Page 23 - Forbes India (December 2015)

innovation. And India will play a with venture capitalists, setting up surpass [that in] the US by 2018.
major role in its scheme of things. their business models and giving What is important for us is to
In an interview with Forbes them the right technology tools to establish a platform where we
India, Robert LeBlanc, senior vice start a business. For startups that believe the pool of developers exists.
president of IBM Cloud, said the come through this programme, we That is why we have announced
company will be ramping up the also offer some free credits to use a partnership with Accenture
footprint of its new generation cloud- our cloud services [Bluemix] for a [IBM also has partnerships with
based services in India. Excerpts: year. Traditionally, most of IBM’s other system integrators like Tech
enterprise clients in India have been Mahindra, Wipro and Infosys,
Q How important is India large public and private enterprises. wherein programmers of these IT
as a market for your cloud- However, with our applications firms develop apps for their clients
based services? and capabilities on the cloud, we using the Bluemix platform]. These
In the first generation of the cloud, can even look at small and medium programmers work on applications
people were looking to manage costs enterprises and offer them the that are used not only in India
by storing data on a public cloud and same capabilities and services that but across the world. We have
paying for what they used, instead only the big players had access to around 1,800 clients who use our
of building their own data centres, earlier. India has one of the youngest cloud-based services in India.
which were expensive. The flexibility working populations in the world
and agility that the cloud offers is and with smartphone penetration Q How do you react to the
very conducive to the next generation and the potential of 4G, India is a security concerns around storing
of cloud-based services, which are a very interesting market for us. data on the cloud, especially
platform for innovation. The cloud public clouds (where a service
is transitioning from being a money- provider makes resources, such as
saving tool to an enabler of disruptive THE NUMBER OF applications and storage, available
innovation. Think Uber, WhatsApp to the public over the internet
or Airbnb. So, if you think about PROGRAMMERS on a pay-per-usage model)?
it, the programmer developing an IN INDIA WILL A public cloud is more secure
application is the agent of innovation. than a lot of private clouds that
Our services like Bluemix make it SURPASS THAT companies run themselves. This is
possible for programmers to develop IN THE US BY 2018 for the simple reason that a public
a new generation of applications cloud that we run is controlled by
swiftly, taking advantage of things us end-to-end and we ensure that
like analytics and mobile. So, if it we have all the tools to ensure data
is the programmer that makes the Q In terms of adoption of security. If you look at most of the
difference, step back and think cloud computing, how do you data breaches that have happened,
where you will find the second- rank India among other global they have occurred in private clouds;
largest body of programmers in the markets where IBM is present? some of them aren’t even clouds,
world? It’s in India. And these Indian If you look at IDC [International Data they are just private data centres.
programmers are working for some Corporation] data, it places India in Very often, data gets leaked if
of the largest system integrators the top 30 percent as far as global one contractor or employee who
around the world and helping clients adoption of cloud-based services goes. has control over the entire system
transform. So India is in a prime That is pretty consistent with the size is compromised. We don’t have that
position to be a major player in the of the business that we see for IBM in system. There is still scepticism
next generation of the cloud. India. But when I look at some of our among some about the security aspect
specific services, like Bluemix, India of storing data on the cloud but that
Q What role will IBM be playing ranks second in terms of adoption is changing. Also, we don’t store all
in the next generation of cloud- after the US. It is logical that India is data in one place. We have acquired
based services in India? the second-largest market for Bluemix a company called Cleversafe, which
We’ve set up two data centres in as it has the second-largest population breaks up data into parcels and stores
India and also tied up with Nasscom of application developers in the world; them in different locations, so even if
to help build a platform for Indian and if that data is to be believed, the one data centre is breached, all you
startups, helping them connect number of programmers in India will get is just one piece of the puzzle.

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