Mumbai: The technology trinity of AI, hybrid cloud, and quantum computing is set to enable enterprises to drive India’s digital future — transforming data into actionable insights, accelerating growth, and tackling some of India’s most complex challenges. At the same time, amid rising geopolitical tensions and evolving global regulations, firms are placing greater emphasis on data residency to ensure compliance and security. “We must also be mindful of where our data resides, given geopolitical uncertainties and evolving regulations in every jurisdiction. Data residency is a critical driver of business value, ensuring that data and control plane remain within national borders,” said Sandip Patel, MD of IBM India & South Asia at the IBM Think 2025 event held in Mumbai on Wednesday. He defined this new era as being governed by five principles: hybrid by design, open by nature, compliant with the laws of the land, built for resilience, and cost-optimised. Patel took a leaf out of IBM CEO Arvind Krishna who, during his visit to India two years back, equated AI adoption to the Netscape moment. Netscape played a pivotal role in bringing the internet into the mainstream and capturing the public’s attention, empowering enterprises to shape India’s digital destiny. Firms are increasingly building sovereign AI capabilities to ensure data is protected with adequate guardrails.Hans Dekkers, general manager, Asia-Pacific at IBM, said, “We believe the control and flexibility clients need should be theirs. They should choose where to run their data, how to govern it, and how to create value from it. It shouldn’t be dictated by a vendor or an external party. This is where IBM helps, in a very open and secure manner. We build AI platforms with clients — govts and enterprises alike — for their end users and constituents. That’s an important differentiator for IBM,” he added. Bharti Airtel, for instance, has entered into a strategic partnership with IBM to enhance its recently launched Airtel Cloud. This partnership is set to combine the telco-grade reliability, high security, and data residency of Airtel Cloud with IBM’s expertise in cloud solutions and advanced infrastructure and software technologies designed for AI inferencing. When asked about how IBM is gearing up with jurisdictional safeguards and evolving contractual risk assessment emerging from AI, Patel said, “We’re not claiming to have everything buttoned up — mainly because regulations like the DPDP Act are still evolving. We maintain continuous dialogue with regulators. A large portion of data and computing will remain on-premise. You can’t view a public cloud in isolation — hybrid is the reality. Our strategy approaches hybrid data and AI through the enterprise lens, and that’s what sets us apart.” Even as AI is unlocking higher developer productivity, IBM has unveiled Project Bob, an AI-powered software development partner designed to understand a developer’s intent, codebase, and security standards. Integrated directly into the IDE (integrated development environment,) Bob allows developers to ask questions, design, debug, and refactor without disrupting their workflow and has a deep understanding of the repository and its context. “Developers’ personas are getting disrupted. Bob is a personified AI developer assistant — it represents a complete developer persona, from code creation to deployment. It’s being used internally by over 8,000 IBM developers. It augments every part of the development lifecycle,” said Dekkers.
Read more on The Times of India
