e- magazine issuu december 2016

1 www.varindia.com December 2016

VOLUME XVIII ISSUE 04 DECEMBER 2016 PRICE Rs. 50

Toshiba appoints RPTech Care Center as its NSP Epson continues fight against counterfeit

Tuesday, 24th January 2017 Hotel Mayfair Lagoon & Convention

Bhubaneswar, Odisha

2 December 2016 www.varindia.com

Chief Guests

Rajnath SinghUnion Minister for Home Affairs

Government of India

Manohar ParrikarUnion Minister for

Defence Government of India

14 December 2016, Hotel Taj Palace, Chankyapuri, New Delhi

DEFENCEPRODUCTION

NATIONAL CONFERENCE

S E L F R E L I A N C E A N D B E YO N D

As a focus area of Prime Minister’s ambitious ‘Make in India’ vision, there is an urgent need to reduce our dependence on foreign equipment with respect to Defence Production .With the third largest armed forces in the world the reliance to the tune of 60% of its arms and ammunitions procurements through

imports does not augur well. Almost 31.1% of its military budget is spent on capital acquisitions alone.


VOLUME XVIII ISSUE 04 DECEMBER 2016 PRICE Rs. 50

Brocade expands SLX Family Canon India expands its projector portfolio

Will demonetization help India to become $10-tn economy by 2030?

4 November 2016 www.varindia.com


Emerson rebrands as VertivEmerson Network Power has

announced the appointment of Rob Johnson as CEO and officially commenced a campaign to rebrand the standalone company as Vertiv.

Vertiv is a global provider of mission-c r i t i c a l infrastr ucture technologies for vital applications in data centers, communication

networks, and commercial and industrial environments. The company, which is headquartered in Columbus, Ohio has more than 20,000 employees and more than 25 manufacturing and assembly facilities worldwide.

Platinum Equity acquired the business today from Emerson in a transaction valued in excess of $4 billion and Emerson has also retained a minority interest in the company.

HMD Global to bring Nokia smartphones in H1, 2017Finnish company HMD Global will

bring a new generation of Nokia Smartphones in the first half of 2017, alongside the existing Nokia branded feature phone business.

The l a u n c h of HMD comes just six months after the company

signed a strategic licensing agreement with Nokia, giving HMD exclusive use of the Nokia brand on mobile phones and tablets worldwide for the next 10 years.

With a leading position in the feature phone market already, HMD has a significant global foothold including Americas, Europe, Asia, Middle East, Africa, India and China from day one. This scale, coupled with a world-class and highly experienced leadership team positions HMD for a truly accelerated start.

Western Digital releases NAS series DIGISOL brings DG-BR5400QAC

SUBSCRIPTION COPY NOT FOR SALEVOLUME XVIII ISSUE 04 DECEMBER 2016 PRICE Rs. 50

46pgOpen Source: An Enabler of Digital Transformation in India

40pg

58 August 2016 www.varindia.com

*TBR Corporate IT Buying Behavior and Customer Satisfaction Study – x86-based Servers, Fourth Quarter 2015.

The following are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo: Lenovo, the Lenovo logo, ThinkServer and System x. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. ©2016 Lenovo. All rights reserved. †Terms and Conditions apply.

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59 www.varindia.com August 2016

A price tag that will getyou new customers.Introducing the ThinkServer TS140for small businesses with big demands.

The following are trademarks or registered trademarks of Lenovo: Lenovo, the Lenovo logo and ThinkServer. Intel, the Intel logo, Xeon and Xeon Inside are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation in the U.S. and/or other countries. Microsoft and Windows are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation. ©2016 Lenovo. All rights reserved. †Terms and Conditions apply. The test(s) above are performed on statistical samples.

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The Age of Analytics …….. seen to be driving the Data World

HELLO INDIA

Data is now a critical corporate asset. It comes from web, billions of phones, sensors, payment systems, cameras and a huge array of other sources – and its value is tied to its ultimate use. Data analytics and algorithms capability has grown in more sophisticated ways. At the same time, the computational power and storage business have grown multifold and not to forget the key component, that is security best practices which are vital for the development of five areas – e-commerce, IoT, corporate WANs, public cloud services and business process outsourcing. Recent advances in machine learning can be used to solve a tremendous variety of problems. Deep learning is also pushing the boundaries even further.

