IBM India rattled by top-level exits

IBM India is seeing a spate of top management exits as the company attempts to infuse new life into its cloud business practice, which is facing competition from Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft.

Karthik Padmanabhan, who was leading the efforts to build the IBM Cloud Ecosystem across the Asia Pacific region, is learnt to have left the company and joined Google India. Padmanabhan was in charge of software developers, digital cities and scale local start-ups in the top 10 cities in Asia Pacific and Japan.

Jaideep John, sales leader, IBM mobility platform, who was was responsible for the mobile platform, is also learnt to have left the company. MobileFirst is a tech platform that enables software development, test, integration and management of apps for a corporation.

Kaustubh Chandra, Head (Marketing), cloud portfolio who has been with the company for the last 2 years is learn to have put in his papers. Similarly, Nilkanth (Neel) Iyer, who was leading the Cloud Ecosystem team in IBM (India-South Asia), quit a month ago.

Multiple industry sources inside IBM and some partners that BusinessLine spoke to, confirmed the development. An email sent to IBM remained unanswered.

BusinessLine had reported that Vivek Malhotra, Director and Head of the Cloud business unit at IBM India, has quit the company and Karan Bajwa is learnt to be taking over the reigns from Vanitha Narayanan as the India head. According to industry sources, Malhotra has joined SAP, heading its SMB division.

These changes are happening at a time when IBM is shifting its focus from some of its legacy business to areas like Machine Learning, AI, and cognitive, all of which is centred around cloud computing. However, in this space, competition is heating up immensely as competitors like AWS, Microsoft and others have been eating their lunch at a faster pace, which has resulted in a lot of these exits, opine industry watchers.

A lot of this has been attributed to the Armonk headquartered company’s slower push around cloud computing, since it’s older technology business still contributes a large chunk of its overall revenues. “There is a turf to protect, especially since cloud data centres are not built around IBM technology, so if everything moved to the cloud - what would IBM sell,” said an analyst from a multinational firm, who did not want to be named.

In the third quarter this year, IBM’s cloud business, which includes a mix of software-as-a-service, hardware and software revenue, was $3.4 billion or 40 per cent of its sales. In August this year, the Armonk-headquartered giant renewed a multi-million dollar deal with Vodafone India to enable the telco to support for its Indian IT infrastructure and applications environment, in addition to deals from M&M and others.

Industry watchers are asking that after large deal renewals like Vodafone and Airtel this year, what does IBM India have in its kitty next year.

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