The Hindu Business Line : Innovation at work

Anil Menon, Vice-President, Channels, Marketing and Ecosystems, IBM Software, believes that only those with ‘nimble minds’ and a clear innovative business model will survive in the ever-changing business landscape. Menon cites the example of Apple to explain how innovative marketing changed the way business was done traditionally.

A ‘die-hard’ India fan, Menon says plenty of critical operations and innovation happens right here in India. He was making a presentation at an IBM forum in Kovalam to present the brand Tivoli to the business partner community and others at large, at a trip organised by the company.

More from Menon on innovation, India, and what IBM is doing to fuel creativity and encourage talent. The picturesque beaches of Kovalam as the backdrop provided the perfect setting for an invigorating conversation.

You talked a lot about innovation in your presentation. What kind of innovation happens in IBM India?

A lot. Innovation is not really only about product innovation. It’s about business innovation, business model innovation, operational process innovation and go-to-market and service innovation. Innovation need not necessarily be fresh ideas, it can be a fresh process or way of doing things.

India is IBM’s fastest growing market. There is significant amount of investment here... there is also focus and intent to do in India what we do anywhere in the world. Work is done where it is done the best. And India is doing innovative work in terms of all the things I mentioned: our software lab, our IBM research innovation lab and our pre-sales consulting organisations are working with partners and customers to help them do business transformation and product innovation. IBM India is helping product companies in India innovate and build global software for the world market.

IBM has played a key a role in understanding India as not a low-cost destination but as a place where work can get done better. We have 35 centres of excellence in the country, as and when tech changes we will keep investing more in the market to fuel the ecosystem.

India is the future and the future is here. Critical operations are happening here. We have a lot of opportunities as a nation.

Is India a key market for mergers and acquisitions?

You don’t plan acquisitions market-wise. You look at product gaps, acquisition opportunities and complementary technologies... We have done a fair bit of acquisitions in India — for instance, Daksh. India ranks as well as any other critical market for IBM in terms of this. But it’s really about product or offering gaps or complementary business. It’s not done with any defined time frame or territory.

What are the important verticals in India where IBM is looking for greater thrust to expand its product presence?

Our products have significant installations in telecom, computer services, financial services and banking, and the public sector.

Increasingly, we believe we will have stronger presence in retail, healthcare, energy and utility.

We are looking at greater thrust in these sectors for our products. This has to do with the maturity of the Indian market and the evolving sectors — we believe there is a lot of effort that needs to be done.. retail has not completely opened up in terms of different solutions. There is store-level automation where we already play in, but the back-ends are not in place. We don’t have multiple malls that are connected and a big supply chain performing. That’s all down the line.

On the pink slips issued to IT professionals recently...

Pink slips in any company is a matter of fiscal discipline. Most companies in India are adding to the headcount. The IT industry continues to hire quite strongly in the country. If there are pink slips somewhere, it’s more an aberration than a norm. We have about 73,000 employees as of now in India. But we have no conscious employee target we operate by. We are looking at building capacity as when as a requirement or market opportunity arises.

What is the awareness about your brands and products in the Indian market?

It is reasonably high. But in terms of applicability, it’s probably not that high. We are continuously looking at correcting that through role-based marketing.

We are structuring our go-to-market strategy to address this. We have strong marketing and PR engines... a strong demand generation engine within marketing and a dotcom engine that looks at tele-calling, talking to customers, explaining to them complex technologies and helping them through the sales cycle.

India is still just about building out its infrastructure. You have seen a lot of application deployment in recent years. As more and more applications come in, they accumulate more information.

And with more information, you are talking about more infrastructure to be managed. But that awareness is not in the market.

What about shortage of skills in the Indian marketplace and what steps are you taking to correct that?

We have no shortage of people. But there is shortage of adequately skilled people. We have multiple steps to take care of that.

We have an academic initiative programme where we work with campuses. We do a lot of things there — we get world class curriculum included in what they learn.

We do programming contests out there. Last year, our contest touched 62,000 people across 24 States.

We also have courses for our products included in the curriculum. We worked with a project with State governments and taught a set of students from different campuses applicability technology to address the root problem of employability. IBM mentors worked with them. All this is at the academic level. When students get out of the campus, they get into some IT company as a developer. We have the developer works programme that will give them the right tools, content, white papers and just a minute (JAM) sessions to interact with peers across the world, using social networking mechanisms to interchange information, and truly contribute to the company they work for.

We also have our traditional education services with our own training institutes. We work with partners to conduct sessions on IBM technology.And none of these mean a real IBM sale. It’s purely in with an overall skill perspective in the market. Because what we do in India has implications across the world.

swethak@thehindu.co.in