Taking a Cognitive Approach With the Startup Ecosystem, Top IBM Exec Says With rising number of corporate accelerators, startup kits and mentorship programs, it has become increasingly important for each of these folks to have a clear distinction as to what they wish to establish in the ecosystem.

Global MNCs and Indian IT giants have realized the brewing opportunities and innovation that exists in the ecosystem. With rising number of corporate accelerators, startup kits and mentorship programs, it has become important for each of these folks to have a clear distinction as to what they wish to establish in the ecosystem.

Global technology major IBM is at the forefront of a worldwide industry to lead the next phase of change, revolutionizing the way in which businesses work and grow.

From Watson to the world's largest data science workforce and industry leadership in analytics, to Bluemix, IBM's cloud based application development platform to the only consulting practice dedicated to cognitive business. Startups which co-create and co-invent with IBM partnership will benefit immensely, the company claims.

Speaking to Entrepreneur India, Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystem & Startups at IBM, said how she feels IBM-lead initiatives are helping the ecosystem.

What is IBM doing differently for the ecosystem?

"The ecosystem is a very strategic initiative for both from the international and local perspective. The company is looking at developers spread across enterprises, startups, students and other sources. A lot of the digital transformation levers come from these developer communities. One of the key criteria for IBM has been to work with developers and advocate our technology and ensure they are able to adopt and advocate our platform technology.

Today one of the primary ways we approach this space is to lead with cognitive. We see cognitive capability as something that can be infused in majority of applications that are going to be built tomorrow and a lot of those cognitive capabilities are present in the form of APIs on top of the available cloud platform, she adds

The company is constantly working with selected startups from certain industries and helping them align and access go-to market activity with enterprise customers," Seema said.

Developers have the choice of building on an open cloud platform with Bluemix with partnerships with key open source communities including Nodel.js, SWIFT, SPARK, OpenStack and CloudFoundry.

4^th Industrial Revolution and IBM's Role

"Industry 4.0 is pretty much the proliferation of the sensors, devices and the intelligence associated with it. We are looking at it from a cognitive IoT perspective. We are looking at augmenting a lot of the intelligence that has been garnered out of multiple devices and augmenting them with human intelligence and thereby creating cognitive systems.

The way computing has evolved and is today more about understanding, reasoning and interacting with other systems. Cognitive systems continuously get better with time. That's where we will play a significant role in the 4.0 phase of the revolution. We will have a major part to play as IBM, she adds.