HCLTech with Intel Launches FlexSpace for AI PCs to Transform Enterprise Efficiency

HCLTech, a leading global technology company, announced the launch of HCLTech FlexSpace for AI PCs in collaboration with Intel®. This innovative solution enhances AI-powered enterprise computers, offering businesses the computing power and flexibility needed for AI-driven environments.

By integrating HCLTech FlexSpace, an Experience-as-a-Service digital workplace solution, with Intel® Core™ Ultra processors, enterprises can perform AI tasks locally on devices, ensuring faster and more secure processing. This reduces the need for data transfers to remote servers, minimizing data breach risks.

FlexSpace significantly improves the performance of advanced AI platforms, enabling faster, more responsive interactions and superior data processing for applications like Microsoft Co-Pilot. With HCLTech AI Force and Edge AI, enterprises benefit from rapid data processing and real-time analytics, providing actionable insights. Additionally, AI of Things (AIoT) applications experience reduced latency and improved performance.

"At Intel, we are committed to delivering transformative solutions that address the evolving needs of modern workplaces. Our collaboration with HCLTech on their FlexSpace solution combines the power of Intel's AI PCs with HCLTech's industry-leading IT services. This collaboration not only meets the critical need for advanced workplace solutions but also enhances customer experiences by delivering unmatched performance, scalability, and security. Together, we are shaping the future of workplace transformation," said Santhosh Vishwanathan, Vice President and Managing Director, India Region, Intel.

"At HCLTech, we aim to revolutionize enterprise AI interaction with advanced, scalable solutions that enhance efficiency and innovation. Our collaboration with Intel on FlexSpace for AI PCs is a key step in helping clients fully leverage AI while ensuring top-tier security and performance," said Anand Swamy, Head of Tech and ISV Ecosystems, HCLTech.

HCLTech continues to deliver intelligent workplace solutions through its HCLTech Fluid Workplace framework, leveraging Intel's Core Ultra processors to empower enterprises to streamline workflows, make data-driven decisions and accelerate innovation across healthcare, finance and manufacturing.

For more information about HCLTech's collaboration with Intel, please visit: hcltech.com/cloud/intel

AWS to Invest $8.2 Bn in Maharashtra

AWS has announced a significant investment of $8.2 billion in Maharashtra over the next few years. This investment aims to enhance AWS's infrastructure in India by deploying advanced graphical processing units (GPUs) and establishing state-of-the-art compute facilities and cloud management services. The move is expected to create substantial employment opportunities and contribute to India's growing digital economy.

This investment is part of AWS's larger plan to invest $12.7 billion across India by 2030 to meet the increasing demand for cloud services and artificial intelligence. The commitment to Maharashtra is likely to bolster the state's position as a tech hub and drive economic growth.

AWS's $8.2 billion investment in Maharashtra will focus on several key projects:

• State-of-the-Art Compute Facilities: AWS plans to establish advanced computing facilities equipped with the latest technologies, including graphical processing units (GPUs) to enhance their cloud infrastructure.
• Cloud Management Services: The investment will also include the development of sophisticated cloud management services to support the growing demand for cloud solutions in India.
• Employment Growth: This investment is expected to create significant employment opportunities in the region, contributing to the local economy.
• Innovation City: AWS's investment aligns with Maharashtra's broader vision of becoming a global capital for data centers, as part of the state's AI-powered 'Innovation City' initiative.

These projects aim to bolster Maharashtra's position as a tech hub and drive economic growth in the region.

NeverInstall's Groundbreaking Cloud PC Revolution Secures $600K in Funding Led by Callapina Capital

NeverInstall has secured USD 600,000 in Seed round funding led by Callapina Capital, founded by Vinod Jose and Anas Rahman Junaid (Founder of Hurun India), with participation from Dholakia Ventures as well as existing investors Speciale Invest and Abhishek Goyal. NeverInstall specializes in Cloud PC and Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions enabling users to access internet computers directly from their browsers without the need for expensive hardware.

NeverInstall, co-founded by Ram Pasala and Lakshman Pasala, has introduced a Cloud PC that integrates hardware capabilities with browser-based VDIs, marking it as India’s first independently developed Cloud PC.

Lakshman Pasala, Co-Founder of NeverInstall, provided insight into the company’s strategy, stating, "Our objective is to offer users on-demand internet computers directly from their browsers. Over the past 18 months, we have experienced organic user growth, which has allowed us to focus on solving various engineering challenges. Our plan for the next 18 months includes initiating our go-to-market strategy, scaling the product, and open-sourcing several technologies developed inhouse."

Vinod Jose from Callapina Capital commented on the investment, "NeverInstall is on a mission to democratize access to software applications. Their technology allows users and enterprises to access sophisticated software applications directly from the cloud, with the browser as the operating system thus providing an alternative for those who have been hitherto limited by access to expensive hardware." For additional information, please visit NeverInstall.

Cloud Lending Platform Lentra Closes Series-B led by Bessemer Venture Partners, SIG and Citi Ventures, Transaction of $ 60 Mn

Funds to be used for product strengthening and international expansion

Lentra, the class leading Cloud lending platform, has closed its Series B funding round with a transaction value of USD 60 mn, led by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and SIG Venture Capital with participation from Citi Ventures. Masterkey Capital were the Investment Bankers. The funding will be used for products+platform strengthening and also for International expansion, including the USA.

D Venkatesh, Founder & CEO, Lentra said “We see a massive opportunity for ourselves in the retail assets and business banking areas worldwide. At the same time, our clients see us as a source of competitive advantage for their business. Ten-fold revenue growth and some of the biggest retail banks as our clients now, act as markers of our solution architecture. I am excited that our investors see the same opportunity and are confident of our ability to execute.”

The four-year-old technology startup is one of the fastest growing enterprise SaaS companies in India, empowering banks to embrace fully digital processes. Lentra Lending Cloud offers ready-to-use 3rd party API connectors to various data sources that banks crave to hook into. Several types of pre-configured loan journeys for originations, Loan management system, cutting-edge customer intelligence and a no-code Business rules engine (BREx) constitute some significant modules for clients to use out of the box. Clients can choose to use all or some of these modules as per their requirements.

“We’re excited to partner with Lentra to help establish their footprint globally. Lentra is empowering lenders to fuel the dreams of millions with effective financial inclusion and credit decisioning” said Vishal Gupta, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners. "We were really impressed with the combination of their technology prowess and the commercial advantage that Lentra is delivering to their clients. We look forward to helping them continue to achieve their vision of becoming the most trusted and sought after cloud-native digital lending platform, empowering clients in democratizing credit through accurate decisioning and rapid processing."

Bhavanipratap Rana, Investment Advisor to SIG said, “Banking lending software is an area where innovation has not kept pace with product releases, due to monolithic legacy software. Lentra through its modular lending cloud architecture has helped some of the largest banks in India democratize credit access by expanding into newer retail assets through instant configurable lending journeys."

We are excited to support Lentra which was SIG’s first Indian VC investment in 2019. Since SIG’s investment, Lentra has demonstrated superior metrics on revenue retention and grown 20x, while exhibiting strong capital efficiency. SIG is excited for Lentra’s next phase of growth as it embarks on serving global customers.”

Everett Leonidas, Director & APAC Lead Investor for Citi Ventures, added, “Lentra is our first fintech investment in India, and we are very excited about the team’s ability to develop and scale low-friction software solutions for lenders. As a global bank, we look forward to Lentra scaling their products and platform internationally.”