Data and analytics are changing the basics of competition. The greatest progress has occurred in the location-based services and retail. In both areas with native competitors, digital platforms are helping marketplaces to connect sellers and buyers for many products and services. Leading companies are using the capabilities of digital platforms not only to improve their core operations but to launch entirely new business models. With the pronouncement of demonetization, it also justified the measure as a way to curb terrorism financing that relies on fake rupee notes, as well as to dampen inflation. Growth and innovation in IT organizations are not possible without the emergence of new roles to help drive a transformational IT business today. In the coming days, chances are that everything will be going digital and hence updation of the IT Act becomes the need of the hour.

Going forward, 2016 will also be remembered as the year when hacking has acquired menacing proportions. The need for cybersecurity has reached a new height and the year 2017 is predicted to be that of Artificial Intelligence (AI), deep learning and machine learning – redefining the way humans communicate with devices to not only improve daily life but also boost businesses. The legal framework for privacy and security of data in digital format provides for compensation to the victim in case of unauthorized access and leakage of sensitive personal information.

The technology sector is not just limited to IT anymore, but has to be aligned with the business, since newer roles are emerging and are rather undergoing a transitional phase. Businesses in India while embracing digital transformation, would need to protect their data across all applications and services. It is absolutely true that a cyber-attack takes place when someone develops a flaw in the system. The challenge is how the companies are using cognitive capabilities to improve existing cyber systems. The evolving threat landscape reveals a growing need for security intelligence.

Lastly, technology is enabling digital transformation and co-creation of new knowledge. It can eliminate the overheads and minimize delays in delivering last-mile services. We have to welcome 2017 with the adoption of data consumption on handheld devices.

Good news is that the total mobile services market revenue in India is expected to touch US$37 billion in 2017!

7 www.varindia.com November 2016


Website: www.varindia.com

CONTENTS

Publisher: Deepak Kumar SahuEditor: S Mohini RatnaExecutive Editor: Dr. Vijay Anand Consulting Editor: Pravin PrashantAssistant Editor: Samrita Baruah Copy Editor: C. M. DuttaSr. Correspondent: Aparna MullickArt Director: Rakesh Kumar Network Administrator: Ashok Kumar SinghManager-IT: Subhash MohantaManager-SEO: Bidyadhar Behera

BUSINESS:Commercial Manager: Amit Kumar JhaSr. Marketing Manager: Ashok Ranjan DashCirculation Executive: Manish KumarMarketing Manager: Dipendra Kumar

CORPORATE OFFICE: VAR House, A-84A/3 Rose Apartment, Paryavaran complex, Ignou Road, new Delhi - 110030Tel: 011-41656383, 46061809Email: [email protected]

Bangalore: Bureau officeMarketing Manager: S. Kamala kar Correspondent: L. g. SwamiD-103 g.F., Ashish JK Apartments Thubarahalli Extended RoadBangaluru- 560066 Tel: 080-49530399 | Mobile:09886280836E-mail: [email protected]

Mumbai: Bureau officeRegional Manager (West): Anil KumarSr. Correspondent: Mamta S.Anurag Residency, 203 - “B” Wing, Plot no-5, Sector-9, Kamothe, navi Mumbai-410 209 Tel: 022-65561292, Mobile: 08108017479E-mail: [email protected], [email protected]

Chennai: Bureau office Branch Manager: M.S. Barani Door. no.8, Plot no.-837,89th Street,13th Sector, K.K.nagar, Chennai - 600 078Mobile: 09444077065E-mail: [email protected]

Hyderabad: Bureau office Branch Manager: Sunil KumarB 383 HAL Colony, BalanagarHYDERBAD, Telengana - 500042Tel: 040-32989844/ Cell no. 08100298033E-mail: [email protected]

Kolkata: Bureau office Marketing officer: Sunil KumarCorrespondent: Kiran Kumar 67 Sarada Park, garia, Kolkata - 700084Mobile: 08100298033, E-mail: [email protected]: 09903088480, E-mail: [email protected]

Printed and Published by Deepak Kumar Sahu on behalf of M/s. Kalinga Digital Media Pvt. Ltd. and Printed at Pushpak Press Pvt. Ltd. Shed no. 203 - 204, DSIDC Complex, okhla Industrial Area, Phase-I, new Delhi-110020 and Published at A-84A/3 Rose Apartment, Paryavaran complex, Ignou Road, new Delhi - 110030, Editor - S Mohini Ratna.

