by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : With mobility on the rise amid enterprises aspiring to create modern, connected workplaces, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE)-owned wireless networking major Aruba is looking for double-digit growth in India, top company executives have reiterated.
Aruba saw its business growing rapidly last year — with over 67 per cent growth — and India has become one of its fastest-growing markets.
The company, acquired by HPE in 2015 for $3 billion, is today the leading provider of next-generation network access solutions for the mobile enterprise.
“Mobility is one factor that is on the rise in India, with more and more devices being connected. Aruba is targeting double-digit growth in the country in 2018. We are seeing more and more customers using our wireless networks that come with valuable insights for businesses to drive growth,” Steve Wood, Vice President, Asia Pacific, Aruba, told IANS.
When it comes to R&D, core research is under way at Aruba’s Bengaluru facility.
“We are living in an era where sensors are everywhere — be it home appliances, IoT devices or consumer devices — and we need to help those units connect to the edge of the network. At Aruba, we are focused towards achieving that ‘intelligent edge’ for sectors like education, health care, hospitality, retail and manufacturing,” Wood emphasised.
Aruba has just bagged a big contract with an Indian bank with 5,000 branches to provide it with secure wireless networking solutions.
“It is still in the implementation stage so I can’t reveal the name of the bank now. Last year, the government business was 48 per cent of our revenue stream in the country,” Santanu Ghose, Country Manager, HPE Aruba, told IANS.
“Small and Medium Business (SMB) is the fasted-growing market segment for us. We have been receiving almost 30 new customers every quarter. We had nearly 130 new customers in 2017,” Ghose added.
Aruba’s distributors and their partners — as well as its own partners — are helping the company reach more enterprises with its wireless offerings. It is also leveraging HPE partner framework to reach more businesses.
“Wireless network adoption is happening very fast in the country. Rural Internet penetration, which is 17 per cent at the moment, needs to go up to 50 per cent with Wi-Fi and end-point connectivity. We have the strength to help the stakeholders achieve that,” Ghose added.
Within SMBs, Aruba is looking at micro-verticals like health care, mobile campuses and co-working offices.
“Wireless is becoming an infrastructure. Co-working offices and mobile campuses are triggering innovations beyond the concrete walls. New design campuses are coming up. Going wireless today is the key,” Ghose told IANS, adding that small-scale manufacturing firms are also coming back into life.
When it comes to connecting governments and enterprises to the edge of the network, a secure, robust and agile wireless network is the need of the hour.
To address this, the company recently launched “Aruba 360 Secure Fabric” — a security framework that provides 360 degrees of analytics-driven attack detection and response to help organisations reduce risk in the changing threat landscape.
“To prevent attacks, we have integrated User and Entity Behavioural Analytics (UEBA) into our central security piece called ‘Clearpass’. This is now called ‘Aruba IntroSpect’ that will introspect behavioural anomalies — be it a person or a device — to gauge possible threats and mitigate those,” Ghose informed.
Aruba is also innovating in UEBA by expanding the “Aruba IntroSpect” product family, enabling businesses to easily and rapidly scale machine-learned behaviour detection from small projects to full enterprise deployments.
The “Aruba 360 Secure Fabric” offers security and IT teams an integrated way to quickly detect and respond to advanced cyber attacks — from pre-authorisation to post-authorisation across multi-vendor infrastructures, supporting enterprises of all sizes.
“At the centre of our security are Machine Learning (ML) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) which are integrated into our security network for a seamless, wireless connectivity,” Ghose said.
According to Ghose, they haven’t seen any known impact so far after the news of two security flaws in Intel and other chips shocked the tech world recently.
“We have not seen any known impact as of now. We also use chips other than Intel but there has been no impact on our operations,” Ghose noted.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Business, Large Enterprise, Markets, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : You must have noticed Virtual Reality (VR) stations tucked away in a corner at your neighbourhood mall that require kids to wear head-mounted devices (HMDs) to experience an immersive world.