Lentra has been at the forefront of digital lending transformation since 2019. It has more than 50 clients in India and will be using the funding to expand overseas in Asia and the USA

About Lentra

Founded in 2018 by D Venkatesh and Ankur Handa, Lentra is a lending platform designed and developed to empower banks with a fully digital ecosystem. The Lentra lending cloud services more than 40 banks and processes over 3 million applications monthly. It has processed over 13 billion transactions and $21Bn worth of Loans on its platform so far.

Exclusive Networks Acquires Nuaware to Accelerate Cloud and DevOps Opportunities for Channel and Vendor Partners

Exclusive Networks today announced the acquisition of Nuaware, a hyper growth, born-in-the-cloud distributor at the bleeding edge of cloud, DevSecOps and containerisation. The move adds immediate global scale and services capability to the Nuaware proposition and portfolio, while enabling Exclusive Networks, its vendors and partner community with a unique skill set for capitalising on immense demand shifts brought about by digital transformation.

Jesper Trolle, CEO at Exclusive Networks said: "DevOps tool chains, containers and the emergence of DevSecOps are specialist areas where Nuaware has carved a truly unique niche in distribution. This acquisition puts us where we want to be in this space, giving our partners a readymade on-ramp into new high-growth opportunities. Large vendors being drawn to these markets are seeking turnkey channel solutions, and their established partner ecosystems have technical skills gaps that demand credible support. We can now meet these kinds of challenges far more effectively, while continuing to accelerate growth for the next waves of disruptive technologies in secure, trusted digital infrastructure.”

Nuaware was founded in 2016 by Zaheer Javaid and Luke Hasty and has grown exponentially since then through its work with vendors including HashiCorp, Docker Enterprise (now Mirantis), Instana, Portworx (recently acquired by Pure Storage) and Twistlock (now Palo Alto Networks Prisma Cloud). The company's London-based team, which works with both large service providers/systems integrators and a network of specialist DevOps consultancies on implementations around the world, will carry on operating as a distinct business unit under the Nuaware brand and continue to target disruptive new technologies and partnerships with emerging high-growth vendors such as, for example, Gremlin and StackPulse in areas such as chaos engineering and SRE automation. Its high-value services, including lead detection, business development, solution design, implementation, professional services and comprehensive training courses, will complement those from Exclusive Networks and vice versa.

Zaheer Javaid, Co-Founder and Director at Nuaware said: “We’re very pleased to be joining the Exclusive family and believe this is the best way to continue scaling up our proposition and bringing optimum value to all our customers and partners. The timing is right – the rapid onset of digital transformation among enterprises has got much faster in 2020, bringing Nuaware and the DevOps, cloud automation and containerisation technologies we specialise in, to an inflection point. With Exclusive’s support, we can aim higher, grow faster and invest more in extending our uniqueness in the market.”

“In terms of culture, attitude to innovation and the capacity to create unique value in the context of technology and market disruption, Nuaware is very much like Exclusive Networks,” said Andy Travers, EVP Worldwide Sales and Marketing at Exclusive Networks. “Teaming up this way is great news for partners of both companies, including the strategic vendors we have in common: Palo Alto Networks and Pure Storage. We anticipate significant organic growth from the Nuaware business by supporting its plans for continued expansion globally, and see many additional commercial benefits from extending their know-how across and into more opportunities with Exclusive Networks vendors and resellers.”

Cirium Sky – a new cloud solution provides an unrivaled 360-degree view of flight

A new managed cloud solution—Cirium Sky—has launched and provides the first 360-degree view of flights in real-time for the air operations sector.

 

This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20201117005361/en/

 

Cirium Sky unifies data in a managed cloud and provides an unrivalled 360-degree view of flight in real-time for the air operations sector. (Graphic: Business Wire)

Cirium Sky provides a single source of comprehensive aviation and air travel data which streamlines essential data-driven operations, planning and decision-making.

 

The solution leverages the vast portfolio of flight schedules, fleet, flight performance, aeronautical, system wide information management (SWIM), and traffic and fares datasets, derived from The Cirium Core – a unique mix of proprietary technologies, skills and processes at the heart of the business.

 

Cirium, the global aviation and air travel data and analytics company, combines data from The Cirium Core and critical contextual data that includes external factors, such as weather and air traffic control directives for more granular analytics and better operational control.

 

Ian Painter, VP of AirOps at Cirium said: “Cirium Sky, our first managed cloud solution, provides a wealth of data and historical and real-time intelligence in a single secure source to radically improve airlines business operations. 

By breaking down data silos in the industry and improving the access to the data, businesses using Cirium Sky can broaden their analyses to include global, regional and competitor insights. 

The impact of COVID-19 on air travel has made it more critical than ever for timely, accurate and complete information in a rapidly changing landscape.” 

Cirium Sky is a suite of Data-Management-as-a-Service (DMaaS) offerings, meaning data management strategies which use the cloud to deliver data storage, integration, processing and analytics services. 

Cirium can relieve industry analysts of the time-consuming and costly process of gathering, cleaning, hosting and managing data. This enables organizations to take charge of their in-house analytics and supports all the major business intelligence tools. 

This initial launch of Cirium Sky for air operations is only the first part of Cirium’s cloud-based innovation. The company will soon roll out tailored versions of Cirium Sky to key market segments within aviation.

  

By Adding Cloud Communication in Welding Process, IIT KGP with TCS Develop Novel Industry 4.0 Tech for Manufacturing Sector

IIT Kharagpur has developed novel Industry 4.0 technology for remotely controlled factory operations and real-time quality correction during industrial production, jointly with TCS to set a new trend in India’s advanced manufacturing sector.

At the time of pandemic when staffing has restrictions due to the hygiene and social distancing norms, cloud infrastructure, remote and real-time operations systems hold the key to maintain effective industrial operations. But the benefits of controlled operations have a bigger impact especially in the context of Atma Nirbhar Bharat in delivering quality output at low costs. The present innovation upgraded the industrial process of friction stir welding to a multi-sensory system of Industry 4.0. It has not only set the course for remotely controlled operations in the Indian industrial sector but has also enabled real-time quality check and correction during the production process. This will make possible for industrial houses to achieve standardized quality goals throughout the production process and reduce rejection hence lowering the cost of production.

Emphasizing on the need for such technologies to achieve the ‘Make in India’ goal, the Director Prof. Virendra K Tewari remarked, “While we are aiming to boost indigenous production and exports, our primary goal should be the quality output with minimum disruptions. Be it consumers in India or abroad, these are the two basic needs our industrial sector, which we must address for procuring orders in large volumes. At IIT Kharagpur’s Centre of Excellence in Advanced Manufacturing Technology, we have set our target to bring to the forefront indigenously developed industry 4.0 technologies to support our industrial sector to achieve this goal.”

The innovative technology developed by Prof. Surjya K Pal, Professor in-charge at the Centre of Excellence in Advanced Manufacturing Technology in association with TCS will acquire real-time information about the welding process through multiple sensors and enable online control of weld quality by means of cloud-based communication with the friction stir welding machine. 

Welding is at the heart of any industrial operations. If we can improve the weld quality in real-time during batch production we can reduce rejections in post production sample checks,” opined Prof. Pal. Explaining the new technology, he said, “Our multiple sensor process involves various signal processing and machine learning techniques to predict the ultimate tensile strength of the weld joint is fabricated. This technology is connected with a vast experimental knowledge base to conform to a standard system and prediction of the weld joint strength. Any defect identified during the monitoring procedure is corrected in real-time by sending modified parameters to the machine thus ensuring standardized quality of the process.

The concept of this technology can further be evolved for real-time control of other industrial processes and such work will be carried at the Centre with other industrial partners soon, affirmed Prof. Pal.

