Exclusive interview: IBM's Sandip Patel on India's digital renaissance through AI and hybrid cloud

In this exclusive Dataquest interview at IBM Think 2025 Mumbai, Sandip Patel explains how hybrid cloud, AI, and quantum are powering India's digital transformation.

- By Shrikanth G

Sandip Patel, Managing Director for IBM India & South Asia, leads IBM's sales, marketing, services, and delivery operations across the region, including Bangladesh, Nepal, and Sri Lanka. He also plays a pivotal role in advancing IBM's global innovation capabilities through its research and technology labs in India.

Since assuming this role in 2020, Sandip has been steering IBM's transformation journey in India and South Asia with a clear mandate – to establish IBM as the number one company in hybrid cloud, AI, and consulting expertise.

In an exclusive conversation with Dataquest on the sidelines of IBM Think 2025 in Mumbai, India mirrors IBM's global hybrid cloud journey, evolving into a software- and services-led, partner-first organisation built around hybrid cloud, AI, and quantum.

IBM's journey, particularly with its strategic presence in India?

We are very much on our journey to be a leading hybrid cloud company, which is central to our global strategy. IBM India clearly mirrors that strategy. With the focus that we brought back into the company through the spin-off of Kyndryl, and the renewed focus on our consulting business, we are now continuing to build a robust hybrid cloud platform built to scale with our clients' ambitions.

In India in particular, the mainframe and server platforms we build still serve a lot of businesses around the world, including India. In fact, a little-known fact, about 95 percent of all banking transactions in India go through IBM servers and middleware. So that legacy continues.

In India, we have clearly pivoted to being a software and services company. Roughly 70 plus percent of our business in India is now software and services, and the software component is growing significantly.