Nipun Mehrotra, General Manager, Global Technology Services, IBM India/SA	A+  A-

Nipun Mehrotra is the General Manager, Global Technology Services, one of the fastest growing businesses for IBM India/South Asia. He has helped IBM India/SA occupy the leadership position in the domestic IT services market.

Nipun has over 21 years of experience in the Information Technology industry - across India, ASEAN and Asia Pacific regions managing various sales & marketing positions and leading Business Units.

Nipun has held various other leadership positions within IBM and currently also serves as a member of IBM India/SA Senior Leadership Team as well as part of the IBM Technical Leadership Team.

Nipun has lived in Bangalore, Delhi and Singapore during his IBM career. He is currently located in Bangalore and is married with two kids.

Q: The domestic IT market has come a long way over last decade or so in India. How would you summarize this evolution as?
A: The Indian domestic IT market has witnessed huge transformation in the last decade. Till about 3 years ago, most of the customers opted for stand-alone services in a piece-meal fashion from multiple vendors. Many a times, they would want to create highly customized solutions and in the process ended up deploying huge in-house IT workforce.
 
The scenario has significantly changed over last couple of years, where companies have realized the value of opting for integrated solutions and partnering with vendors like IBM, who can provide them the entire spectrum of services they need, wherever they need. The domestic IT services market has seen a marked evolution from being a labor-based to an asset-based, and now openly adopts standardized solutions instead of customized ones.

Also, till about 2004-2005, SMBs’ IT spend was pre-dominantly towards hardware and to certain extent software. Increasingly, we now see SMBs asking for a wide range of IT services for their organization. In fact, recognizing this need IBM is possibly the only company around, which can bring the same breadth of offerings to SMBs as it does for larger enterprises, but in a far more cost-effective and scalable fashion.

Q: What are some of the key factors driving the businesses in India to invest more heavily in IT than ever before? What are the key challenges and imperatives?
A: India is currently in an economic overdrive, becoming one of the fastest growing economies in the world. This is driven by the hundreds of thousands of large enterprises and SMB organizations, who are very ambitious and capable of making their mark on a global landscape. Undoubtedly, every Indian company today wants to be more competitive, expand its reach not just within Indian shores but also globally and finally emerge as a successful entity—in a short period of time.

As the Indian enterprises grow rapidly and as technology becomes closely intertwined into their business fabric -- one of the imperatives for them is "Risk Mitigation" -- protecting themselves from different kinds of business and technology related risks. For them to grow in the manner they aspire to, they need to strengthen the "foundations" of their technology platforms. A comprehensive risk mitigation strategy, which will ensure that their business interests are preserved in the face of all kind of risks--both from outside the organization in the form of disasters, network outages, cybercrimes, etc as well as from inside the organization like data theft, theft/damage of physical assets, etc. The need to have this strategy is going to be more critical than ever before because of the potential business risks and weakened consumer confidence that even a simple outage can result in.

In addition to this, what is also driving the Indian enterprises to invest more heavily on IT is their need for infusing innovation into their business, which could then ultimately result in exponential growth of their organization through technology leveraged new business models. Nearly 4 dozen Indian CEOs, who were interviewed as part of the CEO study conducted by IBM in 2006, identified 'creation of innovative business models for competitive differentiation' as the top-most priority. And to do this, they clearly outlined that they need to invest more on IT and also bring IT to the core of their business and integrate it well.

Q: Increasingly, we see that Indian companies are playing at a global level--expanding into markets outside of India, through organic and inorganic approaches. How then is IBM helping these companies from an IT standpoint match up to global standards?
A: Recognizing the need for Indian clients to grow rapidly we have a two-fold approach, in which we address their needs.

One, we bring world-wide capabilities, assets, innovative approaches and experience to our Indian clients. IBM has a huge range of global assets—both from technology and business perspective, and we are able to replicate those assets for clients here as well. A good example there is what we do in the telecom sector. We have had many telecom partnerships for many years now and so when we work on Bharti account here, we are able to easily leverage those assets that we may have used for other telecom clients elsewhere in the world. Apart from this there are others with whom we work globally like General Motors, P&G, Nestle, among others and those very partnerships bring great value for an Indian environment as well.

Likewise there are many other processes and technology capabilities that we have been borrowing from other parts in world and successfully use for Indian clients. Examples include what we do in the area of Work Area Recovery or Emergency Response Network. We have brought the massive supercomputing power of BlueGene to Indian Institute of Science and regularly leveraged insights from IBM Institute of Business Value and applied to our clients.