The Industry partner TCS views such an innovation has helped to give a direction as an enabler of technology based transformations in the country, especially in overcoming challenges called out by the pandemic. “The remote friction stir welding machine quality control via multi-sensor fusion developed by Centre of Excellence (CoE) in Advanced Manufacturing Technology at IIT Kharagpur is a case in point,” said K Ananth Krishnan, Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer. According to him, “The Embedded Systems & Robotics, IoT and ICME platform teams from TCS Research and Innovation are working closely with IIT Kharagpur’s CoE towards AI-driven prediction/control of weld strength using a scalable and robust platform. Academic partnerships are an important part of TCS Research and TCS Co Innovation Network (TCS CoIN) in creating real world solutions with scientific rigour.”

NITI Aayog launches India's 1st Amazon Web Services Cloud Innovation Center

To address societal challenges through digital innovation, NITI Aayog today announced the establishment of a Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center (CIC) with Amazon Web Services (AWS)—the first of its kind in India.

This CIC is part ofthe AWS CIC Global Program, which provides an opportunity for government agencies, non-profits, and educational institutions, to come together on pressing challenges, apply design thinking, test new ideas, and access the technology expertise of AWS.

“We are seeing public sector organizations around the world use cloud technology to innovate in a fast and agile manner, address problems at scale, and transform public services for citizens,” said Max Peterson, Vice President, International Sales, Worldwide Public Sector, Amazon Web Services, Inc. “Our Cloud Innovation Centers program is designed to be a catalyst for innovation in public sector, by bringing together technology experts to address challenges. We are excited to collaborate with NITI Aayog and support its public sector mission in India.”

‘We are delighted to collaborate with AWS in this endeavour. The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC will be a great enabler to budding innovators and start-ups, and help in piloting state-of-the-art, cloud-centric digital innovations by leveraging emerging technologies such as AI, IOT, robotics, blockchain, etc. It is also aligned to the Prime Minister’s vision of an Aatmanirbhar Bharat, as well that of NITI Aayog and Atal Innovation Mission,’ said AIM (Atal Innovation Mission) Mission Director R. Ramanan.

“The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies Cloud Innovation Center will enable government stakeholders, start-ups, and local organizations in India to innovate and create new approaches to solving problems,” said Anna Roy, Senior Adviser, NITI Aayog “Through the AWS CIC program, we now have the opportunity to experiment with the latest technology, and access world-class expertise that will help us advance citizen services, and better understand how frontier technologies can address the unique needs of our country," she added.

The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC addresses a core mission: to identify and deploy leading-edge technologies to drive continuous innovation in delivering citizen services. The center will identify and prioritize projects as well as collaborate with local leaders, including subject matter experts at the state and district levels, to solve critical challenges. Local enterprises, start-ups, researchers, and universities in India can experiment and build prototypes on AWS Cloud.

“With AWS Cloud, public sector organizations get the power of the broadest and deepest cloud services to accelerate their missions and make the world a better place,” said Rahul Sharma, Regional Head, AISPL Public Sector, AWS India and South Asia. “We are deeply committed to help public sector organizations in India achieve transformational economic and societal impact and look forward to sharing our global experiences to accelerate digital innovation in the country.”

The NITI Aayog Frontier Technologies CIC joins a global network of AWS public sector cloud innovation centers across Australia, Bahrain, Canada, France, Germany, South Korea, and United States. For more information about the Amazon Web Services Cloud Innovation Centers Program, visit https://aws.amazon.com/government-education/cloud-innovation-centers/.Amazon Internet Services Private Limited (AISPL) undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India.

Oz Firm Atlassian Launches $50 Mn Venture Fund to Tap India's Cloud Startup Ecosystem and Dev Community

The company looks to tap into India’s fledging startup and developer community

Atlassian Corporation Plc (NASDAQ:TEAM), a leading provider of team collaboration and productivity software and the maker of Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket and Trello products, has announced the launch of Atlassian Ventures, a new US$50 million fund that will invest into the up-and-coming startups, including established companies that are building products in the overall Atlassian ecosystem. The company which set up its world-class R&D centre in Bangalore last year and with plans to expand it further, is keen to interest India’s vibrant startup ecosystem and rich technical talent pool. 

Atlassian Ventures, with the objective of supporting cloud-based products and services will invest in three types of companies. Firstly, the early-stage startups, who are building apps for any of Atlassian’s cloud products, whether it be - Jira, Confluence, Bitbucket or Trello. Secondly, the larger, more established ecosystem product partners scaling their businesses. These investments will be made in partnership with institutional investors and will generally target series A onwards. And finally, the existing sales channel partners looking to step up their cloud services and create new products that support the future of teamwork.

On the company being extremely bullish about the India market, Dinesh Ajmera, Site Lead and Head of Engineering, Bengaluru, Atlassian said, “Atlassian Ventures is a global program with the objective of supporting cloud-based products and services and unleashing the potential of teams all over the world. With India’s cloud market among the largest in the Asia Pacific region, we believe this fund will be an ideal opportunity for up-and-coming startups in India to access funding when building apps for our cloud products. India is a significant market for Atlassian, one that’s teeming with an extraordinary developer community and a vibrant startup ecosystem that we plan to tap into.”

“We have kept the applications open to our existing Marketplace Partners and developers, as well as new-to-Atlassian app developers who are looking for the first funding for their start-ups. As part of this program, companies that receive funding are also eligible for mentorship as well as global exposure at Atlassian events,” he further added.

As more and more customers transition to Atlassian’s cloud products, the company is committed to supporting their journey by fostering a robust ecosystem of cloud-based apps that enhance their experience and satisfy all use cases. Atlassian has 4,200+ apps already available in its Marketplace and offers integrations with popular tools like Slack, Zendesk, and GitHub.

To further consolidate its offerings and capabilities, the company has recently acquired a slew of companies in the ecosystem, which include Code Barrel (the company behind Automation for Jira), Mindville and Halp – the creator of Slack.

Atlassian serves more than 174,000 customers worldwide and has been named a “Best Place to Work” by Great Place to Work Institute in every market where they have a staff presence.

About Atlassian

Atlassian unleashes the potential of every team. Our team collaboration and productivity software helps teams organize, discuss, and complete shared work. Teams at more than 174,000 customers, across large and small organizations - including General Motors, Walmart Labs, Bank of America Merrill Lynch, Lyft, Verizon, Spotify and NASA - use Atlassian’s project tracking, content creation and sharing, and service management products to work better together and deliver quality results on time. Learn more about our products, including Jira Software, Confluence, Trello, Bitbucket, Opsgenie, Jira Service Desk, and Jira Align at https://atlassian.com/.

IIT Roorkee inks MoU with C-DAC to Establish 1.3 Petaflop High-Performance Computing Facility for Research and Development

The initiative will be funded under the National Supercomputing Mission and aims to foster cutting-edge research in the discipline

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Roorkee has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Centre for Development in Advanced Computing(C-DAC) to establish a state-of the art 1.3 Petaflop High Performance Computing (1.3PF-HPC) Facility to facilitate research and development activities in the presence of Hon'ble Union Minister of State for Education, Communication and Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India Shri Sanjay Dhotre.

The MoU was signed between Prof. Ajit K. Chaturvedi, Director on behalf of IIT Roorkee and Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General on behalf of CDA. The objective of the MoU is to ensure the Supply, Installation, Commissioning and Operations of state-of-the-art HPC facility and Data Center ecosystem at IIT Roorkee. It is valid for five years. The initiative will be funded under the National Supercomputing Mission- a joint initiative of the Department of Science and Technology (DST) and Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY).

