by admin | May 25, 2021 | Banking, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Corporate finance, Corporate Governance, Economy, Finance, Investing, Markets, News
By Krishna SinhaChaudhury,
Mumbai : When it comes to digital transformation, sectors like the Banking, Financial Services and Insurance (BFSI), and telecom, will become the growth engines for India and IBM is ready to meet the technology requirements, a top company executive has said.
“The biggest growth for us is going to come from the financial services. We are going to consolidate telco and look at new revenue streams because telco is an industry that is turning on its head. There’s going to be a lot of conversations around integrated telcos which is getting into network domains,” Lula Mohanty, Managing Partner, IBM Global Business Services, told IANS in an interview.
IBM organised a two-day “The THINK Forum” here on February 12-13 attended by senior IBM and key business leaders from across the country who discussed the future of business and technologies that will shape the economy and society.
“The third vertical which we are very interested in is what’s going on in the domain of the retail industry in terms of Internet of Things (IoT) platforms as a service on products,” she noted.
When it comes to skilling and preparing a workforce for New-Age technologies like Artificial Intellignece (AI), robotics, Big Data and IoT, IBM is working with some of the state governments via skill development centres.
“We are also in talks with NITI Aayog and other learning and development organisations to understand what is the platform that we can put in place to skill more people,” Mohanty told IANS.
IBM recently announced a collaboration with the Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) to spur emerging technology skills in the domestic telecom industry.
IBM’s student developers’ programme (career education) that infuses software capabilities that are industry-specific and market-relevant has helped more than 24,000 students and faculty members develop industry-relevant software capabilities.
Present in India since 1951, IBM India has expanded its operations with regional headquarters in Bengaluru and offices across 20 cities.
With the aim to help Indian enterprises deliver next-generation consumer experiences, global consulting agency Bluewolf, an IBM company, also announced a new practice in the country with “Salesforce”, a global leader in the customer relationship management (CRM) solutions.
The dedicated practice will leverage Bluewolf’s expertise and delivery capabilities in Augmented Reality (AR) and innovation strategy — combined with IBM’s leadership in cognitive and design-thinking with “Watson” — to help clients connect customer experience to value.
IBM currently manages 100-200 customers for the Salesforce practice in the country and expects the number to grow significantly in the coming years as enterprises and government agencies begin riding on digital transformation initiatives.
“India is one of the highest-growth markets for Salesforce,” said Sunil Jose, Senior Vice President and Country Leader, Salesforce India.
“We will continue to double our investments in the country. We welcomed our 1,000th employee in India in November last year. We will hire 1,000 more employees in Hyderabad alone by 2020,” Jose told IANS.
“We already have a strong base in Bengaluru, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Delhi. India is the market that is continuously growing for us,” Jose added.
Highlighting the strategy for the country, he said: “To drive business value, success and growth for its customers, Salesforce will focus on customer-centric digital transformation.”
The customer relationship management (CRM) solutions provider also has a “Centre of Excellence” in Hyderabad, which is its first major centre in India.
(Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at Krishna.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Corporate Jobs, Emerging Businesses, Employment, Entrepreneurship, Markets, Medium Enterprise, SMEs, Startup Basics, Technology
Image for representational purpose only.
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : With digital transformation comes the daunting task of preparing a workforce for technologies like Big Data, Cloud, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT) that can address the massive demand coming from governments and businesses in India.
According to a top IBM executive, the time is ripe to start the journey right from schools and universities, leading to up-skilling and re-skilling the enterprise and start-up developers’ community in the country.
Between 2010 and 2030, India’s working population is expected to expand from 750 million to almost one billion.
“Without adequate education and training, such population growth poses an increased risk of the emergence of a growing class of under or unemployed. Skill is emerging as the new currency across businesses globally and in India,” Seema Kumar, Country Leader, Developer Ecosystem and Start-ups, IBM India/South Asia, told IANS.
