Integrated approach to tech is critical for IBM to maintain market leadership

Preeti Parashar
The Financial Express

South Asia region today hosts the entire gamut of IBM’s business services, software, hardware and R&D labs, driving innovation at all levels. Guruduth Banavar, chief technologist, IBM India/South Asia and director, IBM India Research Laboratory has played a key role in formulating an integrated approach to technology innovation.

In an interview Banavar shares his vision and plan for the company.

Excerpts:

How do you plan to drive the integrated approach to technology innovation?

We have a significant innovation capability in India/South Asia region, given the research lab, the development lab, and the global business solution centre in India. As a company with end-to-end capabilities an integrated approach to technology is critical for IBM to maintain its leadership in the market. To develop this technical strategy, I have created a team of technical leaders from each of the business lines in IBM India/South Asia. Each of these accomplished technical leaders brings his/her business insights and technical ideas for creating a cross-business technical strategy that leverages the capabilities across the entire IBM India/South Asia organisation. The strategy will help create a broad technical vision that will effectively support the company’s long-term goals for the region, and provide a concrete two-year roadmap for the organisation. It will also encompass the needs of developing the technical community in India/South Asia.

What would be the key focus of your business plan?

The overarching goal is to bring value to our customers through end-to-end offerings, software, systems, and services. If you consider our Smarter Planet vision, we aim to help our customers perform better in a more complex and demanding marketplace. In today’s interconnected and instrumented world, technologies need to be far more intelligent to meet business requirements. We have a bullish business strategy, and we need an aggressive and clearly articulated technical strategy to support that.

What are the key research areas for IRL? What percentage does IBM invest into R&D?

IBM’s India Research Laboratory (IRL) has a balanced research agenda with both long-term exploratory projects and more industry focused short-term projects. Specific focus areas of IRL include software technologies, high performance computing, analytics and optimisation, and information management. Services is also another key research area for IRL as we engage with our services business as well as end customers for industry specific projects. Globally we spent $6.3 billion on research in 2008.

How can integrated approach and technology innovation drive the growth map for the company?

First of all, IBM is a technology company at its core. In order to remain competitive, businesses must continue to innovate at all levels and IBM can provide the technology to support and drive innovations. There are a number of new opportunities for innovation emanating from this region as some of the issues and challenges faced by our clients here are unique. For example, the technology needs of the population at the base of the pyramid represent a huge opportunity for IBM as does the massive scale of the largest enterprises in this region. As we have already begun to invent technologies like the Spoken Web, we fully expect that there will be a stream of technology innovations that will address the needs of this region. But as a globally integrated enterprise, we aspire to take these technologies to other parts of the world, in both growth markets and major markets, and implement them successfully there. As we bring the global innovation engine of IBM to bear on the needs of the India/South Asia region, these technology innovations will continue the growth and strengthen IBM’s position as the undisputed leader in the region.