"The National Supercomputing Mission underscores our commitment to fulfill the goal of AatmaNirbhar Bharat. It is a key enabler to prepare a skilled workforce, generate job opportunities and contribute to India's economy. Potential collaborations with international organizations and industry bodies to foster a world-class indigenous research ecosystem in the supercomputing technology is also being explored" said Hon'ble Union Minister of State for Education, Communication and Electronics and Information Technology, Government of India Shri Sanjay Dhotre

"A 1.3 PF supercomputing facility will greatly boost our ability to carry out research on several interesting engineering and science problems. It will also improve our ability to attract more sponsored funding. We were waiting for such high computing power since long and are delighted that finally it has come" said Prof. Ajit K Chaturvedi, Director, IIT Roorkee

Prof. Manoranjan Parida, Deputy Director and Head, Institute Computer Centre, IIT Roorkee said "Supercomputing has the potential to address complex global challenges. The initiative underscores our commitment to foster a top-notch tech-driven research ecosystem and set a benchmark in academic excellence"

According to the MoU, IIT Roorkee will contribute towards the NSM in areas of Application and System Software Environment, capacity-building and training of the manpower required for the Supercomputing Research across the nation. It will be mandated to make the HPC facility commissioned under this project for the faculty and students for academic and research purposes.

IIT Roorkee is currently ranked at 6th position in National Institute Ranking Framework (NIRF) and has been involved in high-level research and making a remarkable contribution to the R&D in engineering and science. The new research facility 1.3PF-HPC would aid researchers to solve complex problems using large amounts of data. The new HPC will serve as an essential compute environment for the modern-day research along with their theoretical and experimental work. Some of the major research areas requiring extensive use of HPC envisaged at IIT Roorkee are Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Deep Learning, Molecular Dynamics, Life Sciences and Bioinformatics, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Weather research and forecasting, Data Sciences, Geosciences, Ground motion simulation, Computational Chemistry, Computational Material Science and Nanomaterials and many more.

CDAC will work closely with IIT Roorkee for the installation and commissioning of the HPC systems and data center equipment and offer suggestions and guidance in its maintenance and optimal utilization.

Dr. Hemant Darbari, Director General, C-DAC and an alumnus of IIT Roorkee mentioned that "IIT Roorkee is an institution par excellence and is renowned globally for its technical expertise. We are proud to partner with them in our endeavour to empower the faculty, research scholars and students with a High-End Computational Resource (1.66 Petaflops Supercomputing Facility) with Make-In-India components to accelerate research and innovation in science and engineering. Our Mission is to Establish Dependable and Secure Exa-Scale Eco-system with innovative designs, disruptive technologies and Expert Human resource."

He further added "Our goal is to develop indigenous Hardware encompassing Exascale Chip Design, Design and Manufacture of Exascale Server Boards, Exascale Interconnects and Storage including Silicon-Photonics in line with Atmanirbhar Bharat to achieve complete Self Reliance".

The MoU also mandates both institutions to constitute a Joint Working Group (JWG) to plan, implement, monitor and review the progress of various activities from time-to-time. Both parties will also be entrusted to showcase the facility and handle visits to the facility for educational purposes. IIT Roorkee and CDAC will also jointly prepare the Request for Proposal (RFP) for the Datacenter project and execute it as well.

The National Supercomputing Mission was launched in India in 2015 with an objective to attain self-reliance and enhance global competitiveness in the supercomputing technology and to establish state-of-the-art facilities to foster cutting-edge research in the discipline. The Mission aims to install all the supercomputers by 2022. India's first supercomputer- PARAM 8000 was established in 1990. India embarked on its first HPC mission in 1988 and established the first Giga scale computer- PARAM 8000 in 1990.

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing is the premier organization of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for carrying out research and development in IT, Electronics and associated areas. It is an autonomous Scientific Society registered under the Societies Registration Act 1860 and the Bombay Public Trusts Act 1950.

About C-DAC

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) is the premier R&D organization of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) for carrying out R&D in IT, Electronics and associated areas. Different areas of C-DAC, had originated at different times, many of which came out as a result of the identification of opportunities.

About IIT Roorkee (https://www.iitr.ac.in/)

IIT Roorkee is an institute of national importance imparting higher education in engineering, sciences, management, architecture and planning, and humanities and social sciences. Since its establishment in 1847, the Institute has played a vital role in providing technical human resources and know-how to the country.

Arka Venture Labs Invests in Nirmata to Accelerate Mainstream Adoption of Cloud-native Technologies

Kubernetes management company secures funding from Arka Venture Labs to accelerate regional cloud-native adoption

Nirmata, the Day 2 Kubernetes company, is excited to announce venture investment from Arka Venture Labs, a fund that provides capital and mentorship to global B2B companies. This new investment will allow Nirmata to accelerate regional APAC expansion, across engineering, support, sales and market, securing its position as a leading pure-play Kubernetes management platform.

As enterprise- adoption of cloud-native technologies accelerates, they encounter significant challenges in Day 2 operations due to steep learning curves, infrastructure complexity and rapidly changing business requirements. A significant amount of time and effort is spent on ongoing operations of Kubernetes clusters and applications. This problem is compounded by rapid increase in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, especially in recent times.  

Nirmata enables enterprises to eliminate this undifferentiated heavy lifting, allowing precious development and operations resources to focus on delivering mission critical applications that delight customers. Recently, Nirmata in partnership with Amazon announced a new product offering, the Nirmata EKS Manager, which eliminates several Day 2 challenges faced by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service users. Nirmata EKS Manager is available in the AWS marketplace.

“My co-founders and I started Nirmata to democratize cloud-native technologies.”, says Jim Bugwadia who is a founder and the CEO of Nirmata. “As developers across the globe adopt Kubernetes, Nirmata is well positioning to solve the cloud-native application management complexities across multiple Kubernetes clusters and cloud providers, without lock-in and unnecessary abstractions.”

Arka Venture Labs invests in B2B tech companies between India and the US corridor. In addition to providing capital, the group works closely with the companies by providing expert mentorship, networking opportunities, infrastructure support and connections to valley ecosystems.

We liked the strong credentials of the founders and their ability to provide a complete solution to solve the Day 2 Kubernetes problem of some of the Fortune 500 companies with their patented platform. says Radhesh Kanumury, Managing Partner, Arka Venture Labs.

Nirmata was started by Jim Bugwadia, Ritesh Patel and Damien Toledo, a team with more than 50 years of experience building enterprise products that simplify IT operations. The Nirmata team has been helping enterprises deliver and support cloud-native applications for more than six years. 

About the Company

Nirmata is a unified management plane for Kubernetes clusters and workloads built for enterprise DevOps teams. Nirmata enables self-service cluster provisioning, provides visibility, health, metrics, and alerts, ensures compliance via workload policies, and streamlines application deployments across clusters. 

About the Venture
Arka Venture Labs is the first of its kind India-US cross-border accelerator fund that has been launched with three VC firms coming in as Anchor LPs. They are Blume Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), and Emergent Ventures. They are open to B2B startups with a strong growth in the US, backed by strong core technology and economic differentiators.  It started 2 years back and has invested in 9 companies so far

IBM: Organizations in India to Spend Nearly Half of Their Cloud Budget on Hybrid Over the Next Three Years

• The value derived from hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud, survey reveals 


• Public cloud spend to reduce from 50 percent share today to 43 percent by 2023


• By 2023, Indian organizations expect to be using an average of 10 clouds, however, only 29 percent of businesses have holistic multi-cloud management strategies in place

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Tech Trends revealed in the survey:

• Globally, 64% of advanced cloud companies recognize the need for enterprise transformation and application modernization to go hand-in-hand, 2.6 times higher than the respondents from India


• Globally, 68% of businesses on advanced cloud journey are building an open-source cloud platform, compared to 46% of India respondents


• The survey report identifies businesses that recognize the strategic importance of Cloud, which comprise 13 percent of the global survey respondents, two percent of which are from India, as ‘Cloud Aviators’


• Organizations in India expect to be using at least 10 clouds from a growing number of vendors by 2023 but only 29 percent of businesses have a holistic multi-cloud management strategy


• 31% of IT executives in India say they are seeking Cloud Management Platforms for improved visibility and to control their cloud costs


• Enterprises in India are seeking an application development platform that can run on any cloud, workloads that can execute seamlessly across multiple clouds


• Indian executives get over 2.6x of their investment in cloud management over a period of 10 years.

