Tom Rosamilia, now a Senior Vice-President of IBM Systems, has the global responsibility for all aspects of the IT behemoth’s software, server and storage systems.

Rosamilia, who had joined the company in 1983 as a software developer, had held a number of leadership roles with the company. He was also credited for overseeing the divestiture of IBM’s global semiconductor manufacturing business to GlobalFoundries and the divestiture of IBM’s x86 server business to Lenovo. In an interview with BusinessLine , IBM veteran – who is also the Economic Advisor to the Governor of China’s Guangdong Province – talks about cognitive systems and its importance to the Big Blue. Edited excerpts:

IBM is betting big on cognitive computing. As a technology, how important is cognitive to IBM?

It’s a big deal for IBM as everybody is going digital. Every industry is going through the digital disruption, with every sector having its Uber or AirBnB. All these industries are going through a transformation. Think of cognitive as the advanced class or the PhD of analytics. So the next step that we take is to help clients accelerate their moves through data and actually learn from it.

How different is cognitive from artificial intelligence?

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a broad category and different people define it differently. Cognitive is much more specific and advanced form of AI, and it’s about systems that can learn.

One of the key factors in computer science for a long time was the predictability of the outcome. So, if I run this program on a Monday against a set data I will get an answer, which will be the same on Tuesday and Wednesday.

Cognitive systems actually learn and improve their answers over time. The things that make cognitive and Watson (one of IBM’s cognitive system) unique are that they improve. Watson can read and even see skin lesions, and we can teach Watson to identify skin cancer.

Where does India fit in that roadmap?

India has been important to us and is a large centre of employment to us. We got a lot of rich talent in India and it’s a great place to serve the rest of the world. We see India becoming a much better domestic economy and obviously an essential part of our business going forward.

Of course, acquisitions will be a strategy going forward for growth in India. Comments?

I won’t comment on acquisitions but you have seen us go through a number of these.

So if we look at history, we have been an exquisite company and when we see pocket of great opportunity and we think we can get there faster through acquisitions, we will do it.

Your comments on Linux, since you had also worked on the operating system?

Linux is the fastest growing operating system in the world that is why two years ago we did a profound pilot on our power technology to embrace Linux in addition to the existing operating systems. Just like in early 2000, when we did this for mainframes, in addition to Linux on mainframe and Linux on Power, it’s been big. I would say that in the early days, IBM had profound influence on Linux growth because we were endorsing it, contributing to it, innovating with it and building on it.

We have done the same thing around Java, Apache and Eclipse, and now are doing the same thing around block chain technologies. One of the most profound things we did two years ago was open hardware. Thus ‘open’ has been helpful not only in software but also in hardware.

On software-as-a-service (SaaS), how do you see its adoption?

The nature and advantage that I see people doing SaaS, cloud-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service or infrastructure-as-a-service, it’s the flexibility with which you acquire and deploy it.

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