You’re sitting on more information than you need’

Can you outline IBM's activities in ECM?

I look after ECM in Asia Pacific, all regions apart from Japan. We've got five key pillars-capture, socialise, activate, analytics, and information life cycle governance. We are in a growth phase and have made acquisitions, and invested heavily in India. Our first acquisition for legal and information life cycle was PSS Systems in 2010. PSS was a strategic investment in information life cycle governance.
That is where we have things like defensible disposal, which has the ability to delete documents, information from the organization knowing that you don't need it for some regulatory compliance issue.

Why is it important?

It is important in the current scenario of content explosion. For example, Gartner says that if an email has an attachment it is likely to be stored 12 times more in an organization. So the result is you're sitting on more information than you need. On the other hand, IT budgets have stayed pretty flat and CIO's are being asked to do more with less. So if you're a CIO you want to delete information cyclically, but you don't want to end up before the law because you deleted a document. That's a key execution we made.
For example, if you're in an organization and some legal documents need to be stored for seven years, you have to keep it safe, for say seven years. Part of the solution is, you archive, so you can push it to a second-tier lower cost storage. But once it's passed its use-by date and has no use for the business, so you can delete it. The mindset is to keep everything forever, which is leading to an explosion of data.

What is the flip side and how is it important in the Indian context?

In the US for instance you come under the defensible disposal laws. A lot of large banks in India have transactions with the US and this discussion is key for banking and insurance companies. So if you have information from 20 years ago, that might not put you in the best of light, and you're still holding it and there's an issue, then you have to go through what's called discovery
where legal teams come in and go through every piece of information and find stuff, that you could have basically got rid off defensively.

How did the PSS acquisition help?

Sometimes companies keep things forever, because it might be research. But there's lots of information that you could have got rid off. So in that PSS was very important because it gave us a policy layer.

Tell us about the StoredIQ acquisition.

StoredIQ gives us the ability to start mapping where an information lies. It gives us the tools to dip, dive, and find data. It helps us to find out what data is sitting where. To give you an example, we just run an exercise for a bank in India and we found that there's a lot of client data on individual's laptops and that's a no-no for key reasons. If an employee is disgruntled, they could copy all that information. So that was a big surprise for that bank, so now they're looking at policies on what can be stored on a laptop.

Of the five pillars you spoke about, which vertical generates the maximum traction in India?

Captured solution sees most traction, especially within the BFSI industry. Banks and insurance companies churn a lot of data. The others would include manufacturing, utilities, and energy.

Which areas are seeing substantial growth?

Analytics, definitely.

Which industries are still playing catch up?

The public sector, especially health.