Business executives in India are increasingly planning to invest in hybrid multi-cloud platform strategies and capabilities to drive business transformation and to unlock value, reveals an IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV) survey. The IBV surveyed Indian and global executives across industries to gain an in-depth understanding of their organizations’ current use of hybrid cloud, multi-cloud and their approach to multi-cloud management for the report titled, ‘The hybrid cloud platform advantage: A guiding star to enterprise transformation in India.’

According to the survey respondents, 17 percent of their IT spend is allocated to cloud at present and they plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid from 42 percent to 49 percent by 2023. The majority of their cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms even as their public cloud spend is set to reduce from 50 percent share today to 43 percent by 2023. Most industries will exhibit growth in the number of clouds they will deploy, which can go up to 10 clouds particularly in insurance, telecommunications and retail as these industries will continue to expand multiple cloud deployments in the next three years.

Further, the study confirmed the return on investment (ROI) of a platform approach as respondents said that the value derived from a full hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor approach. In fact, the platform approach is cited as accelerating value with scale.

Commenting on the survey insights, Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice President, IBM Cloud and Cognitive Software and Services, IBM India/South Asia said, “The adoption of cloud has been a central feature in developing new, digitally-driven business models. Interestingly, the findings show that hybrid multi-cloud is the fundamental enabler of an organization’s operating model, helping them to embark on a journey to become a Cognitive Enterprise of the future. Further, Hybrid Cloud enables improved business performance and greater ROI. This is proven in the instance of leading businesses that have successfully achieved demonstrable competitive advantage through robust hybrid cloud management and governance platform.

In India, leading businesses such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are achieving business transformation by leveraging hybrid multi-cloud platform technology and embedding AI. We are betting big on Hybrid Cloud which is secure, interoperable, open and free from vendor lock-in.”

The survey was conducted from February to April 2020 by the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics and covered 6,000 executives globally including 412 executives from India, across industries, job titles and geographies.

Download the full survey reports from here http://ibm.co/hybrid-cloud-platform-india

Shivaami Cloud Services and ICICI Bank Collaborate to Launch Cloud Business Coupled with Transaction Banking API Solutions for Indian SMEs

Shivaami Cloud Services and ICICI Bank today announced their industry first collaboration to launch Cloud based products bundled with transaction banking API solutions in India. To broaden access to cloud technologies and help small and medium enterprises in India digitize, the solution provides a suite of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications including Google Suite for communication and efficient collaboration among teams, Google Cloud Platform (GCP) for hosting and storage, FreshSales for effective customer relationship managements helping businesses interact with existing and potential customers, FreshDesk for providing customer support and FreshMarketer for Email Marketing. Along with these, businesses can streamline their accounting transactions by using API Banking services from ICICI Bank in a frictionless manner.

Companies can accelerate their growth and adopt the cloud way without putting a dent to their cash flow. Powered by API Banking services from ICICI Bank, they can easily integrate their ERPs where day to day transactions can be done in a secured and automated way with end to end instant reconciliations.

Punit Thakkar, Founder & CEO, Shivaami said, "Computing capabilities on the cloud are transforming the online business environment, enabling businesses to run faster, more efficiently and at a reduced cost. Driven on digital platforms, small and medium businesses hold a lot of opportunities to expand their services and improve everyday operations. Our partnership with ICICI Bank has helped us remain committed to providing the latest technology with an endeavor to fulfill customer needs and contribute to their growth journey."

Speaking on the initiative, Mr. Pankaj Gadgil, Head Self Employed Segment, ICICI Bank said, “At ICICI Bank we believe that ‘ease of doing business’ and ‘digitisation’ are the two growth enablers for the MSME businesses. Our tie-up with Shivaami is yet another initiative to enable our MSME customers to scale up their digitisation in a rapid and seamless manner. It offers ICICI Bank’s MSME customers access to attractively priced packages for availing world class cloud infrastructure services. This in-turn will help them to use the APIs available on the ICICI Bank Developer portal and rapidly add to their digitisation, without investing in setting up large IT infrastructure like physical servers. We believe that this access to new technology will help MSMEs improve their operational efficiencies, thereby accelerating themselves to grow and enhance their business.”

• G Suite: G Suite is an exclusive integrated suite of cloud tools that provide productivity and agility in business operations. It comprises Gmail, Drive, Docs, Calendar and more.


• Google Cloud Platform: Services and infrastructure that enable you to develop and deploy scalable applications and websites.


• Freshsales: A cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) solution. It helps businesses manage their interactions with existing and potential customers. Key features include one-click phone, sales lead tracking, sales management, event tracking and more.


• Freshdesk: A cloud-based customer support software and helpdesk solution. It is a platform with a comprehensive set of tools and features to help businesses support all the needs of their customers. Companies around the world use it to deliver exceptional customer service and experience.


• Freshmarketer: An all-in-one conversion rate optimization platform from the Freshworks productivity suite. It is built to help businesses improve their online presence and boost lead conversions using robust marketing functionalities that focus on analytics.

ICICI Bank’s API Banking portal consists of 250 banking APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) which enables developers of prospective companies to seamlessly sign up on it, create an application, select the application, test it out and get the sample code. With this, businesses, fintechs, corporates and e-commerce start-ups can easily partner with the Bank and co-create innovative customer solutions in a smooth manner, all from the convenience of a single portal. The usage of ‘ICICI Bank API Banking Portal’ simplifies the process of digital collaboration for a company with the Bank and reduces the time taken to develop a business solution to a few days. This significantly raises productivity for partner companies. The portal hosts the maximum number of virtual APIs put together by any Indian Bank.

MrOwl and the Coronavirus; How it Helps You be Productive in the New Reality

Coronavirus (COVID-19) cases in India are steadily growing. With over 300,000 cases, it has already surpassed countries such as the UK, Spain, and Italy in terms of the total number of those infected. The government is slowly easing most restrictions to restart the economy and continue the livelihood of people. With a rapidly slowing economy, it is expected that the restrictions will be eased further and that people will need to be prepared to live with coronavirus for the foreseeable future.

MrOwl, a Social Cloud Storage™ platform that combines search, social, and digital organization, offers comprehensive resources and tools to enable you to safeguard yourself and continue being productive in the modern world. On MrOwl, users can store all their digital content in one place by creating public or private collections of information called "branches" that can be organized with subtopics, links, documents, and media.

MrOwl offers a host of free resources for various aspects of living your new normal life under this pandemic. Quarantine Survival Guide has been one of the tops visited resources for surviving during the lockdown. It has been a constant digital companion to a lot of people. During Unlock 1.0 onwards, you may be expected to still be working from home. The Work from Home section has great for effectively working from home. You can also get used to your new everyday lives by making your mask to match your attire and even learn how to sanitize it.

