IBM takes made for India technologies global

 In the Bay of Bengal, floating across hundreds of nautical miles, are about 1800 small buoyant sensors, which record wave height, speed and changes in ocean current. These sensors transmit the information to a satellite, which relays to the Indian National Centre for Ocean Information Services in Hyderabad, helping it alert coastal towns to the likelihood of any tsunamis.

Put in place three years back by the India arm of world's second largest technology company, IBM, the system can send out alerts 2-3 hours before catastrophes strike. "India can rest assured the aftermath of the tsunami in 2005 will never happen again," says Pradeep Nair, who heads the software group at IBM India, which is developing such technologies out of Bangalore.
India had no advanced early warning system in 2005, when tsunami had claimed about 18000 lives and displaced about 650,000 people. At the Bangalore development centre of IBM, increasingly software engineers are also making technologies for the Indian market and then customising them for other global markets.

Take for instance, IBM's largest domestic software engagement worth $1.5 billion with India's largest telecom operator Bharti Airtel.

"At the time IBM picked up Airtel business, none of the Indian IT providers like Infosys or Wiprowere willing to pick up the business. But IBM did it and ramped it up to over a billion dollars and then went on pick up business from Vodafone and Idea," says a technology analyst with a global consulting firm.

Bharti Infratel, Airtel's tower arm runs about 33,000 out of 400,000 towers in India. Software developed by IBM's India labs monitors diesel usage in these towers and also sends out an alert when any tower goes down.

"The tower companies are the second largest users of diesel in India. We do asset management in real time for Bharti Airtel in India, and have taken our learnings to Africa with them," says Nair.

IBM India employees developed technologies which can throw free calls to a particular city to a consumer when his or her voucher is running out, and also alert him. "We call it analytics in the moment, which can change the outcome. We are taking such technologies to other markets."