Game Changers – A Look at Technology Disruptions

Chetan Naik, Director & Regional Executive – IBM India West

Remember the “Kodak Moment”—an advertisement that instantly made Kodak a household name? Thanks to technology disruptions, the magic is now history. Welcome digital photography –a cost-effective technology innovation that ate into the film-based photo space in no time.

Right from the discovery of the wheel and the industrial revolution – to the assembly line by Ford, technology has opened up new frontiers of entrepreneurship in businesses. In India too, we have incredible technology stories that define the innovation economy we currently belong to.

Take ITC e-choupal. The project was intended for the larger good of our farmers. Traditionally, due to the stronghold of profit-making middlemen, commodities were priced inappropriately, which in turn translated into losses for farmers. With its eChoupal initiative, ITC Limited provided computers and Internet access in rural areas, enabling farmers to directly negotiate the sale of their produce with ITC..

Read the complete article on India Onward.

Central Bank of India Picks IBM’s Analytics Solution

Technology giant IBM said Central Bank of India is leveraging its analytics solution to transform its financial management processes.

The deal size was, however, not disclosed. This deal includes activities ranging from budgeting to forecasting to liquidity management, IBM said in a statement.

As a result of IBM’s solution for corporate performance management, the Bank is now able to gain better insight into branch and regional office performance, allowing for further flexibility and quicker shifts in strategy to drive improved results while also maintaining regulatory compliance, it added.

Read the complete article on Times of India.

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Related:

What is Big Data?

Smarter Analytics Transforms Big Data into Big Results

Women in Technology: Make A Difference by Joining IBM

Join other exceptional women who are making a difference.

At IBM women have been making contributions to the advancement of information technology for almost as long as the company has been in existence.  Today, women represent approximately 30 percent of IBM employees worldwide and more than 22% of our global executive population is made up of women, two-thirds of whom are working mothers.

Did you know?

• IBM was named among Top 10, 2013 NAFE Working Mothers Top 50 Companies for Executive Women.
• IBM is a three-time Catalyst Award winner, recognizing innovative approaches for developing women.
• Working Mother magazine has named IBM one of its 100 Best Companies for 27 consecutive years.
• IBM is represented by 15 women in the Women in Technology International (WITI) Hall of Fame.  (see also Diane Pozefsky, Ph.D, 2011 and Joanne Martin, Ph.D, 2012)

Are you looking for a new challenge, inside a progressive organization that values and rewards collaboration, innovation and creativity?  If you want to focus on today’s most exciting technologies — Social, Mobile, Analytics, Cloud — the opportunities are endless and you can make a difference at IBM.

Learn more: Careers for Women at IBM

And apply for jobs:  Job Opportunities for Women in Technology

Why Work at IBM?

More:

• Why IBM?
• IBM Video Series Celebrates International Women’s Day
• IBM Vice President, Gill Zhou, Is a Model for Working Women in China
• Some Wise Words for Your Career, Life and Destiny, from Rebecca Munyuki, IBM South Africa
• IBM’s Pioneering Woman and 1st Executive:  Anne Van Vechten (Part 1), (Part 2)
• IBM Research Chief Scientist for Social Business, Irene Greif, Wins Technical Leadership Award
• Middle East and Africa Inspirational IBMers – Natasha Pillay-Bemath

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Check out these hot jobs today, and be sure to stay tuned for more to come.

- Posted by Regan Kelly and Julie Yamamoto

Announcing IBM Alumni India LinkedIn Group

The Greater IBM Connection and the IBM India team are pleased to announce the launch of the new India LinkedIn group of our community. We’re starting this group as a way for our community of Greater IBMers to interact and network with community members in India.

To do this, we’ve partnered with an IBM social business team in India, led by Khalid Raza.

To join the India group sub-community: 

• You must first join the global Greater IBM Connection community here.
• Then request to join the India Alumni group here.
• Note: You must provide accurate information about your IBM employment on your profile so that your membership can be approved for both groups.

Thank you for your interest, and we look forward to you joining today!

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– Posted by Julie Yamamoto, Program Manager, The Greater IBM Connection

India News: IBM Power Systems Solution Reduces Nakoda Ltd.’s IT Costs by 20%

NEW DELHI: IBM has announced that Nakoda Limited, one of India’s fastest growing companies located in the region of Gujarat, has implemented an integrated IBM Smarter Computing solution. The move, which displaced existing competitive server systems, was designed to help the company standardize and streamline business operations running on SAP and increase operational efficiencies while maintaining both high product quality and attractive pricing. After implementing the IBM solution, Nakoda was able to reduce its IT costs by up to 20% in one year.

