SAP has opened its newest data center in Mumbai. The data center reflects the company’s deepening commitment to India, the world’s fastest-growing large economy and home to more than 15,000 employees of the Germany-based enterprise software provider.

With the new data center in India complementing existing ones in Europe, the U.S., and Saudi Arabia, SAP has dramatically strengthened the data federation capabilities of SAP Business Network Commerce Automation, linking together the procurement processes of businesses and their trading partners across the globe.

With this milestone, SAP has delivered on a crucial promise made to a highly consequential set of customers in the Indian subcontinent and beyond. Later this year, the India data center will extend data federation capabilities for SAP Business Network Supply Chain Collaboration as well.

But what is data federation? And why is it so consequential for organizations in India and elsewhere?

Data federation assembles a unified view of data from disparate sources without physically moving or copying it. Trading partners can thus exchange goods and services across international borders while the data underlying those transactions remains stationary. By preserving the integrity of data where it resides, federation facilitates mission-critical operational processes on a global scale while achieving regulatory consistency with compliance requirements that arise at a national level. For example, if a buyer’s data resides in SAP Business Network’s India data center but its supplier’s data sits in the U.S. data center, federation provides both parties with access to each other’s data without impinging on either nation’s policies governing the residency of that data. This becomes especially important as new legislation gathers pace around the world in response to rising concerns over individual privacy, national security and commercial sectors considered sensitive.

Enabled by SAP Business Technology Platform, SAP Business Network and its data federation capabilities are now built on the kind of modern, connected foundation required for the next era of cloud-based commerce. Beyond improved scale, resilience, and regional compliance, SAP Business Technology Platform helps create the basis for agentic artificial intelligence, automation, richer analytics, stronger security, open extensibility, and seamless cross-SAP workflows and processes. The result is a network that can not only connect partners globally but also help customers to conduct business more intelligently, respond faster to change, and drive greater value from every interaction across procurement, supply chain, logistics, asset collaboration, and working capital management.

To collaborate with their trading partners on these and other core business processes, companies conducting business in India require a cloud-based platform that provides secure infrastructure for building resilient domestic supply chains while maintaining global connectivity, thus maintaining sensitive procurement, supplier, and manufacturing data within Indian jurisdiction. SAP Business Network furthers these objectives with our newly launched data center in Mumbai, where data is localized in a manner compliant with Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) guidelines, with a MeitY-empaneled cloud service provider.

While supporting compliance within an increasingly complex regulatory environment, data federation offers numerous technical advantages as well, especially in hybrid or multi-cloud environments. These benefits include cost efficiency, unified governance and security, and faster response times compared to accessing servers in distant regions. Yet the most valuable competitive advantage provided by data federation may be the most elusive: peace of mind for business leaders amid the ever-looming threat to supply chains posed by disruption.

To counter that threat—whether arising from geopolitical conflict, labor unrest, financial shock, natural disaster, or other upheaval—businesses are turning increasingly to data federation and other cloud-based solutions to extend visibility and instill resilience across their operations and those of their trading partners. With the opening of our new data center in Mumbai, we are incredibly excited to strengthen our relationships with customers throughout India and accelerate the value available to them from SAP Business Network.

For information on SAP Supply Chain Management and how SAP solutions are equipping enterprises with the AI capabilities needed to instill resilience, counter disruption, and foster collaboration, visit sap.com/scm and sap.com/ai.

Jörn Keller is executive vice president and chief product officer of SAP Business Network.