How IBM India is trying to walk the digital talk

To drive growth in digital revenues, technology giant IBM is doing a massive in-house cleansing, to live digital before selling digital.

Last year, IBM India created the position of a chief digital officer to drive this change. The impact is already visible all across the company. Nipun Mehrotra, the man assigned with the task was given a mandate to work with clients and around how to think about projects from a data and digital standpoint.

But a bigger challenge was to build a platform for the company that allows customers to buy software products and services just they way anybody shops on Amazon.

“We always had, ibm.com but it was only to provide information on, rather than offer the set of activities happening at IBM. We were not engaged with the clients. They could not download several of our products including analytical products. They could not swipe a card and buy off the platform, a SaaS product,” Mehrotra said.

But that’s about to change. The company has already started offering several of its services through its website, allowing clients to buy without the need to call an IBM sales representative. And that’s already translating into a shift towards digital revenues.

“Half our revenues come from products that were not there five years back,” Mehrotra told Businessline, highlighting the company’s push towards digital technologies. The new revenue sources include Artificial Intelligence, cognitive solutions, IoT and blockchain.

The digital platform has allowed IBM to create personalised experiences for 36 large customers in India, who can now use the website in a self-service manner.

In addition, IBM India has been able to acquire close to 1,500 new customers with the help of this digital transformation internally in the last 18 months alone. “And 74 per cent of these customers are consuming the new stuff,” Mehrotra said.

Mehrotra is also tasked with creating new partnerships with independent software vendors, developers, startups and students to make this possible.

“We never worked with startups or with the VC community in the past,” Mehrotra said. But now IBM is engaging with large venture capital firms such as Kalaari Capital to work with the firm’s group of startups to pull them into the IBM solution ecosystem.

“We have been pushing this for more than two years now and at the moment I would say we have about 1,200-1,300 maybe even more startups who find their ideal platform in IBM. Maybe 200 of them are building deep solutions. Maybe 50-100 are actually taking the solutions to customers and are creating revenue for themselves as well as for IBM platforms,” he said.

While the initial efforts from the company have been around offering freebies to these startups to get them on board, increasing number of startups are building their solutions on IBM platforms, which is helping IBM build a long term revenue pipeline.

COMMENT NOW