SNP appoints Neeraj Athalye as managing director, India

GURUGRAM: India’s SAP transformation market has just got a new gatekeeper. SNP, the Heidelberg-based specialist in AI-enabled data migration and management, has named Neeraj Athalye as managing director, India. Based in Mumbai, Athalye will lead the company’s expansion in the country, helping enterprises build the data foundations for business AI using SNP’s Kyano platform and Bluefield approach. For a company chasing growth across Asia Pacific, this is as clear a statement of intent as they come.

Athalye’s resume reads like a checklist of everything SNP needs right now. More than 30 years across enterprise software, SAP, cloud technologies and business leadership, with senior stints at SAP itself, MatrixOne under Dassault Systèmes, Honda, John Deere, SUSE and, most recently, Icertis. That is a career built on partner ecosystems and scaling high growth businesses, which happens to be exactly the playbook SNP is running in India. Phillip Miltiades, president and managing director, Asia Pacific and Japan at SNP Group, called India one of the most exciting opportunities for the company, and it is not hard to see why he reached for that phrase.

The timing is sharp. SNP used its flagship Transformation World event in Heidelberg in July to unveil new capabilities for Kyano, the platform that bundles data management, migration and continuous assessment of SAP landscapes into one system. Two additions stand out. Kyano Lorna is an agentic AI layer that leans on three decades of SNP’s transformation expertise to deliver real time insights and project specific recommendations embedded directly into live projects. Kyano Oros pushes the platform into unstructured data, which makes up roughly 80 per cent of enterprise data volumes and has historically been the blind spot for transformation tools. Together, these give India’s enterprises a genuine shot at preparing messy, sprawling data estates for serious AI use, not just tidier SAP migrations.

The market logic backing this hire is hard to argue with. India’s appetite for SAP transformation is being driven by cloud adoption, digital transformation programmes and a rising tide of AI investment, making it a priority market within SNP’s Asia Pacific strategy. The company’s partner-first approach means Athalye’s real job is ecosystem building: expanding SNP’s network of consulting, hyperscaler and technology partners, and pairing Kyano with local delivery muscle to shorten the distance between signing a deal and delivering value.

For a company with over 3,000 customers across 80 countries and revenues of around €297 million in fiscal 2025, India is no side bet, it is a growth lever. Handing that lever to someone who has already built and scaled partner led businesses across SAP, cloud and enterprise software suggests SNP is not just dipping a toe into India; it’s planning to swim.