IBM customers in India can now host marketing data locally

By Soma Tah

Data privacy, sovereignty, and residency are some of the pertinent issues that are just not weighing on the large corporates only- they have kept the tech vendors on their toes as well. Increasing concerns around data privacy and governance have forced them to design solutions that measure up to the customers’ expectations as well as address such issues at hand. IBM has announced that it will deliver its AI-powered enterprise marketing cloud services to customers from its local cloud datacenter in India.

IBM’s India customers can now host their marketing data on IBM’s cloud data center in India, which gives them proximity, scalability, and more importantly helps them meet regulatory requirements. This is a relief for the businesses in highly regulated sectors such as banking, financial services, Insurance, etc. who can have more control over their marketing data now.

Data residency and stewardship issues 

“Data stewardship is a challenging task. What data is getting collected, whose data is it, where it goes, how it gets treated, who benefits from it-are some of the issues of our times, that businesses need to understand and act upon carefully,” explained Harriet Green, Chairman & CEO, IBM Asia Pacific.

“Almost 80 percent of the world’s data belongs to businesses and consumer-facing companies. We are leveraging on the cloud, AI as we are trying to unlock value from that data to power new products and services for customers, and also addressing data security, privacy and regulatory compliance concerns,” added she further.

The cognitive capabilities of IBM Watson can derive meaningful insight from customer journey, weather and location data and help marketers create hyper-personalized offerings in real-time. The tasks that would normally take hours can now be completed in minutes, with AI-powered Marketing Assistant- resulting in faster go-to-market. The cloud, on the other hand, allows customers to scale faster.

“Our approach of bringing AI to data is also fundamentally different from what a lot of other people is doing by bringing data to AI. When we use AI on customers’ data it’s their data, it is their insights and we don’t carry away those insights to their competitions and that is the key differentiator for businesses we are catering to,” said Karan Bajwa, MD, IBM India.

Targeting India’s thriving digital economy

 India is poised to lead the data revolution, given the enormous amount of data being generated by over a billion people.

“India is one of the fastest growing digital economies in the world. Around 80 million people in India shopped online in 2017, which is likely to grow 4x in the next few years. The massive data generated in the process opens up unique opportunities for the businesses by deriving deep insights around customer behaviors, and create hyper-personalized experiences,” said Bajwa.

IBM has already onboarded clients such as Payback, Titan, Kotak, and IndusInd Bank in India who are all leveraging IBM Watson Customer Engagement solutions to engage deeply with customers through targeted marketing campaigns.