IBM deems Cebu as growth area for global operations

CEBU, Philippines - IBM has recognized Cebu as one of its 20 growth areas for its global operations acknowledging the province as one of the largest contributors to hit a significant growth in their business.

IBM Philippines president and country general manager Mariels Almeda Winhoffer said that there are significant areas in its business that the company needs to strengthen its presence and growth in the Philippines including analytics, cloud computing, and smarter planet strategy.

Winhoffer said the company is heavily banking on the future of Cebu, the reason why it has several partnerships with the local government units (LGUs) here to introduce its smart city strategy as well as develop human resource for information technology professionals.

She said Cebu is one of the 33 cities in Asia that IBM has been given focus into. An obvious evident is its establishment of its second Global Delivery Center (GDC) in 2010, which is now on its expansion mode.

“We’ve worked with the academe and the government here to capture the promise of Cebu. We are going to capture and seize the value of talent in Cebu,” Winhoffer said reiterating her confidence that Cebu will play a vital role in the growth of IBM’s operation in the Philippines.

Although Winhoffer did not divulge the number of people GDC will hire for its expansion here, she said IBM will continue to promote the high value and talented IT professionals who are capable of serving the world.

On the other hand, he said while Cebu is growing too fast, it is facing “urbanization” challenges, thus the company is also pushing the introduction and implementation of its smarter cities strategy for Cebu to sustain its economic dynamism.  Smarter city initiatives treat the city as an ecosystem composed of multiple subsystems to manage transportation, healthcare, public safety, government services, energy, commerce, communications, and water resources.

These subsystems come together to form an interconnected, mutually-influencing, and mutually-enhancing whole. In previous city developments, due to technological limitations, these subsystems could not offer integrated information support to city development.

A smarter city enables information sharing and collaboration among different municipal governmental agencies and systems, so that resources are used rationally, decisions are made that best benefit city development and management, and emergencies and disasters are predicted and dealt with in the shortest possible time.

“There’s a bright future for Cebu. We are honored that the province has entrusted the partnership with IBM in this initiative,” she said.

In its contact center arm, IBM is also looking at expanding its operations here. In fact, she said the company’s headquarter has sent a team to evaluate Cebu’s capability in hosting another IBM’s call center operation in the Philippines. (FREEMAN)