“We believe the industry is no more bifurcated into blue-collar and white-collar jobs. The ‘new collar’ job community is embracing technology rapidly, forging deeper relationships with ecosystem partners and acquiring ‘in-demand’ skill-sets,” Kumar emphasised.
Sensing the urgent need to build a talent pool for the future, IBM recently announced a collaboration with the Telecom Sector Skill Council (TSSC) to spur emerging technology skills in the domestic telecom industry.
The agreement outlines a roadmap to build capabilities in the areas of information and communication technology (ICT) to provide the required and relevant skills for the telecom Industry.
“This collaboration will provide an opportunity to students and young professionals to get skilled in emerging technologies including Big Data, Cloud Computing, IoT and mobile applications that have a huge potential in the telecom sector,” Kumar said.
IBM’s student developers’ programme (career education) that infuses software capabilities that are industry specific and market relevant has helped more than 24,000 students and faculty members develop industry-relevant software capabilities.
Developers are the new marketers and decision-makers across organisations and it has become imperative to make them the centre of the core strategy.
“We also have collaboration with US-based Galvanize and Coursera to offer cognitive and Cloud curriculum to developers to help them equip with new age requirements around data science and Machine Learning (ML), etc,” the IBM executive said.
In 2017, IBM organised “IBM DeveloperConnect Roadshow” in Mumbai, Bengaluru and Hyderabad where it offered day-long workshops that combined technical sessions and hands-on activities, led by technical experts from IBM around data science, ML and Cloud.
“We are going to organise the ‘IBM Code’ day for developers in Bengaluru on February 13 which is another step towards introducing the developer community to IBM technologies,” Kumar told IANS.
IBM also has an online learning platform Cognitiveclass.ai that offers several online courses in the area of data science, AI, big data and Blockchain.
“We also work with external Edtech partners who offer structured courses and curriculum based on these technologies. For instance, Jigsaw Academy is leveraging the IBM Data Science experience platform and CognitiveClass.ai to offer advanced customised learning to students and professionals on data science,” Kumar noted.
Similarly, GlobalKnowledge is a training partner offering detailed courses on Cloud and cognitive development, also enabling professional certifications in these domains.
“Today, we are witnessing start-ups adopting Cloud at a fast pace, looking at creating enterprise class solutions and use best practices at a competitive cost, more agile systems and greater efficiency,” Kumar said.
IBM Cloud Private is an integrated Cloud platform built on a Kubernetes-based container architecture.
It is a pre-packaged offering with enterprise-grade content, bringing Cloud native environment to Private Clouds so that start-ups can maintain control over core data while giving developers the flexibility to easily update and launch new apps in a secure manner.
“We foresee start-ups in the FinTech, e-commerce and HealthTech space leveraging IBM Cloud Private for on-premises software portfolio or easily integrate next-generation data and software optimised for Cloud,” Kumar added.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Business Summit, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Emerging Businesses, Events, Large Enterprise
By Sourabh Kulesh,
Mumbai : Reliance Group’s Unlimit — an Internet of Things (IoT) venture for enterprises — and tech giant IBM on Monday announced a collaboration to co-create IoT solutions for industry verticals, including automotive, insurance, utilities and industrial automation.
The two companies are developing IoT solutions for implementation across Reliance Group companies, addressing key segments such as user-based insurance (Reliance general insurance), asset and vehicle tracking (Reliance commercial finance), tower monitoring (Reliance communications) and transformer maintenance (BSES & Reliance energy).
“With 2.7 billion connected devices and growing, Indian economy, enterprises and consumers are embracing IoT at a rampant pace,” Harriet Green, General Manager, Watson IoT, Customer Engagement and Education, IBM, told reporters here at the first-ever IBM ‘Genius of Things (GoT)’ summit.
“Our collaboration is an example of IBM leading the global IoT movement with a growing ecosystem of clients and partners. This underscores how IBM and ‘Unlimit’ are taking the power of IoT to Indian enterprises and capturing the phenomenon of digital disruption for joint client innovation,” she added.
