CEO Vanitha
Narayanan, IBM India- "Need Sachet Style Innovation"
With
half its talent pool in India, IBM generates solutions for the world that have
passed the ‘local’ test
The biggest IT multinational
operating in India — the Rs 19,924-crore IBM India — is also the first to
employ over one lakh employees here, dwarfing several other Indian firms. Since
its return to India in 1992 (the IT giant had exited India during the George
Fernandes-led attack on American firms), IBM has furiously absorbed Indian IT
talent to enhance its own cost and capability. As it continues its run as the
world’s biggest patent filer for the nineteenth year in a row, IBM India’s
managing director Vanitha Narayanan explains why Glocal is central to the
firm’s India plans. Excerpts:
The big break for IBM India came with Airtel’s outsourcing deal. How much of those learnings have been exported?
It is one of those watershed moments. It was the first of its kind — a local company forming a relationship with a multinational for IT services and in as comprehensive a way as Airtel did. Nowhere in the world had we scaled a set of systems to support that many subscribers at a given point in time. These are things that we started to do here and then exported.
When we first sensed that at some point in time Airtel would scale 100 million subscribers, it was not something anyone had envisioned. We had a team of distinguished engineers from the IBM Academy of Technology to scale up IT services when it started to get close to that level. So, we applied our ‘global’ mind to some ‘local’ problems to support the architecture. We now work with Idea, Vodafone, Reliance Jio in different ways.
In the early days you import learning. As you go along, you share learning. Then, as you leapfrog to a certain level, you export learning.
IBM is strong in package implementation and oil and gas. That pool has been built in India. Is that to do with cost or are there other capabilities involved? After all, oil and gas aren’t one of India’s strengths...
Certain processes can be cost-based. But you have to come back to a talent pool because over a period of time, cost arbitrage will be nullified. You will either have technology changes or there will always be markets where things will come faster at a lower cost. So, cost arbitrage on any given day is an element, but not the sole element. Analytics is foundational to the products we are building, the acquisitions we are making and the people we are training.
In our global centres of excellence, on any given day we have close to 9,000-10,000 people for analytics. Around half of them are in India. How you do analytics for risk in banking is different from using analytics to tell how a wind farm should be maintained, or how a supply chain can be optimised. In the centre of excellence, some may be from oil & gas, some from telcos, some from banking, but they are part of a global pool. They tend to be free flowing, not geography bound. Our current chairman has been very focused on not just recognising social as a trend, but making us a social organisation.
As per RoC filings, your revenue has grown, but profit has fallen this year. Is it just market economics or does it have something to do with change in strategy vis-a-vis India?
We do not comment on numbers at the country level, both in terms of employees as well as earnings. For us, numbers are not key performance indicators (KPI). They are a means to an end. They will be driven by client requirement. In our history, the number has fluctuated. When you look at big data, you are not looking at employing hundreds of thousands of people to collect data.
The complexity of problems has grown. Is the talent pool up to meeting that complexity?
IBM has forever been a learning-focused company, starting with our chairman. She started ‘Think Friday’ last year. This is where you can be global and local at the same time because there is a topic that she discusses with some of the experts in the world in our headquarters in Armonk, in the US. That is on a massive open online course (MOOC) platform available to every IBMer around the world at the same time. You log in and you can hear the discussion and type in questions too. It does two things. It does not create the time lag for things to filter. So, you have your chairman, your seniormost leadership as well as the juniormost person that we might have hired last week accessing learning at the same time. Last year, there was another thing she launched: every one of us was to commit to about 40 hours of learning this year, something new that is very client-relevant.
From IBM’s perspective, how has the relationship with India evolved?
What makes India so interesting is the fact that it gives us some of the most challenging problems to solve. We not only have to solve it, but at price points that are locally relevant. When you solve some of these problems in India, they immediately become exportable. As long as you have exciting customer problems to work on, you have got a talent pool that is rich.
The big break for IBM India came with Airtel’s outsourcing deal. How much of those learnings have been exported?
It is one of those watershed moments. It was the first of its kind — a local company forming a relationship with a multinational for IT services and in as comprehensive a way as Airtel did. Nowhere in the world had we scaled a set of systems to support that many subscribers at a given point in time. These are things that we started to do here and then exported.
When we first sensed that at some point in time Airtel would scale 100 million subscribers, it was not something anyone had envisioned. We had a team of distinguished engineers from the IBM Academy of Technology to scale up IT services when it started to get close to that level. So, we applied our ‘global’ mind to some ‘local’ problems to support the architecture. We now work with Idea, Vodafone, Reliance Jio in different ways.
In the early days you import learning. As you go along, you share learning. Then, as you leapfrog to a certain level, you export learning.
IBM is strong in package implementation and oil and gas. That pool has been built in India. Is that to do with cost or are there other capabilities involved? After all, oil and gas aren’t one of India’s strengths...
Certain processes can be cost-based. But you have to come back to a talent pool because over a period of time, cost arbitrage will be nullified. You will either have technology changes or there will always be markets where things will come faster at a lower cost. So, cost arbitrage on any given day is an element, but not the sole element. Analytics is foundational to the products we are building, the acquisitions we are making and the people we are training.
In our global centres of excellence, on any given day we have close to 9,000-10,000 people for analytics. Around half of them are in India. How you do analytics for risk in banking is different from using analytics to tell how a wind farm should be maintained, or how a supply chain can be optimised. In the centre of excellence, some may be from oil & gas, some from telcos, some from banking, but they are part of a global pool. They tend to be free flowing, not geography bound. Our current chairman has been very focused on not just recognising social as a trend, but making us a social organisation.
As per RoC filings, your revenue has grown, but profit has fallen this year. Is it just market economics or does it have something to do with change in strategy vis-a-vis India?
We do not comment on numbers at the country level, both in terms of employees as well as earnings. For us, numbers are not key performance indicators (KPI). They are a means to an end. They will be driven by client requirement. In our history, the number has fluctuated. When you look at big data, you are not looking at employing hundreds of thousands of people to collect data.
The complexity of problems has grown. Is the talent pool up to meeting that complexity?
IBM has forever been a learning-focused company, starting with our chairman. She started ‘Think Friday’ last year. This is where you can be global and local at the same time because there is a topic that she discusses with some of the experts in the world in our headquarters in Armonk, in the US. That is on a massive open online course (MOOC) platform available to every IBMer around the world at the same time. You log in and you can hear the discussion and type in questions too. It does two things. It does not create the time lag for things to filter. So, you have your chairman, your seniormost leadership as well as the juniormost person that we might have hired last week accessing learning at the same time. Last year, there was another thing she launched: every one of us was to commit to about 40 hours of learning this year, something new that is very client-relevant.
From IBM’s perspective, how has the relationship with India evolved?
What makes India so interesting is the fact that it gives us some of the most challenging problems to solve. We not only have to solve it, but at price points that are locally relevant. When you solve some of these problems in India, they immediately become exportable. As long as you have exciting customer problems to work on, you have got a talent pool that is rich.
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