Within the MrOwl Business Community there is an immense number of resources that can assist in improving your business strategy. Any entrepreneur or business can start or improve their business plan by researching and uploading gigabytes of data from their computer or cloud storage. With a just few clicks, MrOwl will automatically organize files into a useable, searchable, and shareable resource that employees and clients can access. Businesses can manage various aspects of their business on MrOwl including the storage of digital resources, sharing business information, passing instructions to employees, and receiving reports.

For those who are facing issues with retrenchment or struggling with their job, they may find MrOwl Community pages on Unemployment and Finding a Job very useful. You can also check out resources for creating an effective resume and applying it effectively. There are also resources on being self-employed.

Arvind Raichur, CEO, and Co-founder of MrOwl had shared his support and encouragement for everyone trying to get back their lives after the lockdown. He said, "Coronavirus numbers are increasing steadily. We need to become self-vigilant and do everything to prevent ourselves from being affected by this terrible epidemic. However, we also need to adjust to the changes to our living environment and get on with our lives. For both professional and personal, MrOwl offers excellent resources and a place where users can both be productive and escape reality with interesting content."

MrOwl is a Social Cloud Storage™ platform that brings together the best of search, social, and cloud storage all in one app. With free, unlimited cloud storage for content that you share with the world, consumers build collections, called "branches", with subtopics, links, documents, and media. Users can upload gigabytes of data with a few clicks and have it automatically organized into a MrOwl "branch" that is shareable and searchable. Now you can save it once, and search it infinitely. Simultaneously search the cloud, your computer, and the internet altogether, because they all belong in one search box. Plus, you can come to find what other users have shared on MrOwl. It's never been easier to connect and collaborate with endless communities and discover what others have shared. MrOwl offers a free tier with up to 10GB's of private storage and free unlimited storage for content that is shared to the world.

*MrOwl also offers premium plans for more storage, increased user privacy, and an ad-free environment.

*Free unlimited files stored in public branches up to 20MB per file. See the terms for full details.

Intellect Launches iTurmeric FinCloud; Will Deliver Offerings Through IBM’s Financial Services-Ready Public Cloud

 

• Intellect, an IBM partner, is one of the first Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers on-boarding its offerings to the IBM financial services-ready public cloud.

 

• With the API-first architecture, iTurmeric FinCloud, the first-of-its kind enterprise integration, cloud- native platform enables banks to progressively modernise while ensuring business continuity without the risk of rip and replacement

 

Intellect Design Arena Ltd., a global leader and the world’s first full spectrum banking and insurance products company, introduced iTurmeric FinCloud – its future-ready, cloud-ready, API-first, microservices-based platform – available today on IBM public cloud, the industry’s most secure and open public cloud for business. Additionally, Intellect Design Arena Ltd is one of the first financial services ISVs onboarding their offerings to the financial services-ready public cloud, once available, to provide its powerful industry solutions to leading financial institutions around the world, while addressing security and compliance readiness, and resiliency.

As global financial institutions continue to embark on their fast-paced digital journeys, it is imperative they leverage cloud-based fintech solutions to mitigate the business challenges arising from changing market conditions and meet customer expectations. Intellect’s iTurmeric FinCloud empowers banks to prioritise their operating models and focus on innovation to offer their customers a gamut of tailored-made products. By offering iTurmeric FinCloud on IBM financial services-ready public cloud, Intellect extends its presence in advanced and emerging economies by offering financial institutions innovative cloud-based solutions to accelerate their digital transformation journey. 

Commenting about the partnership, Arun Jain, Chairman and Managing Director of Intellect Design Arena Limited said, "We at Intellect are excited to collaborate with our long-standing partner IBM, to deliver innovative financial services solutions to establish viable platforms for the next era in banking through their financial services-ready public cloud." Speaking about the API-first "iTurmeric FinCloud", on this occasion, Arun said that, "Most of the banks across the world are still saddled with legacy platforms which are hampering them from participating in the experience economy. iTurmeric FinCloud will give these banks a very novel and unique way of progressively modernising, using Turmeric tools without the risk of rip and replacement. Today iTurmeric FinCloud already has retail banking, lending, origination, and Corporate banking API and Turmeric API manager to create new relevant user journeys on the fly. We will continue to add relevant API's."

He further added, "Our collaboration with IBM was a natural progression to help financial institutions address today's economic pressures around regulation, security and resiliency. IBM’s market penetration and range of services are the perfect complements for our product expertise."

Commenting about the partnership with Intellect, Shanker Ramamurthy, GM Strategy & Market Development: Global Industries, Platforms & Blockchain, IBM said, “We are pleased to continue our engagement with Intellect and support its journey to bring iTurmeric to the IBM financial services-ready public cloud.”

He further added, “IBM is committed to helping clients overcome the challenges of the financial services industry, including the need for continuous compliance, security and resiliency. By bringing Intellect’s iTurmeric FinCloud platform to the financial services-ready public cloud, we’re helping drive innovation throughout the industry."

Intellect Design is part of the IBM public cloud ecosystem, a new initiative to support global system integrators and independent software vendors to help clients modernise and transform mission-critical workloads on the IBM public cloud. This initiative will support onboarding to the IBM financial services-ready public cloud, including guidance through a prescriptive implementation and evidence process to help deliver Intellect Design offerings.

Built on the robust principles of Design Thinking at the R&D Innovation Lab at Intellect US, iTurmeric  FinCloud, the first-of-its kind enterprise integration, API-first, cloud-native platform has Retail banking, Lending, Origination, Corporate banking API's and Turmeric API Studio to create new relevant user journeys on the fly. The discrete nature of these APIs means that newer systems can be put in place without impacting mission-critical legacy infrastructure. With iTurmeric FinCloud, new digital banks' systems can be tested and run in isolation or in parallel with core legacy systems, which can, in turn, continue to run without interruption or compromise. 

Statements regarding IBM’s future direction and intent are subject to change or withdrawal without notice, and represent goals and objectives only.

About Intellect Design Arena Limited

Intellect Design Arena Ltd., a global leader when it comes to applying true digital technology, is the world’s first financial tech company that covers the entire spectrum of banking and insurance needs with its wide suite of products. It does so via its four lines of business, namely, Global Consumer Banking, iGTB (Global Transaction Banking), Risk, Treasury and Markets, and Insurance Software. With over 25 years of deep domain expertise, today Intellect is a brand name that progressive financial institutions look to for their digital needs and for digital transformation initiatives. 

Intellect pioneered Design Thinking for cutting-edge banking and insurance products and solutions, with that being the company’s salient differentiator when enabling digital transformation. FinTech 8012, the world’s first design centre for financial technology, reflects Intellect’s commitment to continuous and impactful innovation, such that the growing need for digital transformation may be aptly addressed and answered. Intellect generates annual revenues of more than USD 208 million, by serving more than 200 customers through offices in 90+ countries. For further information about the company and the various solutions it offers, please visit https://www.intellectdesign.com/.

Blockchain Firm Zebi launches Zebi Secure Cloud, A Forensically Monitored and Secured Cloud Infrastructure

Zebi, a full-stack core-blockchain company founded by Silicon Valley veterans, has today announced the launch of Zebi Secure Cloud. Zebi uses its blockchain related patents into this data logging and integrity management system for cloud forensics, thus enabling a forensically monitored approach to secure cloud data and infrastructure.

Data breaches are rapidly growing every day, even though organizations are making enormous efforts and considerable investments in securing their data. Cloud security is absolutely critical in today's world to make sure your organization doesn't become vulnerable to cyber-attacks and data theft. Although many solutions have been proposed for cyber security incidents, but it is still difficult to collect evidence in most cases. Logs are routinely deleted as part of malicious attacks, by both internal and external users, as the security threats are increasing and attack methods are becoming more diverse. Statistically, less than 40% of breaches are ever detected, of which more than 70% can't be conclusively analyzed due to deleted or tampered evidence, in the form of logs, files, etc.

