Tech giant IBM has taken a strategic decision to increase its footprint in India through its mainframe business. The technology currently is available in two forms - encrypted and open source.To cater to Indian enterprises, IBM had beefed up its security features, which allows mainframe users to encrypt data which is crucial to combat cyber attacks. However, the company claims that it has seen a double-digit growth over the last two years in its open source mainframe business.
"With the encrypted applications, IBM ensures security as its essential in today's date," Viswanath Ramaswamy, Director - Systems Hardware, India South Asia, IBM told ET.
He adds that IBM's mainframe business witnessed an engagement since 2015 but saw a major uptick in 2016-17. "We see the major traction from BFSI, e-governance projects in India. We are now also engaging with new four segments like online payments and e-commerce companies, as security is paramount for them."
"A few years back, we were a closed architecture but now with open source, the business has seen a drastic growth. The performance has also increased by 5-7x," said Ramaswamy.
Talking about the market demands, IBM says that companies are now looking to consolidate their databases and is looking at security features at the computing level along with higher performances. "We added 14 new clients to the platform across 10 countries this quarter. We're continuing to address emerging workloads across the z platform (IBM's latest mainframe platform) like blockchain, machine learning, devops and payments."
The company claims that last quarter (Q4 2017) IBM Z revenue was up 71% year to year globally. On a global level, IBM counts top insurers, retailers, airlines banks as its major customers for mainframe.
Explaining that mainframe does not require any additional skills, Ramaswamy said this makes it easy for the company to hire talent from India. Further, IBM also conducts competition and provides mainframe training and resources to more than 1,000 schools students across 70 countries. Based on current growth patterns, the company predicts around 37,200 new mainframe administration positions will emerge worldwide by 2020.
In this segment, IBM competes with companies like Dell, Oracle and other biggies. To add, India was one of the fastest growing geographies for IBM in 2017 and its India’s revenue grew by 8.6% in the year.