Mumbai: India is witnessing one of the most pervasive adoptions of digital technologies in the world, IBM CEO Virginia ‘Ginny’ Rometty said here on February 16. She said digital adoption could be seen across enterprises in areas like telecommunications, financial services and industrials. “Here it is pervasive. That is not true in all countries,” Rometty said in an interaction with select media at the Nasscom India Leadership Forum. She was responding to a question on why India had emerged as one of the fastest growing markets for IBM.
Rometty said IBM also sees India as a “wonderful opportunity” to use its platforms for technology startups and small and medium businesses to scale, including scaling to the world. “That is one of the fastest growing opportunities we have here,” she said. She was referring in particular to IBM’s open cloud platform that allows smaller companies to use computing resources and software in smaller, more affordable units, build applications on top of it, and then offer it easily to customers globally.
IBM has rebuilt itself into a platform company, with the focus on cloud and cognitive. The latter is the concept of computing systems learning from all the data around them, reasoning over that data, and making judgments and decisions, like our brain does. IBM provides that through its Watson system. Platforms can be used across industry verticals and since they are open platforms in IBM’s case, they enable third parties to build applications for specific purposes on top of them.
Referring to the enormous technology talent in India and its contributions to building software applications for global corporations, Rometty said India’s next path should be to make the world cognitive. “Cognitive is India’s future,” she said earlier in her keynote address the event. IBM has its biggest employee base in India, an estimated workforce of 1.3 lakh, working in R&D, and providing IT services for India and the world.
Rometty said a third of the time businesses make right decisions, but two-thirds of the time they either make not so good decisions or wrong decisions. “Cognitive can improve the decision-making for this two-thirds. And that’s a $2-trillion market,” she said.IBM started using Watson first in healthcare and has since expanded its use to other areas, most recently in cyber security. Referring to security, she Rometty said, “You will never be able to put up enough walls or perimeters of security” (a line that seemed also to be a reference to US President Donald Trump’s desire to build a wall on the Mexican border and ban immigrants from certain countries).
“You have to assume that bad things are going to get in. The average security analyst looks at 200,000 incidents a day. It’s impossible to address them. So Watson gets all malware off the internet, it looks at every paper that’s been written (on security), combines it with your own data, puts it all together and tells you, ‘Here are the things you should really focus on’,” she said.
In healthcare, Watson has had some remarkable success in diagnosing and prescribing treatments for cancer.
Rometty also said, “One of my biggest learnings is, never define yourself as a product. I think that’s relevant to Indian companies too. If you free yourself from identifying yourself with a product, you will be able to reinvent yourself to whatever the next thing is. If you define yourself as a solution, then as the problems change, you will change with it” (referring to the massive technology changes disrupting every industry today).
‘IBM uses visas appropriately’
IBM CEO Ginny Rometty said the company uses US work visas in the way they are intended in the US. “We use them to fill short-term skill gaps. That’s the appropriate use for those. It is not our business model. And it’s a very, very small part of our population,” she said in response to a question on what US President Donald Trump was likely to do in the areas of work visas (like H-1B and L-1) and high-skilled immigration. Rometty is part of Trump’s advisory committee of CEOs. tnnSome of the proposed Trump actions on visas have the potential to hit Indian IT services companies significantly because they are big users of these visas.
Rometty also said the topic of jobs is a topic of every country she goes to. “No matter what Prime Minister I meet with, they want to know how many jobs we have in the country. India has ‘Made in India’ as an example,” she said, referring to why issues of visas and immigration have emerged in the US.
Image Courtesy: The New York Times
Source: Times of India
