IBM TAKES ITS WARES TO 100 CITIES

Shyamala Seetharamanan, Chennai, October 20, 2008
Financial Chronicle

A recent global survey by IBM states that 83 per cent of CEOs expect substantial change in their businesses this year. Though change is the way of life in businesses, the current pace has never been evinced before, the report found out. Most companies including small players are fast becoming parts of global supply chains directly or indirectly.

Consequently, the IT infrastructure of companies has to be agile and highly susceptible to change. IT bellwether IBM has initiated a world tour across 100 cities for 10 days to popularise its Smart SOA (service-oriented architecture) framework to help its customers tackle the rapidly changing business environments. The world leader in SOA covers Delhi, Bangalore and Chennai.

A company may deploy several applications for different processes, which were developed by various vendors. Though IT is meant to improve efficiency, lack of co-ordination among the different systems detriments it, said Manoj Saxena, vice-president, solutions and asset management, IBM Global Business Services. “Acquisitions also add to the burden of varied IT systems that can’t ‘talk to each other’,” he added.

The service-oriented approach of virtually connecting all systems helps to cut down redundancy in operations and also to derive value out of legacy systems. The approach can also be applied to understand business strategies, Saxena said.

Breaking down operations to processes can help companies to assess their strengths and weaknesses. The IT systems can then be built based on the requirements. “The CEO can then decide on what processes to build internally, what to do with partners and what is to be outsourced,” he added.

IBM has also developed industry-specific templates to assess what processes need to be connected within company’s SOA framework and what should be outsourced. “We give diagnostic reports on how companies should go on adding infrastructure, skills and governance based on their specific requirements,” he said.

Globally, IBM has over 7,000 client engagements, about 7,000 partners and 300 patents for SOA.