Evolving with the times: Nicholas Flood on how IBM innovates and adapts to stay ahead

IBM ANZ’s Managing Director Nicholas Flood details the company’s strategic evolution— embracing partnerships, navigating AI—showcasing their commitment to innovation and adaptation.

In 2011, IBM’s Watson cognitive computing system competed on the US television show, Jeopardy, against two human champions and won.

Just over 12 years later, Big Blue threw its hat into the generative AI ring with the launch of watsonx, its artificial intelligence and data platform.

Nic told ADAPT that there is now significant interest from the ASX200 to pilot watsonx’s AI capabilities.

The above video is only an excerpt. Only ADAPT Advantage clients can watch the full video on a Day in the Life.

But he feels that the tech industry still has some work to do to move gen AI from the hype cycle to real world use cases that deliver organisational and operational benefits.

Almost half (48%) of Australian organisations surveyed by ADAPT this year said that they have not defined any clear use cases for AI.

This is despite some having a real crack at making AI work.

“I’m enthused though to see how quickly we are moving from the hype curve into practical, pragmatic uses of this technology.”

IBM Australia is currently ‘hyper concentrated’ around 25 key accounts but is looking to broaden that base following its acquisitions of Apptio, a FinOps software provider and Turbonomic, which created software to optimise the performance, cost and compliance of cloud environments.

It will also leverage the Instana observability and app performance monitoring platform, which it acquired in 2020.

Nic says that IBM has also done a lot of work to be partner-friendly and break away the ‘one IBM” culture of the past where the organisation believed it could be “all things to all clients.”

“We are much more mature these days; we are looking to solve problems at greater scale by embracing the power of the ecosystem and really stepping back and saying to ourselves, ‘how can we build these consortia that are of value to our clients that are most relevant to the problems or opportunities that they are looking to unlock,’” he says.

Meanwhile, Nic says a frustration for IBM has been the disruption caused by the Australian government’s move away from common, reusable whole-of-government buying patterns that were the zeitgeist of times past to ‘best of breed’ solutions for a particular use case or agency.

“That’s been disruptive in a way; however, it’s an area that IBM can really thrive in because of that hybrid cloud archetype that we are aligning to, it’s a space that we can really deliver significant value.”

 

Resourcing change

Meanwhile, IBM is taking steps to be more relevant to more buyers.

The organisation has flipped its go-to-market resourcing capabilities from emphasising sales and commercial disciplines to also highlighting technical specialities.

This is reflected in the ratios of sales to tech resourcing across IBM’s go-to-market teams in Australia and New Zealand.

“Now, we are weighted toward the technical side, about 1.2 technical resources to every one sales resource. That’s a transition that we have been on and one that is of increasing value to our clients, our partners and ourselves to engage clients in a much more richer technology conversation as opposed to a relationship or a commercially engineered fashion.”

The above video is only an excerpt. Only ADAPT Advantage clients can watch the full video on a Day in the Life.