Last week, Tata Communications offered up some news about its new Human Capital Management (HCM) technology which exemplifies a change in roles that systems integrators have traditionally operated. The news now looks even more interesting considering SAP’s acquisition of SuccessFactors, the company Tata has aligned with to reach into the Indian and Asian markets.

Systems integrators face the challenge with cloud services as much anyone. Companies can no longer rely on traditional consulting services contracts to scale their business. Instead, it’s increasingly about systems integrators creating their own intellectual property.

And that’s exactly what Tata Communications has done. Tata Communications is the telecommunications arm of Tata Group, the giant consulting service based in India. Over the past few years, Tata Communicatins has turned its attention to building its own infrastructure for the Asian small business market. And on top of that infrastructure the Indian consulting company has been busy building its own apps.

Tata calls these its InstaApps. They are SaaS offerings. InstaHCM is its latest. It’s a Human Capital Management service that is now aligned with SuccessFactors and SAP.The InstaApps suite of products includes InstaOffice powered by Google Apps, InstaCRM, InstaECM and InstaCC. Its InstaApps are offered according to to an elastic pricing model.

So how does this position Tata? I’d say it is in a unique spot to provide apps to its extensive network of customers. And that has to be appealing to SAP which is looking for new ways to move forward as its traditional business model faces as much disruption as SAP.