The role of the cloud is changing—it is maturing. It is now the platform for innovation and business value. This is where the US computing giant IBM is setting its sights, indicated by its shift to higher value cloud capabilities. Globally, the Armonk, New York-based firm has built a $12.7 billion cloud business. In India too, Big Blue is seeing rapid growth for its cloud services. Here’s the evidence. Last month, YES Bank adopted two niche technologies—IBM blockchain and Watson Conversation—delivered over the cloud platform to fully digitise vendor transactions and raise the level of the digital experience of its customers.
In December 2016, Aegon Life Insurance signed a five-year agreement for a hybrid cloud solution hosted on IBM datacentres in Mumbai and Chennai. The partnership is intended to help Aegon build business resiliency and have access to an IT infrastructure to meet the growing needs of the company’s clients. IBM will also help maintain continuous business operations and improve overall business resiliency via the IBM Cloud through the IBM datacentre in Mumbai, while creating a scalable IT service platform for Aegon Life India’s infrastructure and applications environment.
Powering up
> Globally, IBM has built a $12.7 billion cloud business
> In India too, Big Blue is seeing rapid growth for its cloud services
> IBM Cloud more than doubled its data centre capacity in the last year with new facilities in the UK, South Korea, Norway and India
> It has a network of more than 50 cloud data centres in 17 countries
Prana Studios, a leading 3-D animation and visual effects studio, has selected IBM Cloud to run new high-resolution rendering jobs that are required to create high-quality visual effects. The company turned to IBM Cloud as its platform of choice to create the ultra-high definition (UHD) special visual effects for a high-end theme park attraction in the US. The project required over 1000 bare-metal servers to render a highly photo-realistic 24K 3D-Stereo show in a format that was 12 times larger than the typical 2K UHD content projects Prana manages.
“The project featured complex digital and highly photo-real characters and environments so we had to ensure we were as efficient as possible and yet flexible enough to absorb even last minute creative changes from our client,” said Anish Mulani, COO and President, Prana Studios.
Similarly, Mahindra Group has partnered with IBM for a cloud based custom blockchain solution to provide a secure financial transaction platform for suppliers and manufacturers. With the hyperledger from blockchain, all parties involved in the transaction will now have a secure and efficient way to update transaction details.
Last December, Dewan Housing Finance Corporation (DHLF) and IBM announced a customer partnership. Following expansion to 350 branches, DHLF needed an IT infrastructure that would provide a seamless digital experience across the network, and also allow room for analytics to mine data for business growth. A combination of on- and off-premise cloud infrastructure—IBM Watson delivered over the cloud helped DHLF meet both internal and external business requirements.
Diverse clientele
“Our client base in India covers the spectrum from large to small and medium enterprises, born-on-the-cloud companies and start-ups,” said Shailesh Agrawal, IBM strategy leader, India & South Asia. “In India, we are committed to building our cognitive and cloud ecosystem.” In line with this, IBM is working with several Independent Software Vendors (ISV) and business partners to reach a larger customer base, he said. “We further strengthened our ties with start-ups through our Global Entrepreneur Programme and Smart Camps. All of these initiatives and more, have helped bring on more developers onto our Bluemix platform.”
IBM’s Cloud platform, Bluemix has grown rapidly to become one of the largest open public cloud deployments in the world. Based on open standard and combined with new technologies like blockchain, cognitive and IoT, IBM cloud provides a set of tools, flexibility and agility to organisations of all size and developers to easily translate their innovative ideas into technical solutions and business models.
According to Agrawal, large and small enterprises in the manufacturing industry have become early adopters of the cloud. “We also see large traction across healthcare and IT services in the enterprise space. In addition to large deal renewals in the enterprise space, such as the one with Vodafone in India, IBM continues to be committed to working with small and mid-sized organisations and start-ups to help them with their digital transformation journey,” he informed.
Start-ups show the way
IBM has been proactive in providing Indian start-ups with the tools they need to build and capitalise on the next generation of apps for the cloud. Built in 2013, Tagalys is a configurable e-commerce personalisation engine that helps retail clients deliver a personalised approach based on the end customer’s shopping behaviour. Again, Signzy, targeted at the banking industry, helps banks conduct ‘know your customer (KYC)’ verification and contracting over a digital platform. It makes digital regulatory processes simpler, yet secure as well as compliant.
The big picture
According to Agrawal, the cloud is a race for value, not a race for size. “Cloud and cognitive are the two key pillars of IBM’s growth and strategy. IBM’s strategy is to become the undisputed leader in enterprise cloud. In line with this, today all our conversations with customers are around Cloud First—from solution to delivery,” he said. Agrawal said IBM delivers a complete portfolio of public, private and hybrid cloud deployments based on open standards. This allows clients to deploy cloud workloads that are consistent, avoiding development costs and time rewriting code.
IBM has a global network of more than 50 cloud data centres in 17 countries across six continents, giving clients the flexibility to meet data locality needs and the scalability to embark on the digital transformation journey. “IBM Cloud more than doubled its overall data centre capacity in the last year with new facilities in the UK, South Korea, Norway and India,” Agrawal claimed.
IT market research firm Gartner estimates that more than $1 trillion in IT spending will be affected by the shift to cloud during the next five years. This will make cloud computing one of the most disruptive forces of IT spending since the early days of the digital age. Needless to say, Big Blue is revving up its act to get the lion’s share in the market.
Source: The Financial Express
