by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Medium Enterprise, SMEs
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : As Indian enterprises look forward to digital transformation, Deskera, a leading global Cloud-based business software provider, has plans to invest Rs 400 crore ($62 million) in the country to help 51 million Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) to adapt to Cloud.
With more than 3,000 businesses and approximately 80,000 users that manage their companies using Deskera products — including Intel, Google, Starbucks and Grant Thornton — the firm also aims to expand its operations in 20 more cities.
“We have offices around the world, including in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia and the US. In India, we have offices in Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, Ahmedabad and Pune and will expand to 20 more cities over the next one year or so,” Shashank Dixit, Founder and CEO, Deskera, told IANS in an interview.
“We plan to invest Rs 400 crore in the coming years. The intention is to grow marketshare in our existing regions and expand sales in new areas through geographical representation,” Dixit, an IIT-Kanpur alumnus, added.
Deskera, which began operation in 2008, offers close to 90 per cent of the solutions a business requires — from Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), inventory control, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), payroll and Human Resource Management System (HRMS).
The firm has also added a Big Data Analytics tool, which provides prescriptive analytics with “advanced mathematical, statistical and algorithmic models” for accurate capturing, processing, curating and managing of data.
According to a new Accenture report, Artificial Intelligence (AI) could add $957 billion to the Indian economy by changing the nature of work to create better outcomes for businesses and society.
The integration of AI with applications like ERP and CRM is proving to be an excellent tool for businesses to transform operations globally.
“AI-enabled ERP software can heavily impact the core of an organisation’s everyday business processes. It is like having a system which innately understands an organisation’s goals and can adjust existing processes or institute new ones in order to achieve, and potentially exceed, those goals,” Dixit emphasised.
AI can help achieve the goals by streamlining routine tasks, reducing operating expenses and eliminating manual errors.
“It would also help organisations utilise employees to perform other important tasks that require innovation. With the advent of this new technology there would be considerable cost-reduction in business operations by supporting employees’ workflows,” Dixit said.
Deskera employs 350 people and plans to add 1,000 more in the next 12-18 months.
“The objective is to reach out to the maximum number of SMEs and help them perform. Deskera is expanding its footprint into the tier II cities in India. We are adding people to our skilled sales team and building a robust infrastructure in the local markets,” Dixit told IANS.
The company is also in talks for a data centre in Andhra Pradesh.
“We also plan to set up a bigger fulfilment centre for sales and launch products pan-India. This will enable Deskera tap opportunities with SMEs which are aiming to go digital and global,” Deskara CEO added.
Deskera is also providing a one-stop, GST-ready business solution for accounting and ERP.
“Our Cloud technology helps streamline inventories at multiple business units/warehouses, thus providing real-time input tax credits, which are most critical for GSTR filing,” Dixit said.
SMEs typically have multiple on-premise software (accounting, CRM, HRMS, inventory, etc.) through different vendors. Most often, these software do not talk to each other, leading to multiple data entry operations, increased man-hours cost and time-wastage.
To help SMEs, Deskera is offering an integrated suite comprising ERP, CRM, Material Requirements Planning (MRP), Project management (PM) and HRMS.
“These applications can be accessed from any Internet-enabled device, encouraging SMEs to move out of premise-based system and build a road map for global business reach,” Dixit said, adding that Deskera sees a positive trajectory in sectors like manufacturing, education and training, and health care.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
Cloud technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : The journey of Indian enterprises to Cloud, especially towards Hybrid and Public platforms, is gradually gaining momentum, but finding the right mix is what holds the key for them and Cloud players are now offering customised services to clients.
The Indian Cloud market is growing exponentially. According to the apex industry body Nasscom, the domestic cloud market is projected to reach $16 billion by 2020.
The Public Cloud services market in India is projected to hit $1.9 billion by the end of this year — an increase of 42 per cent from 2016 — predicts market research firm Gartner.
Business leaders across industries are increasingly adopting Cloud technology, says Mohit Pande, Country Manager-India, Google Cloud, because they understand it helps solve real challenges like teams working better together, data becoming useful to make smart decisions and companies creating new values to stay competitive.
“We are committed to offering and investing in technology that leaves the choice to customers. Customers don’t want to be locked in. They are making sure that their workloads can be managed by containers that run on any platform,” Pande told IANS.
A container is a piece of software that includes everything needed to run it — code, runtime, system tools, system libraries and settings, etc.
Google has been running its services in the Cloud for over 14 years. The company hosts seven Google applications, each with more than one billion users.
“Over the last few years, a large number of Indian enterprises have chosen Google Cloud to grow their businesses. We are excited by the growth of paid Google Cloud Platform (GCP) customers in India, many of whom are leveraging our Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities,” Pande added.
Google offers solutions like “Kubernetes”, an open source technology for managing containers which allows customers to run across multiple Clouds. Google “Stackdriver” provides power monitoring, logging and diagnostics across Clouds.
According to Gartner, the highest growth in India will continue to be driven by Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) services, projected to grow 42 per cent, followed by 33.5 per cent in Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) and 33.3 per cent in Software-as-a-Service (SaaS).
“In 2017, enterprises who looked at creating new value with Cloud evaluated three major steps while building their strategy: Decide which IT and business functions to deliver through Cloud, identify and address challenges in adopting Cloud and realise operational, financial and innovation benefits,” Vikas Arora, Country Manager, IBM Cloud, India/South Asia, told IANS.
For Prasad Rai, Vice President, Cloud Applications, Oracle India, the new model of business applications delivery, which is SaaS, will actually meet the customers’ objectives much more appropriately in the country.
“Over the last two-three years, we have seen a significant shift in the customers’ mindset towards the SaaS-based solutions on Cloud. Everyone is today looking at embracing SaaS and this is something that we’ve seen across industries in India,” Rai told IANS.
