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Amazon’s Cloud arm helping Indian businesses drive innovation via AI, ML

Amazon’s Cloud arm helping Indian businesses drive innovation via AI, ML

AmazonBy Gokul Bhagabati,

Bengaluru : With a wide range of Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools at its disposal, Amazon Web Services (AWS), the Cloud arm of online retail giant Amazon, is busy helping its customers in India, bringing to their doorsteps innovative solutions that address the challenges they face.

Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL), the Indian subsidiary of the Amazon Group that undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India, brought to the country earlier this year a digital innovation programme headed by Madhusudan Shekar.

“In a heterogeneous country like India, the scope of innovation is tremendous,” Shekar, Head of Digital Innovation at AISPL, told IANS here, pointing out the diversity of needs in a country of over 1.2 billion people.

According to him, while start-ups are by nature quite innovative in their approach, the risk of inertia to innovation seeping in is higher in large enterprises.

“But large enterprises are always looking for innovations in areas such as optimising operational costs. We can help them find innovation solutions in these areas too,” Shekar noted in an interview on the sidelines of the Amazon AI Conclave held here last week.

“With the availability of a wide range of AI, ML, analytics and Internet of Things (IoT) tools and pre-trained models with AWS, the cost and time required for innovation come down drastically,” he explained, adding that businesses just need to fine-tune these models according to their needs, thereby saving time spent on building them from scratch.

Among the start-ups that showcased their innovative solutions at the event was ChironX, a Gurugram-based company which is using AI and Deep Learning for medical diagnostics.

The AI model that the company has built analyses retinal fundus images in seconds to detect several diseases, including diabetic retinopathy, hypertensive retinopathy, age-related macular degeneration and diabetic macular edema.

“Our solution is now used by several hospitals in India,” said Rito Maitra, Vice President for Product at ChironX, adding that its data infrastructure needs are supported by AWS.

AWS, which is betting big on AI and ML for its growth, has over hundreds and thousands of active customers in the country.

“Every customer conversation that we have today has an element of AI and ML in it — whether they are enterprises, start-ups or other organisations,” Navdeep Manaktala, Head of Business Development, AISPL, told IANS, adding that over 85 per cent of what AWS does is driven by customer needs.

AWS has a broad portfolio of AI and ML services in areas such as text-to speech conversion, image analysis and document analysis, among others.

Shaadi.com, one of the world’s largest online matrimonial services, and Woo, a dating app, are among the company’s two biggest customers from India that use Amazon “Rekognition” — a Deep Learning-based image-analysis service.

The matrimonial website believes that with the use of “Rekognition”, it could reduce the time it takes for a picture to appear on a user’s profile by 95 per cent as a lot of time spent on manual moderation of the picture to see whether it matches the description in the profile can be cut.

“Amazon Rekognition APIs (application programming interface), particularly ‘DetectFaces’, provide rich image metadata that we can use to apply our business-specific quality guidelines to. Utilising information such as number of faces, size of faces, and estimated age range, we were able to remove photo-level manual curation work entirely,” said Sumesh Menon, Co-Founder of Woo.

Manaktala said that ML is also helping AWS better understand the customer needs, helping them secure their data. “The pace of innovation, in spite of our size, is tremendous,” Manaktala added.

With services such as Amazon “SageMaker”, the company also allows developers and data scientists to build, train and deploy Machine Learning models.

It also has what is known as AWS Partner Network (APN), a global programme focused on helping APN Partners build successful businesses or solutions by providing business, technical, marketing and go-to-market support.

Overall, the company offers over 125 fully featured services for compute, storage, databases, networking, analytics, ML and AI, IoT, mobile, security, hybrid, virtual and augmented reality (VR and AR), media, and application development, deployment, and management.

(Gokul Bhagabati can be contacted at gokul.b@ians.in)

—IANS

Indian businesses worried over data privacy, cyber security: Dell survey

Indian businesses worried over data privacy, cyber security: Dell survey

DellNew Delhi : Terming data privacy and cyber security concerns as biggest barriers to digital transformation, almost half of Indian businesses say they will struggle to meet changing customer demands within five years, a survey by Dell Technologies revealed on Tuesday.

The other half of Indian businesses believe they will disrupt rather than be disrupted, said Dell Technologies’ “Digital Transformation Index” completed in collaboration with Intel.

“It’s an exciting time to be in business. However, only technology-centred organisations will reap the rewards offered by a digital business model, including the ability to monetise the data, identify actionable insights, move quickly and automate everything to delight customers,” said Rajesh Janey, President and MD – India Enterprise, Dell EMC.

