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'Those who are not working with us, this is the right time to come on board'

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DQC Bureau
New Update

A sales person throughout his career, Abraham Thomas, took over recently as the MD&CEO of IBM India. He has to his credit the honor of achieving 100 percent sales targets continuously for eight to nine years in IBM. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Golden Circle Award, which is presented to only those one to two percent of the top sales people who achieve their targets continuously. In India, Abraham's target is to come closer to the channel partners and expand the channel network. He talks to DQCI on how he is going to achieve this.  

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A recent SVNS report says that the Wall Street has developed a special respect for IBM because it has not issued any profit warnings or its stock price has not dropped drastically. Your

comments.

I think it's a bit difficult for me to comment on this because this is a very critical period and IBM being a public listed company, any comment either to agree or disagree with what you say can be construed as a kind of help to the share price. 

Yes, I too have read the report and it is very well balanced. The facts speak for themselves that IBM has not announced anything so far. We have to just wait and see that the results are announced in April to know the financial situation of IBM. 

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Worldwide, mainframe is one of IBM’s biggest strengths. Does this hold well in India?

In India, we are just getting into the situation where customers are just looking into the mainframe as a platform of choice for them. IBM would like to sell products as a part of providing a solution to our customers. If solution requires a mainframe, then we will recommend that solution to our customers. 

So far in India, we have a reasonably good success with the mainframe. If we can add value to organizations in India around the mainframe, we would certainly do that. Worldwide most companies, especially the large multinational Fortune 500 companies have the mainframe as the bedrock of their information infrastructure. 

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From your earlier assignment you bring in the expertise of dealing with the financial services sector. How will this experience help you in managing the entire IBM operations in

India?

Before IBM announces someone to take over as the general manager of the country, it makes sure that the concerned person has a varied type of experience within the company. During the past 16 years, I’ve done maybe eight to 10 different jobs in IBM. And each of the jobs that I’ve done brings in different kind of experience in my present job. 

I’m learning on the job as well by interacting with my colleagues. For example, I am not well versed in legal matters. But we have an in-house legal team with a wealth of talent. So a country MD need not know everything about legal issues because he can always tap the internal expertise. The same case holds good for many other areas as well. Also, if I need any help and guidance, I can count on people within my team in India or if it is required, I can approach people from other regional offices as well. So the previous job that I’ve done is part of the training process that I would have needed to do my present job in this country. 

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What are your immediate priorities in India?

My immediate priority is to understand IBM operations here by meeting people. I’m a very people-oriented person. I would like to meet not only IBM people but also customers and key partners. Thus, the No 1 priority is to get myself introduced, and acclimatized to how we are doing things here. With my experience from outside India, I want to see how we can optimize operations for more optimal business results. 

My other priority is to develop somebody from India to run this company when I leave. I hope I would be successful because in other countries, IBM has local MDs. I believe in India we have the right talent to run the organization and there is a right opportunity. I am looking at this as a long-term objective. If I don't achieve this, then possibly I have not done as good a job as I wanted to do in India. 

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Of course, priorities keep changing because this industry keeps changing. If I am not able to accomplish the objective of finding someone local to manage IBM here, that could be because that person may not possess the unique skill set that is required in that point of time when I have to leave India.

From business perspective what are your immediate

priorities?

We have very optimistic view of business opportunities in India. My view is that we have not really taken full advantage of these business opportunities. I want to see how we can really make the big difference in the local marketplace by bringing in quality IBM products and solutions.

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What vision would you like to offer to IBM partners in

India?

I have been spending the last few weeks on the road meeting channel partners in Bangalore and Delhi. I will be soon meeting them in Mumbai as well. One of the key things that IBM is focused on is to see how we can drive more and more of our business through our partners. Those who are not working with us this is the right time to come on board and work with IBM. There is a directive not just for me but around the world we are focused on developing and enhancing our relationship with channel partners. We want to drive more value for customers and in turn drive more value for IBM in the long run. The channel partners, who work with IBM, would agree with you that they have made money along the way.  What specific measures do you have in mind for the channels in the coming year? We see channels driving a lot more of our product business and have announced a number of initiatives for them. We are also working with our channels to see how they can get involved in services part of our business and I think that is a priority for us. It may seem counter-productive because IBM is also investing mainly on services. But the market is so large that no single organization will be able to meet all the demand. What IBM wants to do is collaborate with our partners to bring value at the market place as well as explore opportunities. 

Which market segments are your focus areas right

now?

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We have looked at the market from different viewpoints. One viewpoint is obviously the product view and the other, customers'. Certain segments of the market in India are very exciting to us, particularly, CRS (computers-related services) and financial services. We are looking very strongly into what we can do more in the government sector. 

We are also watching very keenly the distribution, manufacturing and hospitality industries. We want to enlarge the portfolio of our customers in these industries across the world.

Sylvester Loboin Mumbai

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