Technology major IBM has charted out a multi-pronged strategy to achieve double digit growth in India this year including adding 1,000 new clients, scaling up presence in telecom and banking sectors; and developing a robust platform for enabling enterprises to adopt new technologies such as Analytics, Internet of Things (IoT) and Artificial Intelligence (AI).

At the centre of this strategy is IBM India’s restructured organisation led by its Managing Director Karan Bajwa, who took over the reins of IBM India in January 2017.

One IBM

IBM, which hitherto had several verticals including hardware, consultancy and software, is now consolidating itself as One IBM in a bid to give enterprises a single point of reference across all products and services from IBM

“Landing one IBM in the country has been my single most important goal in the last one year,” Bajwa told BusinessLine in an interview.

“We’ve had a fabulous history and very large install base of customers in every industry vertical. There’s a wonderful opportunity for us to take assets of new IBM and take them to our existing install base and also use that to acquire new customers,” Bajwa said.

New assets

The new assets for IBM include technology platforms such as cloud, cognitive, data security, AI, IoT and Blockchain.

“Customer experience falls between the handover across consulting organisation, product organisation and services organisation. Putting these three things together presents a unique opportunity for IBM, delivering what the customer needs,” Bajwa said explaining how IBM already has all three capabilities but just needs to offer them as one. Soon after Bajwa took over at IBM India, he created a new position called Chief Digital Officer and appointed long time IBM veteran Nipun Mehrotra to lead the charge. At the same time Bajwa is trying to tear down walls between different departments so they can work together as one team. “Nipun’s charter is around expansion — how do you go to the customer with combined offering, how do you acquire new customer, how do you sell digital and sell through a marketplace, how do you sell massively through the channel, how do you sell massively through the developers. All those we put together calling it a digital initiative and we aggregated all these capabilities and we put him in charge as the chief digital officer. He’s driving the charter of new customer acquisitions, developer outreach, ISV building capabilities,” Bajwa explained. IBM is looking for 3X increase in engagement with developers to work on applications on top of new platforms.

IBM is also going rapidly after small and medium enterprises, an area IBM traditionally had very little role to play. And one of things that IBM is doing to achieve that is by offerings its services through an online self-service Sofware as a Service (SaaS) model.

Marketplace

“You may not associate IBM with someone going online and buying an offering. But that’s where we are trying to head through our SaaS offerings. It’s a long journey and we are heading in that direction. IBM Marketplace is where you can access our offerings online and buy them,” Bajwa said.

But the challenge remains internally, Bajwa acknowledged.

“The challenge has less been in convincing customers the bigger challenge has been transforming ourselves and our skill sets. Transforming the skill sets is a journey we are on and that’s the mountain we have to climb more successfully. We are doing a lot of work in transforming our skill sets to represent the new IBM,” Bajwa said. IBM is trying to retrain all of its 1-lakh odd workforce in India on IBM’s new capabilities through online and offline trainings.

“The rate at which we are growing our offerings versus our capability to represent that full blown offering—that has to be bridged,” Bajwa said.

Internal goal

Bajwa created an internal goal to get 1,000 new customers in 2017, which he says was achieved through the One IBM vision and he expects the company will be able to add another 1,000 customers at least in 2018. “Apart from our own teams to do it, we are also going after building our channel capabilities. IBM has had a strong channel network but we are now also deeply investing in our hardware, software and our cloud channel,” Bajwa said.

So where will these initiatives take IBM India this year? “I want to see IBM India grow at double digits. The growth of the economy offers that opportunity,” Bajwa said.

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