As part of the collaboration, IBM will provide its Watson IoT Platform to collect and connect data, including sensor data, from devices and provide use-case specific dashboards.
“As India is becoming the hot bed for digital disruption, we are confident that our powerful technology platform, with Watson IoT at its core, will provide enterprises with a flexible, scalable and secure solution,” Juergen Hase, CEO, ‘Unlimit’, told reporters here.
Unlimit will design IoT use cases for various industries in the Indian market and build them on the IBM Watson IoT Platform, which provides device registration, IoT rules, advanced analytics, visualisation, reports and cognitive capabilities for each use case.
As a result, rather than approaching businesses on one-by-one basis, Unlimit will provide customers with access to these capabilities so that they can leverage IoT-driven insights and information for business decisions, create new product offerings and revenue streams.
The Unlimit IoT platform aired at the enterprise users was launched in April this year. Unlimit aims to provide a common platform for vertical industries such as automation, healthcare, agriculture, financial services and asset tracking.
Green said that IBM’s amazing Cloud capabilities enable all communication and infrastructure that is needed to work for the transformation of businesses.
“We have a set of applications that allow us track, record and work together effectively through exceptional software. ‘Watson’, designed especially for IoT, also works as a differentiator for the company,” Green added.
Watson analyses the massive structured and unstructured data to help digital transformation of companies.
IBM also announced key clients and partnerships with Kone, KPIT, Avanijal Agri Automation, Acculi Labs, Tech Mahindra and Arrow Electronics to drive IoT growth in India.
“With an unparalleled, growing global ecosystem of over 6,000 clients, 1,400 partners and 750 IoT patents, IBM is uniquely positioned to lead the IoT revolution across industries and help companies in India plug into critical new revenue streams,” said Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India/South Asia.
Through a multi-year agreement with IBM, Kone will tap into the IBM IoT Cloud Platform to connect, remotely monitor and optimise the management of millions of elevators, escalators, doors and turnstiles in buildings.
KPIT, a global technology company that specialises in product engineering and IT solutions across several industries, will use IBM’s IoT Continuous Engineering to deliver high-quality designs and connected products efficiently.
Avanijal Agri Automation will use the company’s ‘Irrigation Automation System’ solution to collect and log irrigation data from various sensors on the field for agronomical analysis which helps further enhance the yield on a continuous basis.
Acculi Labs will leverage IBM’s IoT platform to build and scale “Lyfas” — a scalable rural healthcare solution to smooth the flow of data from the edge device to cloud for further analysis and prognostics.
With IBM IoT solutions, Arrow Electronics will offer more than 160 industry-leading cloud services such as artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, advanced data analytics and cyber security to customers.
Tech Mahindra is harnessing IBM technology for designing experiences through orchestration of systems, sensors, devices, platforms, external data, back-end systems, analytics engine and much more.
(Sourabh Kulesh can be contacted at sourabh.kulesh@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
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
New Delhi, (IANS) Rashtrapati Bhavan would be transformed into a smart township with the help of IBM Smart City Solutions.
IBM on Thursday announced that its smart city solutions have been deployed for the digital transformation of the Presidential Estate.
“Spread across 330 acres of land and home to over 5,000 residents, the self-sustained Presidential Estate is adopting IBM’s technology and solutions to become future ready. The Intelligent Operations Center addresses challenges that are inherent to townships – water supply, security, electrical infrastructure and solid waste management,” said an IBM statement.
“The transformation of the estate into a smart township is customized to further enhance the efficiency of critical infrastructure and utilities,” it added.
The partnership to reimagine the Rashtrapati Bhavan in the digital age was announced at an event graced by President Pranab Mukherjee.
A citizens mobile app, created by IBM Intelligent Operations Center (IOC), was also launched, which allows residents to report issues using the web and mobile.
“Rashtrapati Bhavan is an iconic representation of India’s smart city vision. It is a proud moment for all of us and the beginning of a great journey. We are honored to be their partner in enabling this transformation,” said Vanitha Narayanan, MD, IBM India.
