by admin | May 25, 2021 | Economy, Markets, News, Technology
By Gokul Bhagabati,
New Delhi : By increasing productivity and reducing cost, Blockchain technology has the potential to create value of up to $5 billion in India in the next five years, a top official of IT industry’s apex body Nasscom has stressed.
“The Blockchain ecosystem is evolving in India. Creating awareness on how this technology is simpler and easier to use with the existing social media and Cloud technology can go a long way in helping the country realise its potential,” KS Viswanathan, Vice President (Industry Initiative), Nasscom, told IANS in an interview.
Based on distributed storage of data, Blockchain technology can enhance the speed of transactions while increasing transparency. It is widely recognised as having the potential to transform several sectors of the economy, including banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) industry, travel, retail, healthcare and supplsy chain, among others.
But despite its potential, the response of Indian organisations to adopt this technology has been far from enthusiastic.
The primary factors that are holding back the widespread deployment of this tehnology in India is lack of awareness, unavailability of adequate skilled persons and insufficient computing infrastructure, Viswanathan, who also head Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups initiative, said.
“There are currently just 20-30 good Blockchain startups in the country,” Viswanathan said, adding that one way to increase investment in Blockchain is to invest in startups.
To create awareness on the importance of the technology and develop skill sets for Blockchain adoption and deployment in India, Nasscom in February tied up with Blockchain Research Institute (BRI), Canada.
The two entities agreed to collaborate on various activities, including joint webinars and knowledge sharing.
The industry body earlier this month also launched a platform, called FutureSkills, for skills development in eight varied technologies — Artificial Intelligence (AI), Virtual Reality (VR), robotic process automation, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data analytics, 3D printing, Cloud computing, and social and mobile.
This platform was launched with the aim of up-skilling two million technology professions and skilling another two million potential employees and students over the next few years.
While cyber security was later added to the list as the 9th skill, Viswanathan said that Blockchain will be added to the list as the 10th skill by October this year.
In collaboration with BRI, Nasscom also started the first Nasscom Industry Partnership Programme (NIPP) Blockchain challenge from June this year.
The shortlisted teams will come together for a 36-hour session in Bangaluru, to be held on July 28-29, to explore new opportunities for co-creating innovative solutions in the areas of Blockchain technology.
For the challenge, eight large corporates including Fidelity Investments, Larsen & Toubro Infotech (LTI), ICICI Bank, Amdocs, SAP Labs, Wipro and IBM (which is also the knowledge partner) have joined the initiative as strategic partners.
“Boosting skill levels, creating awareness on how this technology is simpler and easier to use with the existing social media and Cloud technology, organising multiple hackathons and getting international research papers on Blockchain published are among the priorities that Nasscom is focusing on to increase deployment of the technology,” Viswanathan said.
He said that time is not yet ripe for India to think about a regulatory framework specifically for Blockchain as it can come under the ambit of regulations on data security and privacy.
(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business Summit, Events, Finance, Interviews, Markets, News, Technology
By Gokul Bhagabati,
Panaji : With digitisation transforming the financial services sector in terms of speeding up transactions and fraud detection, the Blockchain technology holds enormous promise of further strengthening the sector, a top official with The National Stock Exchange of India Limited (NSE) has emphasised.
“The NSE is experimenting with Blockchain technology, a NSE CTO Sankarson Banerjee told IANS on the sidelines of the fifth Cisco India Summit here.
The Blockchain technology is based on distributed storage of data. A Blockchain is a continuously growing list of records — called blocks — which are linked and secured using cryptography.
“Blockchain, we know, is the best way to create immutable record of things. That opens up a lot of use cases for asset verification – who owns the asset, where it comes from, things like that – or tracing the transaction of an asset,” Banerjee noted.
“The second advantage of Blockchain is that it helps avoid double spend. It allows for unique non-repeatable transaction,” he added.
Blockchain can make things highly distributed and resilient in ways that traditional data storage technologies cannot, Banerjee said, adding that in Blockchain, one can distribute a record to thousands of people and yet everybody can be sure that nobody can fake that record.
“Blockchain is genuinely a different way of doing things. Today, the asset is held in physical form and digital records of it are transacted,” he stressed, making the point that Blockchain technology should be credited for creating genuine digital asset for the first time.
“While cryptocurrency is a used case of Blockchain, it should not be confused with the technology itself, just as pornographic content, which can be accessed on the Internet, must not be confused with Internet itself,” Banerjee told IANS.
The NSE CTO, however, cautioned that it would be foolish to expect that technology could altogether wipe out the chances of fraudulent transaction because hackers do not always target the hard technology part.
“They instead often exploit the vulnerability of the common people and trick them into revealing crucial information,” he said.
“Blockhain can be truly transformative for exchanges, paving the way for them to get into very different businesses. We could start selling cars. We are not selling cars but we might,” Banerjee added, in a lighter vein.
While Blockchain still remains at an experimental stage at the NSE, what it has done to increase efficiency includes integration of latest solutions from the global networking giant Cisco for enhanced customer service, process automation, analytics and cybersecurity.
