Looking ahead to 2030, the technology firm is drawing up new strategies to support its Peruvian clients in the adoption of artificial intelligence, such as the expansion of hybrid clouds, quantum computing and its training program.
“The pandemic brought about in one year the transformation that we were going to experience in the next ten years.” Álvaro Santa María, General Manager of IBM Peru , thus sums up that period that was the acid test to measure the reflexes of companies in the use of digital tools. Known for manufacturing software and hardware globally, the Peruvian subsidiary of IBM saw this stage as an opportunity to consolidate experiments that began in previous years, such as remote work.
At the same time, the multinational helped its clients transform their applications and implement solutions that could allow them to work remotely. “The idea was that not only was the person at home, but that the applications were prepared to be managed by people who were not in the office,” declared Santa María for AméricaEconomía , within the framework of Ned24, organized in Lima.
With more than 90 years of presence in Peru, IBM has experienced successive transformations and technological revolutions. Digitalization due to the pandemic opened this decade and was soon accompanied by the boom of artificial intelligence. Today, IBM Peru's new challenge is to design sustainable strategies for its clients that apply this tool.
As expected, Santa María assures that the financial industry is at the forefront when it comes to implementing AI to improve customer service and reduce operating costs. However, other sectors such as telecommunications, manufacturing, retail , as well as public institutions, have strongly bet on this novel alternative.
“There are also other highly critical topics under discussion, such as automation, cybersecurity, data and analytics. Finally, data is a basic input for everything you want to do with artificial intelligence. You can have the best AI model, but if your data is not clean or prepared, the result will be bad,” says Santa María.
To balance data management with other factors, IBM often deploys “hybrid clouds” for its clients. This technology infrastructure model merges private and public cloud services, allowing data and applications to be shared between both environments.
The biggest advantage of this system is that companies can keep sensitive or critical data in the private cloud, while taking advantage of the scalable resources and reduced cost of the public cloud for more basic needs such as data analysis and customer support.
“These environments pose a greater challenge to clients in terms of administration and integration of applications that run in different environments, as well as protection from a cybersecurity perspective. So, IBM’s strategy is to help clients manage this complexity,” explains the general manager. For example, there is always the risk that if data is not properly updated between each “digital environment,” information can be duplicated.
This is extremely important in areas such as company privacy, where systems are integrated that determine who enters certain areas. “Suddenly an employee should not have access to the payroll application, because he should not be seeing the employees’ payroll. But access management is also important: the profile, the identity of each worker, what should they have access to? Everyone is cybersecurity in this data environment. The hybrid world of integration and data. That is where we focus our strategy,” says Santa María.
However, both banks and telecommunications operators use technologies from various manufacturers, which forces the concept of “open standards.” This implies the possibility that, with IBM’s support, the company can integrate with third-party technology in a natural way.
According to the representative of its Peruvian subsidiary, IBM's philosophy always aims to seek long-term relationships. According to this motto, these links are not only maintained because the company sells the best product. They are maintained in the sense that IBM accompanies the process of adoption, knowledge, migration and evolution of these products. "It does not mean that I come, sell a solution and then we shake hands until the next time there is a business where you need to buy something," Santa María clarifies.
A clear example of this vision is the Customer Success Managers (CSM) team , a technical organization whose mission is to help clients adopt technology. To put things into context, every time a company acquires certain strategic products in IBM's portfolio of solutions, this team works with the client to understand how they use that product and whether they will get good use out of it. “We often find that there are clients who do not exploit the full potential of the product, because they are not aware of all the advantages and functionalities it has,” adds the manager.
Also, among IBM Peru's upcoming initiatives is the replacement of binary computing with quantum computing in its services. The latter analyzes zero, one and all possible and intermediate scenarios that can occur between zero and one.
“It is a completely different concept and way of processing. It is useful, for example, for encrypting information and anything that requires analysis of many variables. We are talking about scenarios that cannot be handled by traditional computing,” explains Santa María.
DIGITAL EDUCATION
Meanwhile, the company's Corporate Social Responsibility area in Peru has put its efforts into undertaking a strategy oriented towards education. In this regard, IBM works with study centers, entities oriented towards the development of knowledge to develop capacities in emerging technologies.
At the heart of this approach is the IBM Skills Build platform, which offers hundreds of free courses that students can enroll in as an independent student or as part of an educational institution.
“IBM constantly updates the courses, because technology evolves every year: what you studied three years ago is different from what you study today. The platform is constantly updated, these courses are made available. You can take them in English or other languages, as well as obtain certificates for each subject or specialization,” says Santa María. It is worth noting that the “emerging technologies” taught in these study programs include elements of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, process automation tools, etc.
Although high school students, as well as technical or university students, are the target audience for the courses, the truth is that any interested individual can enroll. In fact, at a global level, IBM has made a commitment to train more than 30 million people in the following years. Speaking about the future, Santa María believes that in the next five years, the market will experience an accelerated adoption of artificial intelligence. “But at the same time, AI is the layer that we see on top. But below we have automation and orchestration tools, as well as a series of components of an architecture that accompanies AI to help the client achieve their objectives.”
