BENGALURU: IBM is counting on its enterprise experience and offerings such as cognitive computing to drive adoption of its cloud services, as it faces competitors like Amazon, Microsoft and Google in the Indian market.
The company, which can offer public, private and hybrid cloud services, has also appointed Vikas Arora, former general manager of Dell EMC Asia Pacific and Japan, to head its cloud business in March.
“Our strategy in India is based on three pillars, one that we have an enterprise grade cloud, two that your data will always remain yours and there will no democratisation of it and three, that we can offer cognitive offerings through Watson that are far ahead of anyone else,” Arora said.
Offering services like Watson will also help IBM offset the commoditized pricing that players like Amazon are driving in the infrastructure-as-a-service space. Amazon Web Services, the cloud arm of the global e-commerce giant, says it has cut prices more than 50 times since its inception. Microsoft has also been cutting cloud prices to compete.
And the cloud market in India is getting more competitive, with Microsoft investing $200 million into ecommerce company Flipkart. Flipkart recently signed an Azure-based cloud computing deal with Microsoft.
IBM’s India head shrugged off suggestions that company might have to start buying growth and marquee customer names in India to compete. “I cannot talk about our competitor’s strategy. I can only say that our strategy is playing out well. We already work with large enterprises and customers on their infrastructure needs so to have a cloud conversation with them is not hard,” Karan Bajwa, managing director of IBM India, said. Arora added that the company was already in cloud talks with its enterprise services customers.
“It is not that we talk about cloud when the contract is up for renewal. We are in constant discussions. Earlier, providers used to the push the cloud discussion, now clients bring it up. That is a significant change we have seen in the cloud landscape,” Arora said.
The sale of IBM’s other offerings is also boosting its cloud business. Its blockchain deal with Mahindra Finance and Watson deal with Titan will both leverage the IBM Cloud. Bajwa said the offerings were feeding into each other depending on the technology maturity of the customer. “For less mature customers, the conversation starts with cloud but there is always the ability to then scale to other services like cognitive. That is part of the value proposition,” Bajwa said.
IBM is also working with independent software vendors to create cloud offerings for small-and-medium businesses.