In line with its commitment to digitise the financial services sector in India, Cisco has developed a “Digital Transformation Blueprint” for the banking and financial services sector.
The blueprint leverages the power of Cisco’s intent-based networking portfolio to integrate connectivity, security, automation, collaboration, and analytics across the business value chain.
As part of its collaboration with NSE, Cisco has automated NSE’s data centre, helping it reduce app deployment time from weeks to hours.
The exchange is also leveraging Cisco’s “AppDynamics” platform to monitor the performance of core applications and get real-time analytics for business performance to deliver superior end-user experience.
“With ‘AppDynamics’, NSE will have complete visibility spanning from the infrastructure to application to end user, thereby offering a superior end-user experience,” said Sameer Garde, President, Cisco India and Saarc.
“Institutions that are quick to embrace innovation and adopt new technologies will have immense opportunities to improve the way they deliver services,” added Banerjee.
The NSE, which was the first exchange in India to implement electronic or screen-based trading, emerged as the fourth largest stock exchanges in the world by numbers of trades in equity shares in 2017, according to the World Federation of Exchanges (WFE) report.
(Gokul Bhagabati attended the summit at the invitation of Cisco. He can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Corporate finance, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : As enterprises the world over become aware of the benefits associated with moving their operations to the Blockchain-as-a-Service (BaaS) platform, the Indian public sector would be the real beneficiary of this disruptive technology in the days to come, a top IBM executive has forecast.
Touted as a key technological innovation of the digital cyptocurrency Bitcoin, Blockchain technology is disrupting traditional processes across industries — from financial transactions to marine insurance and more.
For a layman, a blockchain can serve as “an open, distributed ledger that can efficiently record transactions between two parties”.
For use as a “distributed ledger”, a blockchain is typically operated by a peer-to-peer network which allows users to manage the ledger in a secure way and without the help of a third party.
“Today, if you and me are doing a transaction and buying something online, we realise that multiple intermediaries are involved like banks, regulators, manufacturing agencies and marketing agents, etc,” Jitan S. Chandanani, Blockchain Leader, Global Business Services, IBM India (South Asia), told IANS.
As the businesses have grown, the idea today is to seamlessly bring buyers and customers together without the hassle of going through multiple online gateways.
“Blockchain is actually one solution that is delivering on the fact that it will help remove the intermediaries and connect them through a ledger or a network which basically replicates and translates information in real time,” Chandanani explained.
“For example, If I’m buying a shirt from an online website, does the bank need to know the shirt size? Likewise, if I have an IBM shirt to sell and you want to buy an IBM shirt, do both of us really need to go through an agent or a broker? No, but only a network which will be connecting us,” the IBM executive explained.
Blockchain enables trust and connect by securing the exchange of information and replicating it to both the parties and, at the same time, keeping it private and secure.
According to the global research firm MarketsandMarkets, the Blockchain market is estimated to grow from $210.2 million in 2016 to $2.31 billion by 2021.
“The Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI) sector is expected to dominate the market with the largest share as the need for banking and financial transactions has evolved from a traditional payments systems to be seamlessly integrated into new systems,” it added.
Huge opportunities lie across industry verticals in the Asia-Pacific region, especially India, Australia and China, the report added.
According to Chandanani, the adoption as well as awareness has increased among Indian firms and, eventually, the acceptance of blockchain will be redefined in the country.
“The most beneficial sector definitely will be the government/public sector. We have multiple areas for implementation — from additional IT that can be used across government services or having all electronic medical records at one central place and controlling everything from there,” he noted.
Since blockchain technology eliminates cyber frauds to a large extent, the financial services sector has been an early adopter.
“BaaS comes with a high security business network. The key high-security attributes are cryptographics for the hardware, tamperproof cards for the management and malware protection for the database,” Chandanani said.
Blockchain will definitely help companies know what some of the global security standards actually are.
“The response in India is fabulous. The CIOs like it. They know it’s secure, the information can be kept safely and it goes in the right parts. CTOs like it because it’s probably more efficient at this point of time and less stressful than investing in new systems. It’s a check mark on all the aspects and that’s how we are confident of the acceptance coming on,” Chandanani said.
IBM is luckily in a sweet spot because of actually having one overall view of the complete Blockchain stack.
IBM Blockchain provides fundamental support to transform a number of industry business practices, from banking and government to healthcare and logistics.
The IBM Blockchain Platform is an integrated platform designed to accelerate the creation of a “built for business” global blockchain network across industries.
“We have been pushing extensively for blockchain and for hyperledger with all the industry networks we build and the answer is, ‘we will prefer to use IBM Cloud’. It’s not that we won’t use others, but the first choice will be IBM,” Chandanani explained.
IBM is also looking to talk to industry bodies India to help firms embrace BaaS.
“I think IBM is pretty much talking to every regulator who is writing in to us and most of the industry skill bodies that are available as well as relevant councils, be it insurance or others. Not just in India… this is a global activity that IBM is currently involved with,” the executive added.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
