John Granger, who is a part of IBM chairman Ginni Rometty’s performance team of senior executive leaders, is now reportedly relocating to the US after his stint in India for a year and a half.
He is the leader of cloud application innovation at IBM Global Services. He is one of the global leaders based here that reinforced IBM’s commitment to getting the India team aligned to its newer business priorities.
As per some analysts, the news about Granger heading back to the US reflects a major overhaul under Mark Foster, senior vice-president in IBM Global Business Services (GBS), who is aligning its capabilities to newer growth engines.
IBM GBS provides clients with application management services, consulting, and global process services by integrating IBM solutions and services including Watson, cloud, blockchain and technology services.
The company is now positioning GBS around new areas. One of those is Interactive Experience (iX), an internal digital agency that offers design solutions to its customers. Second, the company is leveraging cognitive technology to address some of the clients’ challenges. It is also focused on deploying cloud-centric application architectures and modernizing applications.
IBM India’s revenue rose 10.3 percent to $3.43 billion in 2015-16, from $3.11 billion in the previous year. This was due to the robust performance of its domestic IT and export IT services businesses.
On the other hand, GBS contributed $16.7 billion or 21% to the company’s total revenue of $79.9 billion in 2016. Digital practices made up more than half of GBS revenue in 2016. In India, GBS has close to 50,000 people.
The global technology services seem to be on a hiring spree in India as clients are increasingly looking at cloud deployments. The GTS team has outlined a plan to nearly double its headcount to around 60,000 people in India over the next 2-3 years.
However, IBM is learned to have let go off over 200 employees in senior roles in the GBS business last year. Some reports suggest that since the business is undergoing changes, there could be more employee separations underway.
