Tech Mahindra Establishes a Centre of Excellence for SAP and Cyber Security at Parul University

Industry partnerships are easy to announce and hard to make real. On 1 July 2026, Parul University inaugurated a Tech Mahindra Centre of Excellence for SAP and Cyber Security, and the detail that makes it more than a photo opportunity is how selective it is.

According to Dr. Gurcharan Singh, Director of the Training and Placement Cell, Tech Mahindra has established this Centre of Excellence at only thirty institutions across India, and for cyber security specifically it selected just three universities nationwide, with Parul University among them. That is the difference between a logo on a wall and a place a company chooses to invest in.

A Centre of Excellence is only useful if it changes what a student can do. Under the Memorandum of Understanding signed with Tech Mahindra, the commitment is concrete.

• Industry curriculum: Tech Mahindra provides the full SAP and Cyber Security syllabus, taught in dedicated labs including the SAP ABAP lab inaugurated on the day.
• Continuous mentoring: Access to domain experts and professionals who guide students through projects, not just a one-off lecture.
• Pathways: Internships, industry visits, workshops, webinars, competitions, and recruitment routes into the company.
• Certifications: Exposure to current enterprise tools and platforms, with professional credentials attached.

The leadership team was clear that it does not see itself as a recruiter alone. It framed the relationship as a long-term partnership meant to help students connect with global technology leaders and evolving market opportunities, closing the gap the company itself named: graduates who arrive technically qualified but without practical understanding or a clear direction.

The university framed the responsibility honestly in return. The Dean of Engineering, Dr. Swapnil M. Parikh, told students that the faculty and placement team can build the path, but the students have to walk it, and urged them to use the labs to build their own careers rather than wait for them to be handed over. A Centre of Excellence is an opportunity, not a guarantee, and the distinction is the point.

The company framed itself not as a recruiter, but as a long-term partner for a career, whether in a job or a venture.

One moment in the inauguration captured what Parul University means by a business-ready mindset. Two student founders whose startups are supported through the Parul Innovation and Entrepreneurship Research Centre asked the Tech Mahindra leadership how the new Centre would help cyber security startups like theirs.

The answer was that the Centre exists to guide students toward a promising career, whether that path is entrepreneurship or employment. That is the same logic behind the university’s wider ecosystem: PIERC has incubated 254 startups, provided more than 20 crore rupees in funding, and backed ventures like Solnce Energy, funded on Shark Tank India. A Centre of Excellence that a cyber security founder can use to sharpen a product is worth as much as one that prepares a candidate for a job, and Parul University treats both as valid exits from the same training.

The infrastructure behind that claim is real: start-up studios across four cities, a government-recognised incubation centre, and an annual Vadodara Startup Festival that connects student founders with investors and venture capital. For a student who walks out of the Tech Mahindra labs with a product idea rather than only a resume, the path onward already exists on the same campus.

The Tech Mahindra Centre does not sit alone. The visiting leadership spent the day touring an ecosystem that already runs on industry-standard tools, and the range is the point.

• AWS Student Builder Community: More than 700 student members pursuing cloud computing skills, several holding three globally recognised AWS certifications.
• Apple Authorized Training Centre for Education: Students train on the same Apple-authorised hardware, software, and credentials used across Apple’s professional ecosystem.
• AI and Machine Learning Centre: Home to live civic-technology projects, covered in a companion article below.

Taken together, these are not showcases. They are the working environments where a Tech Mahindra partnership becomes usable, because a student who already holds AWS certifications and trains on Apple-authorised systems is ready to absorb enterprise SAP and cyber security training rather than starting from zero.

The clearest proof that the ecosystem produces results is what comes out of it. At the AI and Machine Learning Centre, a student team has built an affordable crowd-management system for the Vadodara Municipal Corporation, reviewed and encouraged by the same visiting industry leadership. That project, covered in a companion article, is what an industry-connected education looks like when it works: students shipping real solutions for real clients while still enrolled.

A company’s intent shows in who it sends. Tech Mahindra did not send junior staff to a student session.

• Puppala Bhaskar: An IIM Calcutta graduate and President of the Cloud Security Alliance’s Hyderabad chapter, with more than eighteen years leading application and cloud security, heading security services delivery.
• Hemang Jadhav: A Principal Solutions Architect on the global pre-sales team with over twenty-eight years in IT, most of it in SAP, and certified across Microsoft Azure, AWS, and Google Cloud.
• Keerthi Sagar Naik: A senior recruitment lead who spoke candidly about how large firms actually hire fresh graduates.

Leaders at this level travelling through connecting flights to spend an hour with students is the signal. It says the partnership is a priority rather than a formality, which is what turns a Centre of Excellence from a plaque into a pipeline.

The Centre is not a single course. It covers the enterprise skills that large employers are hiring for now, across two anchor domains and the technologies around them.

• SAP: Both functional and technical sides, including the HANA database, the Fiori design layer, and the Business Technology Platform that ties custom solutions together.
• Cyber security: Application security as the foundation, alongside incident response, digital forensics, the Zero Trust model, and Security Operations Centre work.
• Adjacent platforms: Artificial intelligence and machine learning, cloud computing and development, and enterprise digital transformation.

The through-line the leadership stressed was adaptability: master one domain deeply, then keep learning the ones beside it. That philosophy, which Tech Mahindra frames as adopting, establishing, and scaling new technology, is exactly the mindset the labs are built to instil. For a student, the practical value is that the training maps to what large employers are actively recruiting for, rather than to a syllabus written years ago.

For a student choosing where to study engineering or computer science, an industry Centre of Excellence answers a practical question: will the degree connect to the job market. A partnership this selective, layered onto a placement record recognised by AICTE-approved programmes and more than 2,200 recruiters, is evidence that it does. The skills the session emphasised, and how to actually get hired, are examined in a companion article on what IT companies look for in freshers . For a family weighing the cost of a degree, a selective industry partnership is one of the few signals that the investment connects to a real career rather than a certificate.