Cloud as a service is growing across clients: IBM's Mukul Mathur

IBM VP-Global Business Partners and System Integrators discusses his company's outlook

IBM has taken their cognitive engine Watson to business partners and startups across India. Most recently, they have tied up with Honda to provide a connected car platform. Mukul Mathur, IBM VP-Global Business Partners and System Integrators, spoke with Romita Majumdar to discuss IBM's vision for IoT, cloud and cognitive technologies in India. Edited excerpts:

Everyone is talking about moving to the cloud and AI, what is IBM's outlook here?

We are making significant investments to align ourselves with cloud and cognitive technology. We see our cloud activities growing by 33 per cent and Cloud as a Service (CaaS) offering growing at about 59 per cent currently with all clients looking for solutions in these areas. This requirement is similar across small, medium and large enterprises.

What are the challenges in moving entire businesses to these new platforms?

There are three main areas where all the decision-making is taking place i.e., data, cloud and cognitive platforms. Clients are looking at using data coming from various sources and in different formats. Clients need to be able to define what kind of data they want and also be able to share that data with the external world (independent of format constraints). For this the cloud platform needs to be highly resilient, scalable and secure. The cognitive platform helps clients interpret this data and provide them decision-making capacity. 

How is this decision making capacity achieved?

The cognitive engines (that help take decisions) that we develop are trained on a large number of use cases. Additionally, the engines also learn to interpret organisational data in a private and secure environment. So the engine will use data from your own experience to facilitate your decisions. These technologies will help to cut down a lot of repetitive work in data gathering. In fact, it can help our partners know their own client base better through the extensive data analysis, for example, they can gather data from social media and interpret it. 

Working on cognitive engines and large cloud platforms will require a new set of skilled people, how will that work?

IBM works with a large number of partner organisations to whom we extend our skills, product knowledge and certification as well, for example the Watson certified professional certificate. Our business partners can also embed IBM offerings as their solutions to their clients. We offer support to train their own teams for the same. We even help them take their product to the market. 

Where do you foresee the maximum usage of cloud and cognitive offerings like Watson?

It is not possible to point out one sector as the possible applications for these technologies are endless. They are being used from power grids to banking and recruitment. Startups are already applying AI to areas as diverse as education like eKaushal which uses a learning engine or a Snapwork which is innovating how mobile platforms work. Our business partners are applying these to myriad use cases already.