Nearly 12 per cent of Indian businesses are digital leaders — 5 per cent more than the percentage of digital leaders in China, said the survey.

“A quarter (25 per cent) of Indian businesses fear their organisation will get left behind within five years while 38 per cent of business leaders are worried they’ll be left behind,” it added.

According to the research, 93 per cent of Indian businesses are facing major impediments to digital transformation.

The top five barriers to digital transformation are: data privacy and cybersecurity concerns, regulation or legislative changes, lack of the right in-house skill sets and expertise, information overload and weak digital governance and structure.

Dell Technologies and Intel surveyed business leaders from 42 countries and benchmarked 4,600 businesses for the survey.

—IANS

Next-Gen software key growth enabler for Indian businesses: Survey

Next-Gen software key growth enabler for Indian businesses: Survey

Technology, computerNew Delhi : For an overwhelming 97 per cent of Indian businesses, adopting Next-Gen software solutions is the key to driving growth and expansion while 92 per cent of them stated that software is important for them to create new products or services to enter new markets, a survey said on Monday.

According to the leading software company CA Technologies’ “Modern Software Factory” survey, 91 per cent of the respondents highlighted software as key to their digital transformation journey.

Indian businesses recognise software as the defining competitive advantage that will enable them to create new, disruptive businesses or to re-shape their existing business landscape, the findings showed.

“Digital disruption and changing customer expectations are driving organisations to become more agile, and to introduce new products and services to meet evolving demands. Software is not only a catalyst in transforming ideas into outcomes but is also a competitive differentiator,” Sunil Manglore, Managing Director, CA Technologies, India, said in a statement.

“By adopting the modern software factory framework, organisations are better able to speed-up time to market, consistently improve the quality of output, reduce risk and increase productivity,” he added.

Nearly 93 per cent of respondents said software is essential for them to deliver a better customer experience.

“About 92 per cent said it is essential to improving insights into customers’ needs and wants while 90 per cent said it is essential for repositioning the company and its brand,” the survey noted.

As firms in India become cognizant of the decisive role that software plays in facilitating key business priorities, the survey also found that there is a corresponding emphasis in software-related priorities.

Almost 99 per cent of respondents highlighted that it is essential or important to have better prioritisation of software development in line with business goals.

Although this is seen as the most important priority in India, less than half of them (47 per cent) said their IT teams are very effective in realising it.

When it comes to security, the respondents asked to make security a more embedded part of the software development process.

The global online survey of 1,279 senior IT and business executives (575 in the Asia-Pacific region) was sponsored by CA Technologies and conducted by industry analyst firm Freeform Dynamics Intelligence Unit in July 2017.

The Asia-Pacific countries surveyed were India, Australia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore and South Korea.

Although software is indisputably pivotal for the growth of companies, the survey found that most organisations are lacking the right IT capabilities.

“Organisations in India need to understand that every company today is a software company. Without a modern approach to software, they will be left behind in today’s application economy,” stressed Manglore.

—IANS

Indian businesses now comfortably adopting Cloud SaaS solutions: Oracle

Indian businesses now comfortably adopting Cloud SaaS solutions: Oracle

Oracle, CloudBy Nishant Arora,

New Delhi : With a surge in the adoption of Cloud-based services in India, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is one area that is growing faster that ever before. According to a top Oracle India executive, this is because businesses — from large to small — have realised that SaaS solutions are scalable, agile and secure.

SaaS will be the biggest Cloud market and will double to $75 billion by 2020 globally, says Gartner. In India, the SaaS business grew at the rate of 33 per cent (year-on-year) in 2017.

“We believe that SaaS will actually meet burgeoning customer expectations in India as well as globally. We have witnessed the shift in customer mindset, primarily because of the benefits that some of the early starters have managed to achieve by implementing and rolling out SaaS-based applications,” Prasad Rai, Vice President – Applications at Oracle, told IANS.

“Initially, customers used to have apprehensions about SaaS solutions, but today organisations across sectors are open to considering business applications to meet their expectations,” Rai added.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the SaaS segment holds nearly 69 per cent of overall Public Cloud market share globally.

From the largest firms to start-ups, everyone is looking at Cloud or at least at the Cloud-first approach.

“There are two reasons for that. One is that organisations can get their applications up and running much faster than in the past; and second is that businesses have realised that SaaS solutions are scalable, agile, extremely secure and are available all the time,” Rai noted.

