n June this year IBM, the world's largest provider of enterprise business software, celebrates 100 years as a company. That is pretty amazing for a company, which is even older than many countries such as Singapore and Bangladesh.
Martin Chee, director business partners, IBM software growth markets, thinks this is something to be proud of, but at the same time not something to shout about. In fact, according to him, they have been doing a bit of introspective to what has taken the company to where they are right now.
“If we look at what we have been doing for the last 100 years as a company, you'll see that we have made things like cheese slices and calculators and things have obviously progressed and changed along with how technology has changed and now we have moved to analytics and Cloud computing,” Chee said in an interview with The Daily Star.
Chee said, as a company IBM has a core set of beliefs, which need constant innovation and change. The company has spent over $130 billion in research and development over the past 30 years.
“No one in the market matches the amount of researches we do. That is what keeps us at the forefront, we constantly want to lead the market, develop new markets. In fact, we constantly push out and get rid of some parts of our business, which we think, are not growth areas, for example we sold our PC business to the Chinese company Lenovo and hard disk business to Hitachi,” he said.
“The reason why we are here is because we are investing very much into software, which is a huge focus for IBM and represents 20 percent of our revenue but 40-45 percent of our profit and our target is to reach 50 percent of the companies profit by 2015,” Chee said.
He came to IBM when the company acquired Lotus in 1996. Since then the company had over 75 software acquisitions till now. So, software business is relatively young and new in IBM and is a huge focus in terms of growth.
“We have acquired very diverse companies to build a set of portfolio offerings, which we believe today is the best set of software -- middleware capabilities the industry has and there is something that we can bring to the market in Bangladesh,” he said.
The company has been doing it for many years now through its partner Thakral and will continue working with them. It wants to do a lot more in Bangladesh and the offcial thinks the potential is tremendous.
“We have a concept of business-led partner model, which we are implementing here, where IBM works through partners, skill them up, pass business opportunities to them, invest heavily in core marketing activities alongside you and invest heavily in you,” he added.
According to him, IBM has the richest incentive programme for partners, and they earn tremendous amount if they independently bring in opportunities. But that requires skills, so a big part of the programme is enablement and skills development.
“We have been successful in many core business areas around the world and Bangladesh will be no different,” Chee said.
IBM has been working with Thakral for quite some time in this market. IBM software business has two distinctive parts -- one is the commodity business such as emails storage, which is easy to sell and also buy from a customer point of view, and the other set is predominantly solution based, which requires inherent skills the company holds.
"It's not only a product; its significant assets around those products that you have to position, which could be around government, pharma, telecom and banking,” said Praveen Kumar, assistant director-software group, Business Partners, GB and ISV/DR, IBM India.
“Thakral has equipped themselves with certain skills. However, the reach of Thakral is very dependent on other partners. Thakral will continue to be our sole distributor for Bangladesh market. They will be the sole interface from the transaction perspective,” Kumar added.
IBM has invested some direct and dedicated resources in the past year or so for the Bangladesh market.
“Now we want to expand that base. So one of the key points of the event we are holding is to bring in partners of other software products that exist, try and explain the variety of solution that we have and once we get their interest into those areas, we will equip them, ensure that they are skilled enough to go and position those products. They can look at Thakral as a core engine for support and also at the IBM engine,” he added.
“Thakral has given us a lot of insights into the Bangladesh market, something that didn't exist with us couple of years back. They have told us how strong this market can be in terms of business.”
“We started to make direct investments in terms of meeting customers to generate market demand in sometime June last year, from a software perspective.”
He said: “Thakral guided us all through the way to establish this market demand, and we invested based on their advice, and initial references have already come in and so far we have signed agreements with BRAC Bank and some other banks.”
When asked about IBM's strategy behind success, Chee said long time investment is a key element and they have been investing very heavily.
“For example, how do you build a solution to have a better water, traffic or electricity, food or population management system?”
It is all about looking ahead, and whether one is willing to put his money where the mouth is, Chee said.
Also, picking the right trends and developing a market are what IBM has done time and time again to reinvent and transform itself to find areas of growth.
News Source:
The Daily Star