IBM India
IBM over the last year focused on digital like all others in the market. The company’s digital platforms – led by cloud and cognitive gained further momentum. The company believes that this will continue to change the business profile as customers move to consumption based models. Company sources say that right from SMEs and startups are leveraging its platforms aggressively - and believes that this approach improves its ability to impact a much broader base of customers.
The company is also bullish on the government’s spend on the digital economy and smart infrastructure as the key driver of its growth going forward. IBM has also made significant investments in building and expanding its cloud and cognitive platforms and at the same time strengthened its ecosystem programs working with developers, startups, investors and the academia.
The strategy IBM adopted over the last year was to be in sync with the market realities. For instance, the shift towards cloud, SaaS, and consumption driven digital platforms have created a very different revenue model compared to the past and this is an important transition to all companies. In line with that, IBM focused on this transition and at the same time made investments boosting its ecosystem. Over the year the key management focus was on identifying and developing the ecosystem required to deliver the bigger promise of this transformation. IBM’s strong core offerings, however, require a wrap around from a whole set of ecosystem partners and that has been a key priority for the company over the last year.
Another thing that was high on the management list over the last year was ‘skills rebalancing’ internally. The company has felt the need for different skills from what made it successful in the past. In line with that, it launched a comprehensive skills analysis and re-skilling both internally as well as external hiring. Skills - across sales and delivery got an upgrade for better execution.
Meanwhile, there is an increased demand on flash storage, due to increased need for IOPS and also enhanced response times, to cater to digital/online workloads, analytics and also production workloads. IBM says it has led the market with a complete portfolio of Flash Systems right from low end to enterprise storage.
With an onslaught of data explosion leading large capacity of storage across various workloads/applications, clients are also deploying software defined storage to optimize, virtualize and protect the same across heterogenous storage environments. IBM says it is a leader in this space with a complete suite of software defined portfolio.