Like many software majors, do you think that SAP totally failed to understand the potential of the internet and emerging opportunities?

Our competitors have been spreading such arguments and I don't think the criticism is justified. But it is true that we were a bit late to react and prepare ourselves for the emerging opportunities. If you compare us with some of the well-known names in the industry, you can see that we are not all that late. I believe the biggest hindrance was the mental shift. About nine months ago, we began the process of re-inventingourselves and in May, we outlined our internet business strategy and the mySAP.com.

Now that we have begun large-scale efforts to market our new product the worldover, we will invest nearly 25-30 per cent of our sales revenue to popularise the concept. Another important move is to deploy special teams of officials to promote the new environment.

Interestingly, we have the R&D efforts going into the enterprise-wide solutions. We are broadening these further to include e-commerce solutions and will come out with major breakthroughs in the next couple of years in the field of business-to-business e-commerce. Again, we are not pushing our efforts enough as some other companies are doing. We have a suite of 30 highly-useful enterprise-wide applications but never pushed them or gave enough promotion to enable them to become household names.

Companies have started to view ERP as a stumbling block or a restraining factor in re-defining their infrastructures to adapt to new opportunities. What is the futureof ERP?

I admit that ERP is no longer hot but companies must realise that it is a building block for the future. It provides you the correct business model. The relevance of supply chain management will increase once large-scale trading takes place on the Web. You will be able to deliver good better only when you manage your resources better. In fact, a company having an ERP package can better meet the demands of Web trading.

I attribute the present slowness in the ERP market to the Y2K menace. Corporates are not committing any large sums for ERP or any other solutions because they are more worried about the Y2K bug and its likely impact. I am sure that once the situation is over, ERP will pick up.

ERP will itself undergo major changes in the next months in both functionality and concept, enabling it to meet new challenges.

Are you considering mySAP.com as a last bid to reposition SAP in the e-commerce arena?

This should be seen as our major step into the arena and not as a last-ditcheffort. The environment, mySAP.com, is an open e-business solution for e-commerce companies, having industry-specific applications, internet applications and services, portals and extensible markup language (XML) technologies. It also encompasses e-commerce, customer relationship management, business intelligence, supply chain management, human resources, logistics, manufacturing, financial, knowledge management and virtual training classes.

The solutions provide key elements including Market Place, an open business-to-business hub for inter-company transactions and communication, Workplace, a portal with personalised browser-based work environment and Business Scenarios, which enable collaborative business-to-business and business-to-customer solutions through both SAP and third-party solutions. It also has a Web-based application hosting.