IBM - enabling growth of Mid-Size Business

Jyothi Satyanathan
VP - Mid-Size Business (India/SA)
IBM

Small and medium businesses (SMBs) are driving more than one-half of the total GDP and represent 99% of the global businesses, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation. They are major contributors to the strength of economies around the world. Jyothi Satyanathan, Vice-President - Mid-Size Business (India/SA), IBM, in an exclusive interaction with VARINDIA, shared that these firms are vital as they help to spur IT recovery efforts around the world.

As SMBs begin to flourish, they realize that there is a need to embrace technology to stay ahead of the race and look at innovations to enhance their business, reduce costs and increase business efficiency. The midmarket is one of the fastest-growing segments in IBM's Growth Markets Unit (GMU). For IBM, midmarket customers are typically businesses with 100–999 employees. The midmarket sector is part of IBM's General Business sector and was created in 2008 to define a coverage and business model to meet the unique needs of Small and Mid-Size accounts. IBM is partnering with local Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) to provide new and existing clients with additional value-added solutions that are specifically developed and tailored to the needs of the local markets to help in the growth of the scope of the firms located in the tier-II and tier-III cities.

Current CIO/ CTO priorities

With the changing economics of IT, companies now are able to embrace transformative technologies to drive growth without losing sight of day-to-day needs. A new IBM global study of midmarket CEOs indicates that market dynamics and technological advances continue to force more organizational change, significantly impacting how midmarket businesses engage with customers and employees and drive innovation. "Midmarket CEOs are now looking at technology not only to make them more efficient but also to enable increased collaboration and create relationships – essential connections to fuel creativity," adds Jyothi Satyanathan.

Majority of the Indian companies today feel information management, supply chain management and security management as critical business priorities for improving business performance and efficiency. Most mid-size companies also recognize that a go-it-alone strategy may hinder their chances for success, and finding strategic IT partners who can collaborate with them to realize their vision is the key for success. 

IBM help address challenges

Some of the common barriers of any SMB are their inability to implement IT and lack of required in-house skills. Improving efficiency and productivity, improving customer focus and sharpening business agility emerged as the leading business challenges in the industry today. In a typical scenario, SMBs grow rapidly but have a limited access to capital. As a result of this, they prefer solutions with rapid time-to-value and scale to support their rapid growth. SMBs face the same challenges as large enterprises, but lack the IT resources, time and budget. IBM offers SMBs customized solutions and a strong business partner support network. "The way we deliver the solutions can also be tailored to meet specific budgets. IBM can deliver products directly, through a business partners or even via the cloud," he informed.

IBM is focussed on building integrated and multi-product IT solution to help SMBs innovate in today’s challenging times. Our solutions are exclusively designed for SMBs with high flexibility and better ROI in mind rather than simply repackaging enterprise solutions."We work very closely with our channel partners to enable them to help their customers. We conduct regular training programmes for our partner community to keep them abreast with the latest technologies and encourage them to be IT consultants rather than just selling the products," he adds. 

IBM also rewards their business partners for their combining hardware and software sales as well as solution-based selling, the design, development, and deployment of business solutions. Mid-size companies rarely have the financial ability to be proactive. IBM’s tailor-made solutions help SMBs reduce cost; improve service delivery. "We will continue to invest in the midmarket," he concludes. n