The inviting greens of the Karnataka Golf Association’s 18-hole course open up just besides IBM India chairman Vanitha Narayanan’s office at Embassy GolfLinks Business Park. The view of the grass is partially blocked by the trees bordering the course, and also the high-driving fence that prevents golf balls from hurtling into offices. Nevertheless, the vast expanse of greenery, especially given Bengaluru’s traffic congestion, is spectacular. Holes one to five as well as eight are close by and the sense of excitement and thoughts of a round of golf are never far.A similar sense of excitement, of jumping into something green or greener, pervades right through IBM India offices today. The organisation is in the midst of transforming itself to focus on the Indian market. It is metamorphosing with the aim to grow the more profitable India business, even as globally IBM has reported 21 quarters of declining revenues.The numbers from India actually make their own case (see Numbers Make the Case). In 2015-16, the last year for which numbers are available, IBM India reported revenues for the Indian IT services business that were a third of the exports slice of the pie. However, the operating profit for the Indian bit was bigger than the exports business by almost Rs 100 crore (Rs 2,016 crore vs Rs 1,921 crore).In the last 12 months, IBM India has worked in many ways to address the Indian market. The most visible change has been the induction of Karan Bajwa from Microsoft India as the India-focused managing director, while Narayanan will focus on exports. That apart, there has been an overhaul of the company’s strategy, embracing open source and providing a platform for its biggest clients to interact with startups and domestic services players on data analytics and artificial intelligence (AI)-related technologies. It has also reoriented research resources to develop solutions to Indian problems on different technologies , including cloud analytics and blockchain. And it is back to hiring from the top Indian institutes, something that it had not done much for almost a decade.Will it work is a question for the future. This is not the first time IBM is transforming itself. Founded in 1911, it has seen a few already, including in the early ’90s when it faced bankruptcy. But this time around, India can be key to IBM, which accounts for a fourth of its global staff.“It is beyond doubt that India is an important growth geography, and it requires execution on multiple levers for an organisation to succeed,” says Venu Reddy, head of IDC’s Global Centre of Excellence in Bengaluru. “Overall, the strategic levers are all in place for IBM. The key now would be to work cohesively and execute these plans.” IDC, or International Data Corporation , is a global market intelligence firm.In the first week of September, chairman Narayanan was out of Bengaluru. Sitting in the visitors’ area of her chamber, overlooking the golf course, Shailesh Agarwal, IBM’s head of strategy and operations, was explaining the new normal: how the new-age customer did all the research even before the sales pitch began; how companies that were never competitors have emerged as IBM’s chief threat (read Microsoft); and also how a customer could also become a competitor for another deal and a partner for yet another.“Culture eats strategy for lunch,” said Agarwal, taking after management guru Peter Drucker and trying to explain how IBM had to change the overall way its people approached the market.The strategy that Agarwal outlines also explains how Microsoft and IBM are on a collision course. Both are leveraging their key customer bases of large enterprises, cultivated over decades. The old large enterprises are repositories of large amounts of data that have never been harnessed. Data analytics, cognitive and machine learning offerings can provide a lot of value for the customer. IBM is keen to create a platform where startups and IT services firms can interact with these large enterprises offering solutions, using IBM’s tools. While even Google and Amazon Web Services are offering such tools for startups, they do not have the traction of an IBM or a Microsoft with large clients.One way, then, of beating Microsoft would surely be poaching its key executives — something Bajwa, who came on board as executive for strategy and transformation in the Asia-Pacific region in July 2016, can laugh about. But he’s dead serious about the India-focused strategy. Bajwa, who was elevated as MD in January, says, “India is one of the fastest growing markets globally and every aspect of IBM is represented in India.” In fact, after the induction of Bajwa, a new aggressive approach to the Indian market has been noted by analysts who cover the company in India. Sanchit Vir Gogia, founder of Greyhound Research, says: “The real momentum has only picked up in the last four quarters. Earlier under Narayanan, while some efforts were made, this aggressiveness was missing.”Bajwa feels there is a gold mine of data and services to be built around it in India. “Only 20% of the data that lies with large enterprises is out. The rest remains inside and real power is sitting inside these companies,” says Bajwa.Explaining how the change in thinking continues, he adds that data analytics and cloud cannot be treated as a horizontal function. “Data analytics, cognitive and cloud technologies are not a horizontal that we can apply to each vertical. We have to think differently. Every industry needs its own solutions.”Neither is IBM saying that it will have all the solutions. What it is trying to do is to have a finger in as many pies as are being baked today. While larger clients will be hand-held through the process of using cloud and related technologies, for the mid-sized companies a new platform is already live. Chief digital officer Nipun Mehrotra explains how a marketplace has been created to bring different parties together. On one side of the marketplace are mid-sized customers and on the other are ecommerce players and startups. IBM has populated the space with its own tools created by its technology team. The ecommerce players are free to access IBM tools and create solutions and place them in the marketplace. The clients and the startups are also free to interact. Mehrotra says that as the platform matures it might even see products by third parties.Mehrotra operates from a ground-floor office in Embassy GolfLinks that he says is often used as a garage for meeting with head honchos of ecommerce ventures. The office has multiple desks, white boards and screens. Mehrotra himself had led a team for the last one and a half years working on how to bring about this transformation and create an interface with startups. He says: “Today we work with at least 1,000 startups. This number has gone up 5x in the last year.” IBM also has an investment arm that can provide a round of finance to startups and clearly wants to partner in their growth. Agarwal adds, “We will now have different kinds of partners: Startups that will only want to work with our application programming interface (API); the likes of Wipro or Infosys that will want our infrastructure and intellectual property; someone like L&T Infotech that will bring in their own infrastructure understanding.”As the India opportunity has opened up, more resources have been allocated to India, especially in research. Chairman Narayanan told ET Magazine in an emailed interview: “IBM in India is a microcosm of the global company. This is a recognition of the skills, talent and capabilities India offers. We have always leveraged our global capabilities to serve the India market and the India capabilities, expertise and talent for our global clients.”Sriram Raghavan, director of IBM Research in India, adds: “Six years ago, 80-90% of research activities in India would be catering to global needs. Today, at least 40% of our resources are focused on finding solutions for India.”What kind of research is IBM engaged in for the Indian market? Consider how it has worked on combining technologies around the internet of things and AI to come up with solutions for agriculture. On-ground sensors and machine intelligence that can read weather reports now combine to judge the amount of water available for crops at a particular time across agricultural fields. The on-ground sensors help to reduce errors that would have been made by a system dependent solely on AI. There are offerings that use blockchain technologies to give solutions around GST implementation and supply chain financing.Today IBM is seeking out new business with customers like public sector banks and rural jewellers, helping their own transformations. Lula Mohanty, managing partner, IBM Global Business Services, talks about a jeweller client whose salespeople actually visit customers in villages on cycles trying to sell jewellery. “We got the fieldforce armed with tablets loaded with the entire range the jeweller has to offer and an app — what we call a cognitive mirror. A customer can see herself wearing that particular design through the app,” she adds. Similarly, work is on in India with a tyre manufacturer who wants to develop a fully connected tyre that can inform the driver about drop in tyre pressure and other problems.“In the Western markets we are providing incremental improvements while in India, because our customers are slightly behind the curve, we are building end-to-end solutions for them,” explains Mohanty. Will the enthusiasm be matched with money, especially since IBM is not in the pink of health globally? Narayanan says: “IBM has always invested heavily in India. We continue to build on our strength in India and leverage the capabilities for the India marketplace and global clients.”