By JON JOAQUIN
Luisito D. Pineda is a scientist, inventor, and banker who heads the Philippine office of one of the largest multinational companies in the world. The President and Country General Manager of IBM Philippines  also happens to be a Dabawenyo, born and raised here until his family migrated to the US when he was 12 years old.
“Our house was along Mt. Apo Street,” Pineda, 47, told EDGE Davao before the start of a roundtable discussion with a few Davao City reporters on Wednesday night at The Marco Polo, Davao. His family owns some property in the now busy area, and he visits every time he is home.
Pineda studied elementary at the Ateneo de Davao University (AdDU) and still fondly remembers his school days there. But the 1970s were a difficult time for the Philippines, and so his father sought greener pastures in the US. “He went ahead of all of us and he would come home every year, and then finally when I was 12 he told us we were all moving to the States.”
The family settled in Seattle, Washington where the fair weather proved agreeable to the young Pineda. After high school, he studied at the University of Washington where he earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Computer Science.
Pineda joined IBM in 1991, and within three months of joining the company’s Silicon Valley Lab in California he invented a computer aided software engineering product that helped IBM’s developers gain a 10-fold improvement in productivity. “I found a better way to write applications,” he said matter-of-factly.
Pineda helped build several successful businesses in IBM and co-founded one of the first services businesses to utilize offshore capabilities in delivering complex Enterprise Solutions to clients worldwide. He traveled around the globe, creating offshore delivery centers in Belarus, Egypt, Jordan, China, India, Latvia, and Russia. In 1999, he led the world’s first wireless banking solution, utilizing Wireless Application Protocol (WAP) at Svenska Handelsbanken.
“IBM supports its people when they have great entrepreneurial ideas,” he said. For the Philippines, Pineda started the first Software Group Technical Support Center which supported customers in North America.
Pineda has held various executive posts within IBM, including an assignment in Zurich, Switzerland as the Vice President of Technical Sales and Services for Northeast Europe, Vice President for Worldwide Client Success (Professional Services, Premium and Technical Support), and Director of Software Development. Prior to his appointment in the Philippines in September 2014, Pineda was Vice President of the Client Support and Success, Industry Cloud Solutions, IBM Software Group.
As President and Country General Manager, Pineda is responsible for IBM’s sales and distribution, systems and technology, software and services units, and fully-owned subsidiaries offering global delivery including IBM Solutions Delivery and IBM Business Services.
Smarter analytics
One of the areas Pineda wants IBM Philippines to focus on is analytics, which he said has a higher potential for growth than business process outsourcing (BPO). Pineda said while the BPO industry’s P300 billion market is bigger than analytics’ P233 billion, it is growing at only 5 percent. In contrast, the analytics industry is growing at a rapid 15 percent.
“The BPO industry will have to transform itself,” he said. “Data is the world’s new natural resource. It promises to be for the 21st century what steam power was for the 18th century, what electricity was for the 19th century, and what hydrocarbons were for the 20th century.”
Research firm Gartner had earlier predicted that while smarter analytics can create 4.4 million jobs by 2015, only 30 percent can be filled partly due to a lack of skilled workers. To address this, IBM signed an agreement with the Commission on Higher Education (CHED) on December 6, 2012 to collaborate on developing a comprehensive analytics education master plan for Philippine higher education institutions in order to prepare the country’s workforce towards the emerging trend towards analytics.
Pineda said the Philippines has a lot talent when it comes to analytics “but they just need opportunity.” He also said Filipino workers, particularly those in the BPO industry, must develop deeper skills in analytics in order to fill the need. He said ultimately, BPO companies must add value through analytics, giving their customers more information that would help companies and industries grow.
“Data is valuable buy only if you know how to extract value and insights from it. Data has the power to transform industries and professions,” he said.