Zebi Secure Cloud, maintains data in a digitally indestructible container on every system, much like a flight recorder on aircrafts. In the case of an event, this can be retrieved at any time to provide an analysis of what actually happened. The product uses a blockchain based data logging and integrity management system empowering organisations to (1) Forensically logging events (2) Advanced monitoring and analytics (3) Integrated Data encryption as a service (4) Backup & Recovery.

Zebi Secure Cloud not only monitor events leading up to the incident, but also permit the analysis of logs during and after a security event. It uses machine learning for log analysis, and flag suspicious activities in real time crucial for fast, effective monitoring, streamlining root cause analysis and reduce false positives for IT operational intelligence.

“Zebi Secure cloud is an enterprise product built over the past few months with our research in the blockchain space. We have just completed beta testing with some marquee customers and the product is going into production now. Blockchain as space is nascent, but evolving quickly and while there has been regulatory uncertainty in government opportunities, we are seeing certain use cases ramp up. We are very excited and are positive about this billion dollar opportunity,” said the newly appointed Zebi CEO, Pruthvi Rao.

Sudheer Kuppam, newly appointed Chairman, Zebi said, “We are excited to announce the launch of Zebi Secure Cloud. It is the result of our R&D alongside our valued partners and customers. With Zebi Secure Cloud, enterprises can enhance their business by enabling a forensically monitored approach to secure cloud data and infrastructure., transparently and securely than ever before.”

Zebi Secure Cloud enables real-time alerts using Cognitive Insights and Predictive Alerts, a unique alert system when aided with scheduled and real-time reporting, learns and upgrades based on intelligence from various security events.

Paving a strong growth plan for Zebi, the board has taken a strategic decision of elevating Prutvi Rao to the position of CEO from COO.

About Zebi

Zebi is a full-stack core-blockchain company founded by Silicon Valley veterans. Full-stack means that Zebi operates in the entire blockchain ecosystem – infrastructure and products. Core blockchain means that Zebi does not offer any other service apart from the blockchain.

Zebi Public Blockchain (Zebi Mainnet) is a public blockchain designed to be a multi-chain and multi-token platform built on Cosmos, with Zapp (Zebi Dapps) development, facilitating libraries for several data and security use cases. Zebi Chain 2.1 is an enterprise-grade private blockchain platform that is far superior to any open source offering. It is now live in 5+ enterprises and government customers. Zapps are Zebi's products that are built on top of its public and private chains with specialized IP/modules for each use case and the business vertical. Zebi has 20+ PoCs, 5+ live products, 40+ customers, and 2 Million+ digital records blockchained.

Public Cloud Computing Can Add $100 Bn, 2.4 Lakh Jobs to Indian Economy by 2023: Report

Deployment of the public cloud computing system can add around USD 100 billion to the Indian economy and generate 2.4 lakh direct jobs by 2023, a report released on Wednesday said.

"Public cloud deployments in India have the potential to contribute approximately USD 100 billion in GDP (gross domestic product) cumulatively from 2019 to 2023. When annualised, this is equivalent to 0.6 per cent of GDP and 15 per cent of the GDP impact of the IT industry and 25 per cent of the textile industry in India," the Google Cloud-BCG joint report said.

According to the report, manufacturers and financial institutions are still in the early stages of public cloud adoption due to the perceived complexity of migrating legacy data and evolving government regulations around data and security.

"Traditional retailers are expanding into e-commerce to capture digital and omnichannel revenue growth, and they are turning to the public cloud to help them scale up quickly and handle peak loads during special sales like Diwali," Google Cloud Asia Pacific managing director Rick Harshman said.

He also said that access to cloud-based smart data analytics solutions also enables retailer customers to become more customer-centric and data-driven so they can optimise their spend across channels, plan inventory and manage their supply chains.

According to the report, the business efficiencies and growth resulting from public cloud deployments have the potential to generate up to 2.4 lakh jobs and impact another 7,43,000 jobs through second order effects from 2019 to 2023.

"Of the 2,40,000 direct jobs, around 1,57,000 will be in digital and technology-related roles such as data scientists, product managers, engineering, design, user experience and infrastructure management jobs with cloud service providers, IT service providers and across industry verticals," the report said.

The public cloud deployment will create another 83,000 direct roles that will be related to core business functions across industry verticals, the report said. PTI PRS

Healthtech Firm In-Med Prognostics launches Brain Quantifying Analytics Tool 'NEUROShield'

In-Med Prognostics, a health tech company developing AI based brain health diagnostic and prognostic tools, launched NEUROShield, a cloud-based Clinical Decision Support Tool for neurological disorders. The hospitals and clinics deploying this technology stand to benefit as it leverages clinical decision support mechanisms to take early calls for preventive health. The analysis of NEUROShield enables actionable, quantitative, objective decision making to the neuro-physicians for differential diagnosis. The NeuroShield technology uses pattern recognition and deep learning for the development of clinical biomarkers for early prognosis and differential diagnosis.

In-Med Prognostics already has strategic alliances with like-minded hospitals that have agreed to collaborate and leverage the use of NEUROShield for the benefit of patients across geographies. Some of these hospitals and screening centers are Sahyadri Hospital, Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital, Arthi diagnostic center, NM Medical, P.H diagnostic Center and Noble Hospital, among others.

NEUROShield, powered by state-of-the-art AI, utilizes 3D based MRI images to their full potential by extracting data and providing volumetric analysis for the brain and its various structures. Use of cutting edge, AI technology enables them to perform analysis, on both Indian and Caucasian brains, thus unlocking a global scalability potential for their platform.

Dr. Latha Poonamallee, Co-founder and chairperson, In-Med Prognostics, says, “I am delighted to be leading this effort in developing a global gold standard product right here in India to serve the world at large”.

Rajesh Purushottam, Co-founder, InMed Prognostics, said, “The launch of NEUROShield is a step closer towards making mental health more acceptable by dissolving the stigma around it and making it more acceptable across age groups and geographies. Our aim with this initiative is to make brain screening mainstream like any other diagnostic screening available today."

Mr. Rahul Kulkarni from Deenanath Mangeshkar Hospital in Pune, shares his opinion that, “I have started using NEUROShield in my clinical practice in patients with neurological disorders. While a traditional 2D MRI imaging provides only a limited understanding of mild atrophy changes, NEUROShield provides differential diagnosis on visualization and volumetric analysis of 3D MRI images. This analysis could help in assessing conditions like MCI, dementia, MS, epilepsy, and TB more efficiently and arrive at optimal evidence-based clinical decisions.”

In-med Prognostics, incorporated in early 2018, is committed to bringing affordable, accessible, reliable and data-driven brain health diagnostics and prognostics tools to India and other emerging markets. Their team has experts in Medical Image Analysis, Deep Learning, and Bio-Medical Engineering. The consultants and Scientific Advisory Board of In-Med Prognostics have experts from the field, including some of India's Leading Neuro-Physicians, Radiologists and Psychiatrists.

Early last year, the company received a Biotechnology Ignition Grant of Rs. 50 lakhs for a duration of 18 months from the Biotechnology Industry Research Assistance Council (BIRAC) that was used to develop technology that will label, visualize, and quantify the volumes of brain structures using 3D MRI images. Also, they were recognized globally as one of the top 50 health care companies around the world by International Forum on Advancements in Healthcare (IFAH).

New Consortium to Develop a Common Computing Platform for Autonomous Vehicles

Leading companies from the automotive and computing industries announced at last week a collaborative effort toward making fully self-driving vehicles a reality. The new Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), officially launched at Arm TechCon in San Jose, brings together industry leaders from automotive, automotive supply, semiconductor and computing to serve as the leading organization for autonomous computing expertise.

