Multinational technology major IBM expects higher spending by Indian enterprises on cloud-based services accelerated by the increased push to digitisation following the Covid pandemic.

“The pandemic has definitely accelerated the move to go digital and, hence, the adoption of cloud services has been on the rise. Dozens of business oriented applications today are connecting home-bound workers to collaborative tools that enable business continuity. This has led to an increased push for digitisation and has a direct impact on hybrid cloud adoption,” said Viswanath Ramaswamy, vice-president, technology, IBM technology sales, India and South Asia.

Globally, more than a third of the company’s revenue is coming from the cloud business and the company anticipates hybrid cloud as a $1-trillion business opportunity.

“According to the IBM CEO Study, in India, nearly six of the 10 Indian CEOs expect cloud computing to deliver results in the next 2-3 years. 45 per cent of CEOs in India expect AI/machine learning to deliver results in 2-3 years. We are seeing a direct impact of this shift in IBM’s hybrid cloud business – with cloud revenue topping $25 billion, up 20 per cent from the previous year and accounting for 37 per cent of IBM’s total revenue,” said Ramaswamy.

“IBM has a $1-billion investment committed in the hybrid cloud ecosystem over the next three years to support partners and help clients with high value skills, solutions and expertise required to be competitive and resilient,” he added.

The company, in a bid to strengthen its hybrid cloud and AI portfolio, have announced 10 acquisitions since Arvind Krishna took over as the CEO in April 2020 and seven of them were since October. Krishna was elevated as the chairman effective from January 2021.

In India, business is expected to come from a variety of sectors such as banking and financial services, manufacturing, public sector, telecommunications, automotive, retail among others.

“According to a recent study from IBM’s Institute of Business Value, customers in India currently have 17 per cent of their IT spend allocated to cloud at present and as part of the cloud budget, they plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid from 42 per cent to 49 per cent by 2023,” said Ramaswamy.

He added that there is an increased interest to adopt a platform approach which uses a combination of on-premise private cloud and public cloud architecture with resources from different cloud vendors.