Summit Notebook
Exclusive outtakes from industry leaders
IBM skips around China Internet censorship
Foreign companies in China, which has the world’s biggest online community, have faced allegations of bowing to censorship rules in their hunt for market access. To be careful, they usually avoid questions on the subject altogether or deflect them with humour.
“I don’t think I am the expert to comment on this,” Shirley Yu-Tsui, a vice president of strategy for IBM greater China, said at the Reuters China Investment Summit.
“All I know is my children complain they can not get on Facebook,” she said.
The subject is very serious, as companies such as Google and Yahoo have had their executives called to face angry congressional questioning in the United States to explain their business practices in China.
IBM: No Sun, but there are other fish in the sea
IBM’s Chief Financial Officer Mark Loughridge didn’t have much to say about Oracle’s planned purchase of Sun Microsystems at the Reuters Global Technology Summit.
I don’t see that much has changed in this. They have been partnering for decades. It doesn’t fundamentally change the position” in the industry.
Audio – Outsourcing daily life
At the Reuters India Investment Summit we asked Managing Partner of IBM Global Services Sandip Patel about the first thing he would like to outsource from his daily life. His response, perhaps instinctively, was automating the cleanup of thousands of his emails.
Anantha Radhakrishnan, Vice President at Infosys BPO, yearned for extended telecommuting to cut down on travel time (and probably cost as well!!) when asked the same question.
Audio – Still holding out
One would expect a top executive of the world’s largest software services provider to hang out with the latest gadgets. Sandip Patel, Managing Partner for IBM Global Business Services in South Asia, seems to be quite the contrarian.
He is antagonized by even the most common gadget to adorn executive pockets in these times.