At the moment, for an Indian consumer, the ultimate 360 degree VR experience is either limited to those stations or headgear sold bundled with smartphones. But most of those HMDs are yet to evolve, even as VR developers aim to build high-quality games to drive more people towards the technology.
Despite arriving on the scene some two-three years back, mass-level VR impact is yet to be seen — both on the consumer and enterprise fronts — though things have slowly started picking up.
In the meantime, industry experts are giving Augmented Reality (AR) a definite edge over VR. Unlike VR, AR lets users continue to be in touch with the real world while interacting with the virtual world.
According to a new report from International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on AR/VR is forecast to reach $17.8 billion in 2018 — an increase of nearly 95 per cent over the $9.1 billion in 2017.
“VR and AR are disruptive technologies, but they will take years to emerge. There was a lot of buzz and hype in 2016 for AR with the ‘Pokemon Go’ craze — and with VR too, with Facebook saying VR was the next computing platform,” said Thomas Husson, Vice President and Principal Analyst, Forrester.
“In 2017, we saw more realism about the opportunities VR and AR will open up and, at the same time, more tools made available to developers to build new AR experiences with Apple’s ‘ARKit’ and Google’s ‘ARCore,’ ” Husson told IANS.
Although smartphone giant Apple is yet to shake up the AR/VR market, the company has introduced “ARKit” in iOS 11 — a new framework that allows developers to create unparalleled AR experiences for iPhones and iPads.
Google has also released a new software development kit (SDK) called “ARCore” that brings AR capabilities to the existing and future Android phones.
“Soon, there will be hundreds of millions of iOS compatible devices for Apple “ARKit” starting to create effects of scale and scope,” said Husson.
According to Thomas George, Senior Vice President and Head of CyberMedia Research (CMR), when it comes to India, AR/VR is still in the initial stages of adoption.
“However, the AR/VR market in India is expected to register a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 50 per cent in the next five years,” George told IANS.
“Applications of AR/VR for headgear and mounted display are on the rise, particularly in sectors like retail, auto, health care, training, defence, gaming and entertainment — areas that are at the forefront of AR/VR adoption in the country,” George added.
In the consumer space, apart from Samsung Gear VR at Rs 7,290 which is still the leader, Xiaomi has launched Mi VR Play 2 (Rs 12,999) while Lenovo just unveiled a stand-alone VR headset “The Mirage Solo” — housing motion-tracking technology on the VR platform of Google Daydream (itself an excellent standalone VR device) — at CES 2018.
In the AR/VR arena, the big devices that are making news are Microsoft Hololens, Oculus Rift and HTC Vive.
“I think AR will grow much faster than VR since it will be powered by the scale of smartphones and is a more natural extension of mobile behaviour, while VR requires some additional and expensive equipment,” Husson noted.
Some companies will rightly invest in VR for educational and training purposes, maintenance and productivity improvements to help consumers try complex and expensive products.
“AR will start in the gaming and social space but will gain traction among traditional brands (consumer electronics, home equipment, furniture, etc),” Husson predicted.
According to George, AR/VR will also play a key role in areas like research and development.
Immersive technologies like AR/VR in India will also have potential for industries like public safety as well as retail, real estate, entertainment and tourism.
“An AR platform can take us on a heritage trail that can help people access images, video and audio providing tourists a view of the place and its history,” George added.
A rising number of consumer electronics applications such as gaming and entertainment are witnessing adoption of AR and VR devices as smartphone penetration continues to rise (India has over 300 million smartphone users).
Applications like immersive learning and entertainment, especially high-quality games, on top of state-of-the-art affordable headsets could kick-start AR/VR adoption sooner, experts stressed.
(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 | Markets, Networking, Online Marketing, Social Media, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : As governments the world over realise the urgent need to tame the anarchic world of the Internet — dominated by a couple of tech giants — and begin to write new rules pertaining to users’ rights, data privacy and spread of false news and extremist content, India too must shun archaic regulations and implement New-Age cyber laws.
