovation
Dharani says, “For SAP, innovation or re-invention is an evolution.” SAP has a long and rich history of innovation. To shape the next generation of enterprise software, SAP explores and develops new business models, trends, and technologies. Driving organic, in-house innovation is a key pillar in SAP’s novel approach, which includes offering impeccable products that became the foundation for customer transformation and growth. In addition to the company’s internal innovation efforts, SAP Start-up studio, an inhouse accelerator program from SAP Labs India, helps scale early-stage startups by providing them with the access and resources to build on SAP solutions and expand their portfolio. In addition to transforming current products, the business is also looking for SAP’s next great thing and investigating innovation in a more comprehensive and product-agnostic manner.
Being a tech leader is not easy; to fathom the prerequisite attributes necessary to procure an unimaginable success is difficult. Dharani’s emphasis being people-focused and empathetic and also foster strong team dynamics. More importantly, having a customer-centric approach and closely working with customers across the globe do ensure satisfying success. Simultaneously, a commitment to continuous upskilling by personally upskilling on new technologies and also encouraging constant upskilling of the entire organization keeps a leader at the forefront of technology, ensuring its solutions remain cutting-edge.
"The future of enterprise software will bring an abundance of opportunities with the power of Generative AI"
Building a brighter future
Dharani believes generative AI is going to be the most dominant trend. Generative AI is helping to humanize the technology and allows delightful experiences to be built on top of it. Gen AI is not just helping to write a funny poem; it is solving real-world problems. Right from automating core finance processes, invoice matching, generating job descriptions, and understanding real-time business insights easily based on natural language, the opportunity is immense.
Dharani feels passionate about delivering highly scalable software combined with a consumer-grade user experience and an enhanced customer experience for large-scale enterprises. As a leader, she walks the talk and continues to upskill on new age technology that helps strategise and re-image analytics for future. Gen AI is the new way forward for SAP and she has led and guided her team to deliver innovations to the market based on that and have several more lined up in the coming quarters.
Dharani suggests every aspiring leader always thinks from the customer’s perspective and spends time understanding the domain and its challenges, before jumping into the solution space. Choosing the technology wisely and keeping it simpler makes things function in a greater and more effective way. It does not leave space for over-complicating the solutions. One must be aware of the unconscious bias that comes in while designing, testing, and creating user personas and work consciously to avoid it. “The future of enterprise software will bring an abundance of opportunities with the power of Generative AI,” concludes Dharani