The Indian enterprises today want more than just productivity and cost-saving perks.
“For them, Cloud as a technology is an enabler to turn increasing volumes of structured and unstructured data into easily accessible insights and help them continually improve customer experiences and applications by infusing cognitive and AI,” Arora explained.
With over 50 million SMBs, India is one of the fastest-growing economies in the world.
“India’s workforce is already ahead of the curve from being mobile-first to largely avoiding the costly hurdle of transitioning legacy systems. Google has a local team of seasoned enterprise and developer experts connecting with start-ups, SMBs and large corporations to understand their needs and offer solutions accordingly,” Pande added.
Google recently launched its own Cloud Platform region in Mumbai which offers several services, including Compute, Big Data, Storage and Networking.
“With the India region, enterprises will be able to take advantage of the high speeds, low latency and performance benefits uniquely offered by GCP (Google Cloud Platform) services. Further, Indian customers will now be able to buy these services directly in the local currency,” Pande emphasised.
Hosting applications in the new region, Pande added, can improve latency from 20-90 per cent for end users in Chennai, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and, of course, Mumbai, compared to hosting them in the other closest region which is Singapore.
According to Arora, IBM has announced multiple new innovations on IBM Cloud that will help enterprises further derive value from their Cloud.
This has opened more options for the organisations that are not only relying on Cloud to enhance internal efficiencies but also target more strategic business capabilities.
“The customers are looking at Cloud to provide them access to new-age technologies like IoT, Blockchain and Mobility services, coupled with strong security, compliance and regulatory features. Besides large-sized enterprises, we have started to see a huge demand coming from SMEs and start-ups,” Arora added.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Branding, Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Large Enterprise, Marketing Basics, Markets, Networking, Technology
Beijing : 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
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
New Delhi : With a surge in the adoption of digital workspaces, the Indian enterprises will work towards harnessing opportunities created by integration of new technologies in 2018, desktop virtualisation leader Citrix said on Monday.
“Digital workspaces will help organisations across various facets of operation, ranging from talent retention in HR, productivity in operations, data-driven decisions in finance, improved customer engagement in sales and so on,” Makarand Joshi, Area Vice President and Country Head, India Subcontinent, Citrix, told IANS.
The workspace transformation is inevitable and the benefits far outweigh the transitional hurdles that might come up, he added.
According to Citrix, Cloud and cloud-enabled Software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps are here to stay.
“Capabilities around analytics, Artificial Intelligence (AI), robotics that have been integrated into Cloud-based offerings are proving hard to emulate using traditional on-premise deployments due to cost, complexity, and skill considerations,” Joshi said.
Businesses, therefore, will have to evaluate the capabilities of the Cloud offerings alongside on-premise offerings and accordingly implement an environment spread across Cloud platforms that best meets their capability and productivity goals.
As work paradigms and technologies change, we will see an even wider gap between generations.
“With 50 per cent of employees being digital natives who prefer not to be restrained by a location, and the rest comprising of traditional non-digital employees, organisations will have to invest in creating systems that regulate this gap,” Citrix added.
Organisations need to encourage adoption of digital technologies like automation, Internet-connected devices, and online communication tools, to reduce the technology awareness gap across groups.
“Hiring trends will also see a shift as the newer generations joining the workforce are increasingly mobile and technology savvy, it will be increasingly difficult to attract the best people in this talent pool without extending capabilities like mobile digital workplaces and Bring Your Own Device (BYOD),” Joshi emphasised.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Corporate, Corporate Buzz, Investing, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
By Krishna SinhaChaudhury,
Mumbai : A year after the historic merger of Dell Technologies and EMC, the company has empowered several Indian enterprises transform their information technology (IT) infrastructure, a top executive said here on Friday.
Dell EMC has emerged as a holistic solutions provider and holds the second spot in the India mainstream server market (by revenue), with a share of 26.5 per cent.
“According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), in Q1 2017, Dell EMC was No 1 in the India storage market with 43.4 per cent market share (by revenue) and holds second position in the India mainstream server market (by revenue),” Rajesh Janey, President and Managing Director, Enterprise Dell EMC, told reporters here.
With a share of 22.5 per cent, the company has now climbed to the second spot in the personal computer (PC) market in the country.
“As new digital business models emerge, there is an increased focus on reinventing business to thrive in the digital age. Organisations are now investing in innovation with emerging technologies and the first step towards this innovation is modernisation,” Janey said on the sidelines of the ‘Dell EMC Forum 2017’ event here.
“We are strongly positioned to guide customers on their digital transformation journey from edge to core to cloud. We are celebrating Dell EMC’s first-year anniversary and we would continue with our strategy to deliver results for our customers, partners, companies and team members,” Janey added.
On R&D, the company said that the India team is contributing 60 per cent to overall server systems management software, with the grounds up engineering of 14th generation servers touching three key tenets of scalability, intelligent automation and integrated security.
Earlier in July, the company had launched the 14th Generation PowerEdge Servers globally.
“We are well placed to enable businesses in their digital transformation journey across three key pillars of IT, security and workforce transformation,” said Alok Ohrie, President and Managing Director, India Commercial, Dell EMC.
“We are uniquely positioned to address numerous technology touch points to modernise their IT infrastructure, from end point devices to data centre and Cloud with a strong focus on security,” he added.
The company currently has nine offices in the country in Mumbai, Pune, Gurugram, Bengaluru, Delhi, Chennai, Hyderabad, Kolkata and Ahmedabad.
The company annually invests around $4.5 billion for research and development. Dell-EMC employs nearly 140,000 people in 180 countries. It has a combined revenue of $74 billion.
(Krishna SinhaChaudhury can be contacted at krishna.s@ians.in)
—IANS