The debate is now growing about exercising some form of control over the web when billions are communicating daily over social media platforms, smartphone use is on the rise and data consumption is breaking all previous records.
Look at how the Unites States has brought Facebook under intense scrutiny over Russian ads on its platform during the 2016 US presidential election, or how the European Union in June slapped a record $2.7 billion fine on Google after it found that it “abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors”.
Speaking at the United Nations last week, British Prime Minister Theresa May said technology companies must go “further and faster” in removing extremist content from their platforms.
In the meanwhile, there is widespread criticism across the world, including in India, over sharing of user data between WhatsApp and its parent company Facebook.
Like the Western world, the time is ripe for India to wake up from its slumber in terms of cyber regulation and come up with appropriate strategies to tighten its cyber policies vis-a-vis the Internet, say experts, adding that the existing cyber law is not adequate to deal with current realities.
“India does not have any detailed legislation on data privacy on Internet/social media platforms. India also does not have a data protection law. The Information Technology Act, 2000, which got amended only in 2008, is neither a data privacy law nor a data protection law,” Pavan Duggal, the nation’s leading cyber law expert, told IANS.
According to him, Indians are slowly beginning to discover that they have no effective remedy once they are targeted in the anarchic system on Internet, including social media platforms.
Data intermediaries and data repositories need to be made responsible for ensuring data privacy of their customers, stressed Duggal, also a Supreme Court advocate.
“India can come up with dedicated new legislation on data protection as well as data privacy. The Supreme Court has already expressed the hope in the landmark judgment of Justice K.S. Puttaswami vs Union of India that the Government would take into account the fundamental principles concerning privacy which have been laid down by the Supreme Court and enshrine them in new provisions of law,” Duggal informed.
According to The New York Times, in the last five years, more than 50 countries have passed laws to gain greater control over how their people use Internet.
“India is woefully under-prepared to address issues of data protection and cyber-security. We need a data protection law that protects citizens from misuse of data by the government and companies with strict liability and extremely high statutory damages that must be awarded within a strict period of time,” noted Mishi Choudhary, President and Legal Director of New Delhi-based Software Freedom Law Centre (SFLC.in), a non-profit setup.
“In addition, we need a citizen’s privacy charter against surveillance. But overall, we need simplicity in communications in terms of use, law and not an overload of legal jargon and over-regulation,” Choudhary told IANS.
According to Duggal, it appears that governments at times do tend to get intimidated by Internet giants.
“However, every country provides a fertile market for big Internet players and, hence, the country can rely upon its intrinsic strengths to regulate the big ones. Just because an Internet player is a big player, that does not mean that the said player is not amenable to regulation,” Duggal emphasised.
With a nearly 1.3 billion population — and most of it now connected — India represents a huge market for web players who can’t afford to ignore its potential.
“If big Internet players want to have access to the India market, they have to comply with Indian regulations,” Duggal added.
With a growing chorus for digital India and realising a billion dreams, a new legal cyber framework should be the first and foremost step by the government.
“The onus is now on the government. It will be interesting to see what approaches the government would want to adopt in this case,” the experts noted.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Corporate Jobs, Employment, Markets, Media, Online Marketing, Private Jobs, Technology
By Nishant Arora,
New Delhi : The first wave of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has started creating ripples in the newsroom — in chatbots, automated reporting systems and machine learning techniques which are sifting through massive data sets to write initial news reports.
For those who still believe that AI and automation will not hit jobs in the media industry, just consider the kind of investments that media houses are now making in AI for the newsroom. Clearly, the next five to ten years would be decisive.
Google has provided British news agency Press Association $805,000 to build software that will gather, automate and write nearly 30,000 local stories a month.
Dubbed as “Radar” (Reporters And Data And Robots), the software will “automate local reporting with large public databases from government agencies or local law enforcement”.