So that was approach#1 and we have seen clients highly appreciating the same. They realize if they have to match up to the scale of their global counterparts, they do need to use some of the best practices from outside of India as well. Approach#2 is where we create unique solutions and localize our innovation efforts to cater to the very specific clients needs in an Indian context. Examples being the work that we do at the India Industry Solution Labs and even India Research Labs, wherein we have created solutions keeping the Indian clients and business landscape in mind.
 
Last year in March, IBM also invested towards creating the first-of-its kind in the world center called the Global Business Solutions Center or GBSC to create replicable assets for different industries. And while these reusable assets are being used by many clients globally, we have been extending the same to Indian clients as well.

Additionally, IBM has also invested heavily in creating strong local partnerships—to create a highly progressive ecosystem in the country. These include its partnerships with academia like IITs, IIMs, etc. It also partners with industry bodies like CII and various governmental organizations to see how Indian businesses and society at large can be made to progress.

Q: Globally, we hear IBM putting strong emphasis on Innovation. Can you highlight some Indian examples, wherein you have brought to life your focus on Innovation?
A: IBM is focused on innovation-led growth. IBM brings world-wide capabilities, assets, innovative approaches and experience to our Indian clients.

Some of these examples would be:
DLF, where IBM is providing IT solutions for building management and creating intelligent buildings, digital video surveillance (based on IBM’s cutting-edge research in this area) and helping the client manage land recorded in a paperless fashion.
FINO, where IBM is helping the client deploy a core-banking and an end-to-end smart card solution that enables fruits and vegetable sellers participate in auctions without having to carry cash or borrowing money from traditional moneylenders. The smart-cards double up as biometric identity proof as well as an electronic pass-book for these traders, and thereby bring a great technological edge to the growing Microfinance industry in the country.
BSNL, where IBM has implemented SOA-based architecture to integrate client’s geographically dispersed operational system. The solution deployed by IBM helps the telecom major to achieve an end-to-end business process visibility while increasing its customer satisfaction through telemetry integration.
In addition to this, there are still many other examples like the IVR (interactive voice response) solution deployed for IDEA, Health Hi-Way created in collaboration with Apollo Hospitals, and the landmark deal with Bharti which involved business model innovation.

Q: What stage of IT maturity are Indian organizations currently at – and is there a roadmap that you can prescribe to them?
A: Indian Inc is no longer willing to enjoy the status quo and is ready to challenge the world by growing rapidly in a very short span of time.

But to achieve this kind of unprecedented growth, companies realize that they need to make their foundations very strong. While they put their efforts towards the next phase of growth, they simultaneously have to mitigate any kind of risk that may get posed to their business. They also need to understand the significance of optimizing their investments on IT and viewing both IT and business strategy as a complementary piece and not isolated. And most importantly, the companies need to work with strategic partners that can help their business to grow and not just provide need-based IT products/solutions. 

In terms of IT maturity, I would say a good number of Indian enterprises are moving towards similar levels like their counterparts in other parts of the world. Many of them in fact are willing to invest in technologies and solutions that absolutely cutting-edge and helps put them ahead in an intensely competitive landscape.

Also, there is a marked evolution in the buying behavior across verticals. While so far BFSI, telecom and manufacturing were the verticals spending most on IT and IT services, gradually we see a strong demand coming in from other emerging verticals like Retail, Healthcare and Media & Entertainment. With IBM’s proven expertise worldwide to address the specific needs of these verticals, we find ourselves again in a unique position to offer the entire breadth of capabilities like no one else across all the verticals: traditionally strong ones as well as the emerging.

Q: How do you see the future of IT services in India? How is IBM placed to address these areas in the future?
A: The future of IT services in India will be driven by innovative business models emerging from proven methodologies, tools, & governance to help clients manage their IT Infrastructure, enhance operational efficiency & derive business results. There will be an increasing need for secure, dynamic and resilient solutions to minimize risk for the clients. Flexible, standardised, modular and cost-effective solutions will highly be in demand.

And as I have mentioned earlier, increasingly clients would not be so much interested in what IT product and what solution is being deployed, but instead how those product/solutions will help their business to improve—its efficiency, its growth, and its resiliency. 

The one aspect which separates IBM from the rest of the players in the market is the sheer breadth offerings and capabilities it can bring to its clients—anywhere in the world, including India.

On one hand, the best of unique solutions by virtue of our acquisitions like Netsol, Daksh, Internet Security Solutions, PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), etc gets delivered to our clients. On the other hand, our vast portfolio of capabilities from consulting to global delivery to software and services research and even business transformation, are made available for the Indian clients.

Netsol is one of the very good examples. 2 years ago we acquired this leading network integrator and today it is at the helm of offering some of the best infrastructure management offerings to our customers in India.

IBM is going to support its clients meet their growing business demands by fully integrating technology and business functions to operate together seamlessly.

Updated on: 26 Mar, 2008