|
IBM
Chairman and CEO Announces Plans to Triple Investment
in India over Next Three Years
Our
Corporate Bureau
6 June 2006
 Bangalore:
The chairman and chief executive officer of IBM, Samuel
J Palmisano, speaking to the largest-ever gathering of
IBM employees in India, today announced IBM expects to
nearly triple its investment in India over the next three
years.
Palmisano
spoke before 10,000 employees gathered in Bangalore and
via satellite to thousands of other employees in Delhi,
Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune. With more than 43,000 employees
in 14 cities, India is IBM's largest country organisation
outside the US.
Present at the Bangalore meeting was Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam,
the president of India.
"India
and other emerging economies are an increasingly important
part of IBM's global success," Palmisano said. "If
you are not here in India, making the right investments
and finding and developing the best employees and business
partners, then you won't be able to combine the skills
and expertise here with skills and expertise from around
the world, in ways that can help our clients be successful.
I'm
here today to say that IBM is not going to miss this opportunity.
In the next three years, we will triple our investment
in India — from $2 billion over the last three years
to nearly $6 billion in the next three years. That investment
will ensure that we make the most of the opportunities
to grow this marketplace, while it also enables IBM to
fulfill its vision to become a globally integrated company."
Also
in attendance during Palmisano's meeting with IBM India
employees were Wall Street analysts, who were attending
IBM's first-ever financial analyst meeting in India, Karnataka
governor T.N. Chaturvedi and Karnataka chief minister
H D Kumaraswamy.
As immediate steps in its increased investment in India,
IBM is:
- Establishing
the first in a new breed of Service Delivery Centres
in Bangalore, deploying new processes and technology
that will greatly automate IT service delivery to provide
clients with enhanced flexibility and increased worldwide
access to skills, service offerings and continuous availability
at lower cost.
- Creating
the IBM Systems & Technology Group (STG) Innovation,
Development and Executive Briefing Center in Bangalore,
focused on IBM infrastructure solutions, technologies
and innovations and providing performance benchmarking,
testing, data migration and competency building capabilities.
- Locating
a Telecommunications Research & Innovation Center
at its India Research Lab that will serve as a key resource
to IBM's telecommunications clients around the world.
- Increasing
the capabilities and staff of the High Performance On
Demand Solutions Lab in Bangalore, a specialized software
and services lab driving automation and virtualisation
of complex IT infrastructures.
- Inaugurating
"The Great Mind Challenge," which is designed
to improve the software development skills of Indian
students as they work to solve issues facing businesses
today.
Advanced
Global Services Delivery Network
IBM has formed a new Global Delivery Research and Development
organisation that pairs researchers from its eight worldwide
labs with services delivery experts to reinvent service
delivery for IT by creating a virtual global delivery
platform unifying IBM's entire network of IT delivery
centers. Standard processes and greatly increased automation
distribute work seamlessly among the global centers, providing
unprecedented levels of reliability for clients via automatic
back-up capability. In addition, the automation of service
delivery will allow IBM to scale without adding new resources,
dramatically lowering costs by reducing the dependence
on labor for low-level tasks, such as remote systems monitoring.
This
work is being piloted at IBM's Global Service Delivery
Center in Bangalore, which runs, not just monitors, IT
operations from India for more than 225 clients worldwide,
providing high-value complex services, including security
and network operations, server and storage management,
and hosting.
The
new technologies being deployed in India will be rolled
out to IBM services centers worldwide in Boulder, Colorado,
US; Bratislava, Slovakia; Brno, Czech Republic; Buenos
Aires, Argentina; Dublin, Ireland; Hortolandia, Brazil;
Johannesburg, South Africa; Shenzhen, People's Republic
of China; and Szekesfehervar, Hungary.
This
network of Global Delivery Centers is a key component
in IBM's strategy to apply innovation to continually enhance
its services delivery model that goes beyond simply lower
costs to provide clients with high-value business solutions.
IBM
STG Innovation, Development and Executive Briefing Center
The IBM STG Innovation, Development and Executive Briefing
Center will provide a one-stop shop for clients to learn
about IBM infrastructure solutions and technologies, as
well as perform benchmarks for IBM System and Storage
products, including proof-of-concept, scaling and performance
as well as data migration. The new center will work closely
with the STG Development Lab, which is located in the
same building.
The
center also will focus on Linux competency as IBM increases
its focus on Linux in India. Earlier this year, IBM announced
greater collaboration with the open source community to
improve the development of general Linux kernel functionality.
India already has IBM's third largest population of Linux
developers. The new center will work closely with the
Linux Technology Center, which has been operating in Bangalore
since 1999.
The
IBM STG Innovation, Development and Executive Briefing
Center also will coordinate the development of skills
and competencies in IBM hardware and software solutions
for IBM Business Partners and ISVs as it provides support
leading to additional sales.
Telecommunications
Research and Innovation Centre
The Telecommunications Research & Innovation Center
at the India Research Lab in Delhi, one of the eight IBM
research labs around the world, is the latest in a series
of industry-specific initiatives designed to tap relevant
IBM Research technologies and expertise for collaborative
projects with clients and business partners.
The
center will focus on such areas as advanced analytics
to identify useful information from telecom call center
records, network management technologies for improved
transaction process monitoring and technologies to allow
telecom companies to offer location-based services to
their customers.
Located
in labs where concentrations of technologies and expertise
reside, the local Research team actually serves as both
a global resource for a specific industry as well as a
conduit for clients and partners into IBM Research at
large. With more than 3,000 scientists, IBM Research helps
businesses, governments and other organizations differentiate
themselves in their respective fields through innovation.
High
Performance On Demand Solutions Lab
The High Performance On Demand Solutions Lab (HiPODs),
the first-of-its-kind lab in India, connects IBM's top
consultants, developers, engineers and researchers in
India and around the world, culminating the most comprehensive
skills and resources available in the industry today.
IBM will further enhance its ability to leverage the best
of Indian talent and IBM's global innovation leadership
by increasing staffing of the lab.
Customers
bring their applications to this dynamic infrastructure
lab to validate their performance, scalability and solutions
needs before deploying them in a business environment.
The specialists at the HiPODS team then work with the
customers to tune their application to facilitate optimal
performance. The lab was inaugurated in February 2006
and already has worked with more than 40 customers to
transform and support their business critical activities.
The
lab and other IBM HiPODS Labs located in various regions
of the world are responsible for facilitating billions
of transactions every day from the company's many high-volume
customer engagements.
The
Great Mind Challenge
As part of its Academic Initiative in India, IBM, along
with IBM Business Partners, will launch "The Great
Mind Challenge," in which students at the country's
engineering schools will develop software based on various
project scenarios. Mentors from IBM will work with the
students, and there will be a series of training sessions
as students learn how to collaborate to solve business
problems. The top 20 projects will be put on the Internet
to be used without charge by end users and IBM Business
Partners. The program will begin June 15 and continue
through the end of this year.
This
Challenge is an outgrowth of IBM's efforts to collaborate
with local governments and university students to create
a repository of innovative solutions that are available
free to government agencies, solution providers and academia.
Project
INVITE (Initiative to Nurture a Vibrant Information Technology
Ecosystem), another offering through IBM's Academic Initiative,
already has created more than 25 e-governance solutions
and projects developed on open source software and open
standard technologies. More than 3,400 students across
155 institutions across India have participated in Project
INVITE since it began in June 2005. By involving university
students, the initiative seeks to help universities keep
their IT curricula current and responsive to the needs
of the Indian job market.
List of reports on IBM
More
IT news
|
