India’s digital transformation in pandemic akin to mobile revolution: IBM’s Arvind Krishna

“The 18 months of the pandemic has accelerated digital transformation in India, which is equal to 15 years in the area of digital payments or online commerce or internet banking,” Krishna said during an interactive session, moderated by Tech Mahindra CEO CP Gurnani, at The Economic Times India Leadership Council.

“You can see that impact. You can see the (Indian) government now beginning to talk much more seriously about what they’re doing around the key marketplaces for procurement and what they do to government payments.”

“It is much like India leapfrogging from having few (landline) phones to…800 million to 1 billion mobile phones,” Krishna said.

Gurnani lauded Krishna’s bold attempt to spin off IBM’s IT infrastructure business Kyndryl as an independent company, with IBM focusing on platforms and products. The US-based firm, under Krishna’s leadership, is betting big on hybrid cloud and Edge computing.

“It was a hard decision between the management team and the board. For Kyndryl, that was the time it was important that they get to go on their own journey. They need their own capital structure, they need their freedom,” Krishna said. “They need to have their own margins; they need to have their own partners and to do all that under the auspices of IBM.”

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Kyndryl, with a revenue of $19 billion, listed as an independent entity earlier this month.

Krishna and Gurnani discussed the India advantage in terms of talent for global technology companies as well as the opportunity for services companies to help customers transform their businesses using technology.

Global firms will spend over $10 trillion on technology over the next 10 years, Krishna said.

“Only 20% (of the applications) has been modernised with any kind of microservices, modern cloud container-based architecture. The other 80% is still sitting in (servers and databases) how it used to…so our current bets on hybrid cloud and probably a current and future bet on Edge computing remains,” he said.

IBM, he said, was looking at data sovereignty by countries, automation, artificial intelligence and Edge computing to drive demand for hybrid cloud.

“Data sovereignty is deep inside the soul of every nation. They want to control, and they want to know the destiny or where the data is and where the critical infrastructure is going to go wrong. And that’s the conversation pretty much every country is having, be it India, in the UAE, in Saudi Arabia, France, Germany or the UK. So, you got to have all of that presence. You need to make sure that that data stays within boundaries,” he said.

“The very question of automating factories and bringing AI is going to imply Edge computing. You bring those together, and that is why we fundamentally believe in the strategy of hybrid cloud,” he added.