IBM CEO Virginia Rometty to push digital technologies during India visit next month

India has the largest employee base for the company outside of the United States with over 1.2 lakh workers delivering services to its global customers

IBM Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Virginia Rometty will visit India in February, as the company looks at expanding its business. The Indian market has expanded in double-digits for the global software major in the latest quarter.

India has the largest employee base for the company outside of the United States with about 120,000 workers delivering services to its global customers, competing with large Indian information technology services firms such as Tata Consultancy Services, Infosys and Wipro.  

The Armonk-headquartered company also has a significant presence in the local market, with revenues of close to $2 billion  Rs 13,500 crore) by building solutions for customers such as Bharti Airtel, Vodafone, Adani Group and Idea Cellular. It has a significant presence in financial services space where it has got multiple customers such as Reserve Bank of India, Canara Bank, Max Life and Reliance Life.

The company recently announced setting up a public data centre — the firm’s second in the country — to offer cloud services in India.

Rometty, who will arrive in Bengaluru on February 2, would showcase IBM Watson, the artificial intelligence platform to its customers. She also has plans to travel to Mumbai, where she would meet RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan, people familiar with the development said.

In reply to a Business Standard query, an RBI spokesperson confirmed about Rometty's meeting with Rajan saying "it's a courtesy call"

India's IT spending is forecast to reach $71.0 billion in 2016, a 6.0 per cent increase from 2015, technology researcher Gartner said on November 3. The IT industry is being driven by digital business, and an environment driven by a connected world.

“India will continue to be the fastest-growing IT market for the second year in succession and will continue growing to total $85.28 billion by the end of 2019,” Aman Munglani, research director at Gartner, had said at that time.

Rometty's visit comes at a time when India has become an important destination for global technology chief executives, as the country embarks on massive spending on technology in its Digital India campaign. In the past few months, senior tech executives including Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have pitched for their technologies to be included in India's technology roadmap.