EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
4 | COVER STORY
IBM bets big on Watson to accelerate growth With increasing pace of digitization in India, IBM believes that India is on the cusp of a definitive cognitive era
Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
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ast year, during a visit to India, IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty said that she believes that India can be a world leader in cognitive systems. The reasons for Rometty’s belief - India is on a rapid digitization drive, and is fast moving to create a digital ecosystem powered by technology enablers such as Aadhaar and UPI. The nation is also home to one of the largest developer populations in the world, and has a large number of ISVs who are rapidly helping global clients in their digital journey. This makes India a very unique market - as it is a market that not only has huge domestic potential, but also has huge influencer potential - thanks to its large base of software services players. India is also a unique market as its enterprises want to give clients access to high quality services at an extremely affordable price point. Be it sectors like telecom, healthcare or financial services - the ability to provide a customized service in a large volume market like India, can be the crucial differentiator. With each sector throwing up large volumes of data - most of it in unstructured form, Indian enterprises face a challenging task in harnessing intelligent insights. With Watson, IBM believes it can help Indian enterprises quickly take completely unstructured data and find new patterns that is not visible to humans, and in effect, amplify the cognitive ability of human beings. India is a significant market for IBM Watson, and Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India, points out three core reasons why his company believes that IBM is rightly positioned to help Indian enterprises with Watson’s cognitive capabilities. Says he,”India will be a very significant market for Watson for multiple reasons. Firstly, cognitive computing is about scaling expertise and augmenting capabilities of professionals. For us in India, every domain exhibits that challenge - be it healthcare, education, law, telecom, or financial services and financial inclusion - and Watson is here to help. As evidenced with oncologists at Manipal Hospitals, we are showing that this can be done at scale using the unique capabilities of Watson.” The second reason for IBM’s bullishness on Watson is the intent of the government to aggressively go down the digital path. “India is getting digitized at scale, thanks to initiatives such as Digital India. Cognitive is the “enrichment” layer on top of this digital foundation - and the rich data generated by it - that enhances services, customer engagement, and delivers immensely valuable insights from all the data,” states Bajwa. Finally, India is home to one of the world’s most prolific developer population, and rapidly becoming a global hotbed of innovative startups. With Watson, IBM wants to be the enablers of this vibrant community. Watson APIs delivered on cloud are fostering innovation around the world, and IBM sees India as one of the most important markets for consumption of these APIs. One more critical factor in India’s favor is the country’s ability to leapfrog technologies. “While some of the reasons may also hold true for other markets, the pace and the “leapfrog effect” are unique to India. India has often skipped ahead a generation or two of technologies, compared to the rest of the world - as evidenced in the telecom sector. We are at a similar point with regards to cognitive - where we can apply our learnings, our domain and industry expertise from around the world - readily to this market,” says Bajwa.