The business of the BSE-listed Nakoda Limited is diverse – spanning from manufacturing of raw materials for the textile industry to wind farm equipment. Having grown its profit/revenues three fold in the last four years, Nakoda Limited found its existing infrastructure increasingly difficult to manage. It was too complex and costly, and not capable of meeting business needs. Equally, multiple applications needed separate user sign-on, and managing user authentication was major drains on IT help desk resources, as well as a security risk.

“We realize that to keep up with the changes in today’s business environment we needed an integrated IT platform to make it easier for us to centrally plan, control and optimize workloads, while keeping data accuracy and integrity up-to date,” said Devendra Jain, Joint Managing Director, Nakoda Limited. “IBM’s performance and its market leadership in Power Systems convinced us to replace our existing servers.

The integrated smarter computing solution based on IBM Power Systems built with IBM BladeCenter servers, IBM System Storage DS5020 and Tivoli Storage Manager enables faster deployment of mission critical applications, while keeping operating costs under control. New SAP applications and consolidation of the infrastructure have contributed to significant savings. Also, as a result, raw materials price changes that took several days to reflect are now adjusted on the same day.

The implementation of the solution was done with the help of IBM’s Advanced Business Partner Innovative Telecom and Software.

“Nakoda chose IBM’s Power Systems as it offers better performance and support for the SAP implementation. The Power architecture coupled with the AIX operating system is the most robust solution for a mission critical application like SAP and with superior TCO benefits and RAS features that ensures round-the-clock operation with minimal downtime”, said Viswanath Ramaswamy, Director – Power Systems, IBM India South Asia. “Interestingly, this win along with the recent IBM announcement of the most powerful enterprise Power Systems to date, a new high-end disk storage system and key software updates for IBM’s newest mainframe computer may open several new opportunities within the textile sector in India”.

As part of IBM’s geographic expansion plans, which is one of IBM’s core growth strategies, IBM is expanding into untapped markets around the world where there is a significant opportunity for growth. Gujarat is an important region for IBM where the company works with key clients such as Nakoda Limited, Nawanagar Co-op Bank, Amul, Surat District Co-operative Bank, Atul Limited and Micro Inks Limited. IBM is also present in Ahmedabad and Surat where it has been focused on meeting the growing needs of its clients, providing advanced integrated solutions, technologies and services to aid their business growth.

from lightreading.in

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IBMer Greg Daws Shares Corp. Service Corps (CSC) Experience at Indore, India

Greg Daws, IBM Australia, shares his Corporate Service Corps (CSC) Team India 17 experience by enjoying the culture around India and visiting the places in Indore. Greg and his team were charged with helping the Labour Commission to address some of the issues faced in that society.

The India 17 team (missing Greg Daws)

If you would like to read more about the program, visit http://www.ibm.com/ibm/responsibility/corporateservicecorps/

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As a current or former IBMer, have you ever taken part in a Corporate Service Corps assignment? What was it like? Tell us about your own experience below.

In Campus Recruitment, IBM India Hires More Women than Men for IT

by Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis, The Times of India

BANGALORE: In a landmark for the IT industry, maybe for most industries, IBM India has this year hired more women than men during its campus recruitment. This is significant because it’s happened in an industry where mass recruitment is the norm.

Of the campus recruitments done by IBM India till June, 52% were women — a quantum leap from the 38% in 2011 and 32% in 2010. IBM doesn’t disclose the numbers it hires, but large IT companies in India have hired over 30,000 people in recent years. Of these, about 70% have been campus hires.

Of the 265 engineers SAP Labs India hired this year, 42% are women, up from 34% last year. For Cisco India, the figure is 22% this year, down from last year’s 25%, but significantly higher than 16% in 2010.

The significant jump in the number of women hired by leading IT firms is remarkable especially because, as IBM’s recruitment leader for India Vardanahalli A Rangarajan notes, the average admission of women across engineering colleges in India is just 18%. Most companies have been working with placement cells in colleges to achieve these high numbers.

IBM says a major reason is awareness about facilities offered to women employees. “Our flexible work policies, the workfrom-home option, the ability to customize working hours are big attractions,” says Kalpana Veeraraghavan, diversity manager in IBM India.

Rangarajan says IBM has many women role models, including CEO Virginia Rometty.