SaaS is perhaps a decade-old market in India and initially catered to overseas clients before Indian enterprises realised the need to adopt Cloud-based services.

“We had Cloud-based solutions about 10 years ago. Over these years, SaaS solutions have matured and early adopters have started witnessing the benefits. This has resulted in more and more companies across the spectrum joining the journey towards the Cloud,” Rai emphasised.

“If you look at the R&D spend of several major software original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in the world, you will see that a majority of their R&D spend now is focused on the Cloud,” he added.

Oracle registered six per cent revenue growth ($9.6 billion) for the second quarter of fiscal 2017-2018 and Cloud SaaS revenues were up 55 per cent to $1.1 billion.

In comparison, Cloud Platform as a Service (PaaS) plus Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) revenues were up 21 per cent to $396 million. Total Cloud revenues were up 44 per cent to $1.5 billion.

“At Oracle, we firmly believe that SaaS applications deliver the best value to our customers. Our experts spend time with the customers to take them through various levels of security that we build into the SaaS solutions at our data centres so that the customer’s data is secure and is accessible or visible to the customer only,” Rai explained.

Not even the people working at Oracle data centres have access to the customer’s data, he added.

Oracle has the entire suite of SaaS solutions, starting from traditional ERP to Fusion ERP till HCM and CRM applications.

“We have moved to an almost completely Cloud-based approach in delivering the applications. We have thousands of SaaS customers in India and more and more customers are looking at adopting these solutions,” Rai said.

Start-ups are Cloud-native organisations and do not have any preference for on-premise solutions.

“For example, fashion e-commerce marketplace Myntra has deployed our service Cloud and enterprise performance management applications,” Rai told IANS.

IT company Genpact has deployed Oracle’s human capital management and enterprise management solutions. In the start-up space, OYO Rooms has rolled out Oracle Fusion HCM to manage their entire human capital.

“Similarly, ASK Group and Airtel have deployed our SaaS-based applications,” Rai said.

In the enterprise space in India, Oracle has witnessed a rapid uptake in ITeS, hospitality, health care or any of IT services-based industries.

“Now we are seeing upswing in manufacturing organisations as they need to be able to take business decisions in lesser time and to have an agile IT infrastructure,” the Oracle executive noted.

Oracle is also embedding Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) in its applications.

“SaaS solutions have democratised the market, where organisations of every size can avail the best in world Cloud applications,” Rai said.

(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)

—IANS

Alibaba arm offers cloud services to Indian enterprises

Alibaba arm offers cloud services to Indian enterprises

AlibabaBeijing : Chinese e-tailer Alibaba’s cloud computing arm on Wednesday said its new data centre in Mumbai would offer services to Indian enterprises from January.

“We will deliver cloud computing services to small and medium size Indian businesses from our new data centre, opening in Mumbai in January, 2018,” said the company in a statement here.

As a key market in the company’s cloud’s globalisation strategy, India offers business opportunity for rapid economic growth and scope for enterprises to expand beyond the country.

“Our vision to empower enterprises to go global is extended to our Indian clients with cloud products, including computing, storage and big data processing capabilities,” noted the statement.

The data centre will also enable Indian businesses to run their applications on the company’s cloud platform.

The data centre’s service offerings include computing, database, storage and content delivery, networking, analytics and big data.

Alibaba Cloud has tied up with Global Cloud Xchange (GCX), a subsidiary of Reliance Communications, that enables direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect through GCX’s Cloud X Fusion service.

The company had earlier also announced a partnership with Tata Communications to provide direct access to Alibaba Cloud Express Connect through Tata Communications’ IZOTM Private Connect Service.

Alibaba Cloud has 33 zones in 16 economic centres worldwide, with coverage extending across China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Australia, West Asia, Europe, India and the US.

“The data centre will enable us to work with more Indian enterprises, which are innovative and operate in growth sectors,” said Alibaba Vice-President Simon Hu in the statement on the occasion.

The company also looks forward to empowering the enterprises through cloud computing and data technologies.

“As we build the cloud network globally, India is another important piece that is firmly in place.

“This continues our commitment to India, helping it to develop trade opportunities with other markets in the region and beyond,” added Hu.

Alibaba Cloud would have a local team of consultants to provide service planning, implementation and after-sales support, helping Indian companies move to the cloud.

“This will extend what Alibaba Cloud is already doing to service thousands of customers from India globally,” the company said.

Set up in 2009, Alibaba Cloud is among the largest providers of public cloud services in China and one of the largest Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers in the world.

—IANS