• A group of leading automotive and technology industry companies including a, Bosch, Continental, DENSO, General Motors, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors and Toyota have joined forces to help accelerate the delivery of safer and affordable autonomous vehicles at scale.


• Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC) commits to making fully self-driving vehicles a reality through industry-level collaboration.


• The AVCC will start its work by developing a set of recommendations of a system architecture and a computing platform to promote scalable deployment of automated and autonomous vehicles.

Leading companies from the automotive and computing industries announced at last week a collaborative effort toward making fully self-driving vehicles a reality. The new Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium (AVCC), officially launched at Arm TechCon in San Jose, brings together industry leaders from automotive, automotive supply, semiconductor and computing to serve as the leading organization for autonomous computing expertise. Together with the consortium’s growing membership, the initial AVCC members Arm, Bosch, Continental, DENSO, General Motors, NVIDIA, NXP Semiconductors and Toyota will collaborate to help solve some of the most significant challenges to deploy self-driving vehicles at scale.

The first step toward achieving this vision and the common objective of AVCC is to develop a set of recommendations of a system architecture and a computing platform that reconciles the performance requirements of autonomous systems with the vehicle-specific requirements and limitations in terms of size, temperature range, power consumption and safety. These recommendations will be specially developed to move autonomous vehicles from today’s prototype systems to deployment at scale.

Member companies understand the technological complexities and obstacles to overcome for the deployment of autonomous vehicles. They aim to work together to enable solutions that address these challenges and create an ecosystem of industry experts to focus on innovations that to meet these goals. Working groups will share ideas and study common technological challenges, facilitating cross-industry collaboration to help the automotive industry work together by defining, educating and publishing for the benefit of all.

AVCC calls on all interested parties, and members of the automotive ecosystem worldwide to accept the challenge to build the future of the industry one milestone at a time, one breakthrough at a time while sharing with the technical community each one of those important advances.

To learn more about the Autonomous Vehicle Computing Consortium and opportunities to support the mission of accelerating the delivery of safe and affordable autonomous vehicles at scale.

“The future of mobility and the safe, scalable deployment of advanced driver assistance systems to fully autonomous vehicles for mass production requires unprecedented industry collaboration,” said Dipti Vachani, senior vice president and general manager, Automotive and IoT Line of Business, Arm. “The AVCC brings together leaders from across the automotive industry landscape to tackle complex foundational technological and computing challenges to accelerate our path to a truly autonomous future.”

“As well as the development of hardware, there is a large and sophisticated autonomous vehicle software stack required,” said Michael Meier, director of engineering and product management, Drivers Assistance and Automated Driving, Bosch. “As part of the AVCC, Bosch will help to develop recommendations for software APIs for each building block in an autonomous system.”

“Denso is looking forward to creating a shared platform to focus innovation as part of the AVCC,” said Takuya Fukushima, AVCC board member, AD & ADAS Electronics Engineering Division, Denso Corporation. “The consortium brings together expertise, knowledge and innovation with a shared goal and focused strategy. It will facilitate and manage workgroups to share ideas and study common technological challenges.”

“The massive amount of technological innovation required to power fully self-driving vehicles at scale requires collaboration at an industry level,” said Massimo Osella, AVCC chairman of the board, and lab group manager, Research & Development at General Motors. “We are delighted to join this group of key leaders in the automotive industry. As the AVCC, we are working together to create the ‘go to’ organization for autonomous computing expertise to help bring this technology to market.”

“The hardware and software requirements for autonomous vehicles are enormous, requiring an energy-efficient, high-performance AI platform to process sensor data and achieve the highest levels of safety,” said Gary Hicok, senior vice president of Automotive Hardware and Software Systems at NVIDIA. “As the leader in AI computing, we are working closely with transportation innovators, tackling the complexities of developing and deploying safe autonomous vehicles at scale.”

“The path to delivering autonomous vehicles is long and complex,” said Kamal Khouri, vice president and general manager of Advanced Driver Assistance Solutions at NXP Semiconductors. “NXP welcomes the opportunity to work with the AVCC to define the computing architectures needed to help solve the huge challenge of deploying safe self-driving vehicles.”

“The AVCC understands the technological complexities and obstacles that need to be overcome for the deployment of autonomous vehicles,” said Satoru Taniguchi, AVCC board member, and project general manager, Electronics Control System Development Division at Toyota Motor Corporation. “Toyota aims to work with the other AVCC members to deliver a conceptual computing platform that addresses these challenges.”

Dell Launches Platform Acceleration Lab in India to Teach Software Engr, Architects

Dell Technologies Inc. Education Services today announced the launch of Platform Acceleration Lab (PAL) in Bangalore with a vision to transform the way the world builds software. The Platform Acceleration Lab (PAL) is an immersive, best practices set of courses that enables developers and architects to develop new applications, move applications (replatforming), and modernize existing applications on Pivotal Cloud Foundry (PCF).

The Bangalore PAL lab will organize 3-week of immersive, best practices boot camp every month at the campus, to help native developers to adapt cloud-native applications and modernize existing applications to drive digital transformation. During the boot camp, Dell Technologies practioners will teach the participants how to modernize and replatform existing apps to run on Pivotal Cloud Foundry. The developers and architects will learn the fundamentals of Pivotal Cloud Foundry, CI/CD, Application Architecture, Spring Boot, and Spring Cloud Services—as well as be exposed to many of Pivotal’s core practices.

This immersive, instructor-led boot camp provides participants with 90 percent hands-on lab access with a capacity of 16 students per class.

Dell Technologies helps the world’s Next-Gen workforce to transform the way they build and run their most important software applications. The teams who use PCF and have accelerated their adoption of modern software skills realize a faster time-to-market with + 50% increase in developer productivity. PAL is used by Global 2000 companies to achieve strategic advantages in software development and IT operations.

We are entering a could-native world, and with our vision to create technologies that drive human progress, this launch is only fitting. The Platform Acceleration Lab will help engineers be cloud-native ready and make their companies future-proof. Bangalore is home for many of our global customers and partners, I am excited to see how this program will help them grow and contribute to their future,” – Sarv Saravanan, Senior Vice President & GM, India Center of Excellence, Dell Technologies.

“The launch of the Pivotal Platform Acceleration Lab (PAL) in Bangalore, India combines the expertise of Dell Technologies and Pivotal to support our customers with their digital transformation journey. The PAL offers a performance-based immersive learning experience to develop the talent and the skills necessary for organizations to modernize their legacy application architecture and become cloud-native,” – Cindy Etherington, VP of Education Services.

The course was piloted with select customers in India in September 2018. Their feedback was very positive:

“We were looking for cloud solutions that could help us transform our IT and support business with the agility and resilience that business needs. After an evaluation of PaaS offering, we found Pivotal Cloud Foundry to be the best fit for us as it continuously delivers custom software on a secure, reliable platform—PAL has enabled us to start our journey of digital transformation in the right direction. It is like essential primary education, it helps you build the foundation and framework which acts as the transformation vehicle for migration journey to Cloud,” - Rajesh Mann, Senior Manager, BT Technology.
About Dell Technologies

Dell Technologies is a unique family of businesses that provides the essential infrastructure for organisations to build their digital future transform IT and protect their most important asset, information. The company services customers of all sizes across 180 countries – ranging from 98 percent of the Fortune 500 to individual consumers – with the industry’s most comprehensive and innovative portfolio from the edge to the core to the cloud.

~ Published unedited except headline via Business Wire India feed.