A sales person throughout his career, Abraham Thomas, took over recently as the MD&CEO of IBM India. He has to his credit the honor of achieving 100 percent sales targets continuously for eight to nine years in IBM. He is also the recipient of the prestigious Golden Circle Award, which is presented to only those one to two percent of the top sales people who achieve their targets continuously. In India, Abraham's target is to come closer to the channel partners and expand the channel network. He talks to DQCI on how he is going to achieve this.  

A recent SVNS report says that the Wall Street has developed a special respect for IBM because it has not issued any profit warnings or its stock price has not dropped drastically. Your comments.

I think it's a bit difficult for me to comment on this because this is a very critical period and IBM being a public listed company, any comment either to agree or disagree with what you say can be construed as a kind of help to the share price. 

Yes, I too have read the report and it is very well balanced. The facts speak for themselves that IBM has not announced anything so far. We have to just wait and see that the results are announced in April to know the financial situation of IBM. 

Worldwide, mainframe is one of IBM’s biggest strengths. Does this hold well in India?

In India, we are just getting into the situation where customers are just looking into the mainframe as a platform of choice for them. IBM would like to sell products as a part of providing a solution to our customers. If solution requires a mainframe, then we will recommend that solution to our customers. 

So far in India, we have a reasonably good success with the mainframe. If we can add value to organizations in India around the mainframe, we would certainly do that. Worldwide most companies, especially the large multinational Fortune 500 companies have the mainframe as the bedrock of their information infrastructure. 

From your earlier assignment you bring in the expertise of dealing with the financial services sector. How will this experience help you in managing the entire IBM operations in India?

Before IBM announces someone to take over as the general manager of the country, it makes sure that the concerned person has a varied type of experience within the company. During the past 16 years, I’ve done maybe eight to 10 different jobs in IBM. And each of the jobs that I’ve done brings in different kind of experience in my present job. 

I’m learning on the job as well by interacting with my colleagues. For example, I am not well versed in legal matters. But we have an in-house legal team with a wealth of talent. So a country MD need not know everything about legal issues because he can always tap the internal expertise. The same case holds good for many other areas as well. Also, if I need any help and guidance, I can count on people within my team in India or if it is required, I can approach people from other regional offices as well. So the previous job that I’ve done is part of the training process that I would have needed to do my present job in this country.