South Korea’s Yonhap news agency has introduced an automated reporting system “Soccerbot” to produce news on football games.
Associated Press and Thomson Reuters are using machine learning algorithms to write stories and The New York Times plans to automate its comment moderation.
So whose jobs are at stake as AI-powered software becomes common in the newsroom?
“For simple, factual-based news reporting and gathering — it is possible for AI-powered bots to do that. However, it’s less likely for point-of-view type of stories or feature articles that require more human input,” said Xiaofeng Wang, Senior Analyst at global research firm Forrester.
Personalised communication at scale is one of the strengths that bots can deliver on more efficiently.
“There are already bots designed for research purposes, but they act more like assistants to humans. When designing these bots, humans can define the purpose clearly and imagine a personality for it but the AI technology today still has limitations,” Wang told IANS.
Carl Benedikt Frey and Michael Osborne, researchers at the University of Oxford, have predicted that the combination of robotics, automation, AI and machine learning would impact journalists too, among others.
According to a survey by the University of Oxford and Yale University, AI would outperform humans in many activities in the next 10 years, such as translating languages (by 2024) driving a truck (by 2027), writing a bestselling book (by 2049), and working as a surgeon (by 2053).
“There are dynamic changes happening and we as journalists can see that. AI and robots will write stories in the future and they will get better at doing it as humans will fine tune it,” noted Ramesh Menon, a senior journalist and author.
“But the best stories will come from writer-journalists who can put in fine detail, empathy, drama, colour and analysis into their stories. What is good is that we can tomorrow get robots to do the routine stuff that today takes 80 per cent of the journalists’ time,” Menon told IANS.
This can help reporters and editors concentrate on big ticket stories that require a lot of footwork in terms of getting to the right people, getting them to talk, analysing the present and even talk of the way forward, he emphasised.
Researchers claim that there is a 50 per cent chance that machines will outperform humans in all tasks within 45 years.
Yonhap’s “Soccerbot” would write stories related to the English Premier League (EPL) football tournament.
The system had a successful test in covering all games of the 2016-17 EPL season. It produced a total of 380 automatic experimental articles, each within one or two seconds of a game’s end.
The “Radar” software project at Press Association, scheduled to be launched in early 2018, will hire five journalists who will help identify datasets and curate and edit news articles generated by “Radar”.
According to Rajeev Vaid, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, machine Intelligence platform Kognetics, AI is now being used by leading global media houses for automation of press coverage.
“In future, we expect to see a wide-scale use of automated systems to analyse content quickly, in real time, and produce insights in a consumable and usable format to the journalists,” Vaid told IANS.
The initial impact of AI on journalism would be seen at four levels: Content gathering, content creation, moderation and scale.
“AI can be used to scan through structured and unstructured news corpus to gather information restricted to an area, territory or region. Similarly, it can be used to disseminate content to a targeted section with local news via Internet, social and print media,” Vaid stressed.
For Atul Rai, CEO and Co-Founder, Staqu, a Gurgaon-based AI startup, AI could be used in most of the domains which are data excessive but identifying fake news is another big challenge today for humans as well as bots.
“Media is a domain where plenty of data is collected and created and, therefore, it is easier to use these data points to create stories. I would reiterate that the problem set is not to create news or content but is filtering out the malicious, fake and rumoured content or news,” Rai told IANS.
As the media fraternity prepares for a new reality, the news business would only ramp up incorporating the AI-based tools into the newsroom.
“Though many if us are apprehensive today, it may not be such a bad thing. Good journalists will always have jobs; no one can replace them in the world of tomorrow as they would be needed more than ever,” Menon said.
For Wang, AI would help journalists work more efficiently if they know how to use (not create) these bots. “Bots are not ready to replace journalists yet. Replacing the journalist’s assistant? Maybe,” she added.
(Nishant Arora can be contacted at nishant.a@ians.in)
—IANS
