In June, Palmisano pledged to triple investments in India over the next three years-from $2 billion since 2003 to nearly $6 billion by 2009. This investment, ask any IBM employee, is “absolutely necessary”. “Yes. It (the investments and massive presence in India) enables IBM to fulfill its vision to become a globally integrated company,” says Annaswamy.

Though the size of the business available to tap in India may not be the biggest when you compare it with the rest of the world, what interests IBM Corp is “the rate of growth,” he adds.

Managing Mantra

TO get an idea of the scale and ambition IBM brings to India, check this: The most crucial turning point for IBM in India came 12 years after the local launch of its PC business, in April 2004. That month, IBM announced that it had bought out Indian BPO unit Daksh e-Services (for anything between $130 million and $180 million, according to industry estimates). At the time, IBM was a $90 billion-revenue firm, while homegrown Infosys was clambering up to its $1 billion revenue mark.

But just before it bagged Daksh, IBM had already struck a deal with Sprint, a US-based company that was one of Daksh’s two biggest breadwinners. In a way that Indian companies could not then imagine, IBM had captured not only the rights to support all of Sprint’s customer service processes, but also run its call centres: The one headquartered in the US, of course, but also the one in India.

... contd.