IBM Chairman and CEO Announces Plans to Triple Investment in India over Next Three Years

Our Corporate Bureau
06 June 2006

Palmisano spoke before 10,000 employees gathered in Bangalore and via satellite to thousands of other employees in Delhi, Mumbai, Kolkata and Pune. With more than 43,000 employees in 14 cities, India is IBM's largest country organisation outside the US.
Present at the Bangalore meeting was Dr. A P J Abdul Kalam, the president of India.

"India and other emerging economies are an increasingly important part of IBM's global success," Palmisano said. "If you are not here in India, making the right investments and finding and developing the best employees and business partners, then you won't be able to combine the skills and expertise here with skills and expertise from around the world, in ways that can help our clients be successful.

I'm here today to say that IBM is not going to miss this opportunity. In the next three years, we will triple our investment in India — from $2 billion over the last three years to nearly $6 billion in the next three years. That investment will ensure that we make the most of the opportunities to grow this marketplace, while it also enables IBM to fulfill its vision to become a globally integrated company."

Also in attendance during Palmisano's meeting with IBM India employees were Wall Street analysts, who were attending IBM's first-ever financial analyst meeting in India, Karnataka governor T.N. Chaturvedi and Karnataka chief minister H D Kumaraswamy.

As immediate steps in its increased investment in India, IBM is:

Establishing the first in a new breed of Service Delivery Centres in Bangalore, deploying new processes and technology that will greatly automate IT service delivery to provide clients with enhanced flexibility and increased worldwide access to skills, service offerings and continuous availability at lower cost.
Creating the IBM Systems & Technology Group (STG) Innovation, Development and Executive Briefing Center in Bangalore, focused on IBM infrastructure solutions, technologies and innovations and providing performance benchmarking, testing, data migration and competency building capabilities.
Locating a Telecommunications Research & Innovation Center at its India Research Lab that will serve as a key resource to IBM's telecommunications clients around the world.
Increasing the capabilities and staff of the High Performance On Demand Solutions Lab in Bangalore, a specialized software and services lab driving automation and virtualisation of complex IT infrastructures.
Inaugurating "The Great Mind Challenge," which is designed to improve the software development skills of Indian students as they work to solve issues facing businesses today.

Advanced Global Services Delivery Network
IBM has formed a new Global Delivery Research and Development organisation that pairs researchers from its eight worldwide labs with services delivery experts to reinvent service delivery for IT by creating a virtual global delivery platform unifying IBM's entire network of IT delivery centers. Standard processes and greatly increased automation distribute work seamlessly among the global centers, providing unprecedented levels of reliability for clients via automatic back-up capability. In addition, the automation of service delivery will allow IBM to scale without adding new resources, dramatically lowering costs by reducing the dependence on labor for low-level tasks, such as remote systems monitoring.

This work is being piloted at IBM's Global Service Delivery Center in Bangalore, which runs, not just monitors, IT operations from India for more than 225 clients worldwide, providing high-value complex services, including security and network operations, server and storage management, and hosting.