SAP Labs targets the few women’s engineering colleges, including the Cummins Engineering College, Pune, and Meenakshi Engineering College, Chennai. It also conducts an online recruitment test for women across all engineering colleges on International Women’s Day. “It’s for women doing computer science and with a CGPA (Cumulative Grade Point Average) of about 8. This year, 3,000 took the test. We flew in over 200 women to Bangalore for the final interviews, and selected 45,” says Anil Warrier, director for staffing, SAP Labs.

For the past five years, Cisco has been organizing every year a programme called Girls in Technology, where about 100 engineering graduates are invited to the company’s campus in Bangalore and exposed to the labs, work environment and culture.

Protima Achaya, Cisco’s lead for scaling services staffing in Asia-Pacific and Japan, says flexible workhours and excellent creche facilities are big attractions . “The number of women who join Cisco after this programme has been increasing every year. Such recruits tend to stay on for long,” she adds.

Accenture doesn’t disclose its women recruitment numbers. However, a spokesperson told TOI: “We have exclusive campus engagement programmes for women. We have Diversity Zones, a campus event which talks about several aspects of working at Accenture. Students get an opportunity to interact with senior women leadership and young achievers, who share their experiences about working at Accenture and how they are able to manage the work-life balance.”
At HCL Technologies, the overall percentage of women is almost 25, but the campus recruitment percentage is only 12. However, Srimathi Shivashankar , AVP for diversity and sustainability, says the percentage has been steadily rising and HCL has women-focused recruitment drives.

It’s increasingly acknowledged that diversity at the workplace is not only good in itself, but also has a profound influence on the operations of an organization. “Numerous studies show that increasing gender equality enhances productivity and economic growth. The best ideas flourish in a diverse environment, and companies benefit from accessing female talent,” Shivashankar says.

Adds IBM’s Kalpana Veeraraghavan : “When you mirror external reality at the workplace, employees feel more at home, and they behave more naturally. And that environment enables us to access a lot more talent.” At IBM, the overall percentage of women still remains about 28%, but the most recent initiatives suggest that the number could quickly rise to the ideal 50%.

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IBM Chairman: Indian Cities Must Get Smarter to Tackle Urbanization

Sam Palmisano, IBM Chairman, says leaders will need to gain support for their ideas and concepts, and be persuasive

(from Information Week)

Cities are a critical component of driving the economy. But rapid urbanization around the world is already putting immense pressure on the limited resources available in the world’s cities. And countries like India and China are at the forefront of urbanization — India already has 12 of the world’s 100 largest cities.

Crowded street in Bangalore, India

It took nearly 40 years for the urban population in India to reach 230 million. Studies reveal it will take only half that time to reach the next 250 million. In the next 20 years around 30 Indians will migrate from a rural area to a city every minute. At that growth rate the population of Mumbai will be bigger than that of Canada by 2030. And the Delhi/NCR region will have a GDP bigger than Portugal. With more people choosing to live in cities, India will need 500 new cities in the next 20 years.

At the IBM Smarter Cities forum in New Delhi on September 13, a gathering of city planners, government policy makers, politicians, city architects, technologists, and researchers the consensus was that, even the best technology in the world cannot address the challenges induced by rapid urbanization. Delivering the keynote, IBM’s Chairman, Samuel J. Palmisano said it was really “a leadership issue” and that collaboration was essential. He suggested our leaders “should be systems thinkers, take a long-term view,” and have persuasive skills. And they “shouldn’t confuse leadership with charisma or the sound bite on TV.”

“If (leaders) are going to manage in the long term, they will need to build organizational support for their concepts and ideas. And you can only do that in a collaborative environment, with good team work and spirit. And you can’t dictate it and will it — you have to persuade people (to accept your ideas),” said Palmisano.

He said the problems (due to urbanization) are too severe for our leaders to manage. Yet there were changes happening in cities elsewhere in the world. Palmisano alluded to fresh water systems in Saudi Arabia, waste management systems (recology) in the San Francisco, a public safety crime center in Davao (Philippines), and an end-to-end command center in Rio de Janeiro to monitor all aspects of the city. IBM is also engaged with 3,000 smarter city projects around the world.

“Leaders who are managing these cities are non-ideological. They get things done. They have to solve the problems and make things better. And that’s what you see leaders in urban centers doing. These leaders think in terms of systems. Power generation, water management, transportation, health care and public safety are systems. A city is a system of systems that are interconnected. A great example is Rio de Janeiro. And they take a long-term orientation because you can do this in one election cycle. These are sophisticated projects.”

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