IBM’s supercomputer to push the growth of Indian eCommerce business

India has become one of the fastest growing eCommerce markets and to push it further IBM is planning to bring its supercomputer Watson to help Indian corporates to expand their eCommerce businesses which is driven by technology. This move would give a big push to the eCommerce business in the country. The technology major would also launch some products in areas like design and analytics.

Supercomputer Watson is doing a good job across the world and is also working to cure cancer completely.

IBM's global commerce head Deepak Advani told the Economic Times that it is in talks with a few Indian companies to bring Watson's cognitive abilities to India.

"In India, one of the CEOs that I spent a lot of time with, who is in the fashion industry, said they want to bring in cognitive capabilities. Social is big in India, so if you can do a better job of understanding sentiments to better predict trends, that is a lot of interest," said Advani, who was named general manager of IBM Commerce earlier this year.

Though Advani did not share client names, corporates IBM Commerce is working with Hero Motorcycles, Arvind and Aditya Birla Nuvo among others in the country.

Morgan Stanley has already predicted that the size of the eCommerce business would hit $102 billion (about Rs 6.32 lakh crore) by 2020. Players like Future Group, one of India's largest retailers, have already started working with software firms like analytics services player Manthan to further build an omni-channel presence.

Therefore, IBM wants to make profit and coming up with new ideas. "A lot of companies are moving into a hybrid model from a brick and mortar model, but now need to have a Web presence. One of the challenges that they are facing, which I saw was very prominent, is that they are using Web to drive traffic into the physical stores," said Advani.

IBM has worked with retailers like Marks & Spencer in the UK to build their omni-channel presence, leveraging aspects like detecting location of customers from their smartphones to offer deals in stores located near them.

Ashu Garg, general partner at Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Foundation Capitals, expects chief marketing officers' tech spending to increase 10 times over the next 10 years to $120 billion from $12 billion. To tap this market, IBM introduced new tools called Journey Analytics and Journey Designer last week. These tools will help marketers figure how to make data more actionable, create business goals and map customer engagement.

(Image: Indiatimes)