For Subscription queries contact: [email protected]: Rs. 500(12 issues)Rs. 1000 (24 issues)

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KALIngA DIgITAL MEDIA PVT LTD© All rights are reserved. no part of this magazine may be reproduced or copied in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. (1999-2016)

* All disputes are subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of competent courts and forums in Delhi only.

46pg

FACE TO FACE

27| Opportunities galore for Siemon in India

29| “A Holistic, well-rounded Security Approach is the need of the hour”

50| Avaya’s Transition to a Software-andServices Model is Customer Driven

52| Canon is the Growth Partner for the Emerging Indian Entrepreneurs

54| Cloudera Leverages the Power of Big Data to serve Customers

COVER STORY

30| Will demonetization help India to become $10-tn economy by 2030?

CHANNEL EVENT

38| Ingram Tech Forum 2016 Introduces its Partners & End-Customers to THE NEW FUTURE

LEAD STORY

40| Is Endpoint Security the answer to Advanced Persistent Threat?

46| Open Source: An Enabler of Digital Transformation in India

VAR CORPORATE44| Triggering transformation with

new-age marketing

TECHNOMANIA51| Hyperconverged is the new

engine for future data centre

REGULARS

Round About 16

Hot Bytes 18, 20

On the Ramp 22, 24

Voice N Data 26

Channel Buzz 28

Produt of the Month 45

Movers & Shakers 49

EVENT55| Making data work

VAR MOBILITY 56| Aircel leverages technology to offer

better customer experience

Presented by


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SD-WAN fast catching up with WAN virtualization

Eklavya BhaveHead Partner Strategy & Sales India & SAARC Region - Citrix Systems India

Globally, we have benchmarked ourselves against other companies in the tech industry, to make sure that our Channel programs and incentives are very attractive for Partners. Our constant endeavor is to make our channel incentives and programs partner friendly

In an exclusive interview with VARINDIA, Eklavya

Bhave, Head Partner Strategy & Sales India & SAARC Region - Citrix Systems

India spoke about how SDN is fast catching up and how SD-WAN technology with

integrated WAN virtualization and optimization capabilities

can help increase the performance and reliability

of mission critical apps for the remote users.

Software-defined networking (SDN) has been the buzzword within enterprise IT. One of the first places that SDN is proving valuable is with the enterprise-wide area network (WAN); so much so that the term SD-WAN has been coined to refer to this important segment of software-defined networking.

SD-WAN is more than just a new acronym, rather it is a recent networking concept full of innovation and investment. The workplace of today has evolved such that enterprises are relying upon a wide array of mission-critical applications, delivered from the data center or Internet, that help them run their businesses more efficiently, while also maintaining tight control over data security. SD-WAN as a new approach provides cost-efficient, reliable, secure, and effective application delivery by means of its wide area network design and operation.

While offering a comprehensive, end-to-end solution, Citrix also supports enterprise customers who wish to maintain a multi-vendor environment and actively collaborates with partners to provide added support. True enough, Citrix’s NetScaler SD-WAN ensuring better user

experience at the branch and mobile level are just as rich and seamless as at headquarters. This is catching up really fast among the customers.

Talking about the company’s expansion plans, Eklavya Bhave, Head Partner Strategy & Sales India & SAARC Region - Citrix Systems India said that with a strong global leadership, Citrix is getting more aligned towards the product lines it is focused on and then expand accordingly. “We do virtualization at all levels- server, desktop and application and we

have been the leaders for years and now there is increased focus on networking. With our flagship product Netscaler, a product family for networking which includes capabilities of application delivery controller, unified gateway, Application Firewall and SDWAN, we are addressing large market need,” he said.

Citrix is targeting the larger section in the industry including

SMB, Banks and enterprises with multiple branches. “The distributed enterprise requires a solution that ensure users remain connected at all times. They look for a solution that strengthens security which provides end-to-end visibility without adding complexity. For them, Netscaler SD-WAN is that solution,” he said.

Talking about Citrix Cloud, (formerly Citrix Workspace Cloud) it is a control plane to manage all Citrix technologies. This cloud-

based approach means reduced infrastructure, centralized control and SaaS-style updates, contributing to lower administration cost and complexity. “Citrix Cloud is helping our customers and partners find the best way to deliver a Citrix environment using any cloud or infrastructure,” Eklavya added.

Market strategy…Citrix is a full-fledged channel

focused company. It has a strong ecosystem of partners who engage with it for successful execution and implementation of products and solutions. Looking at the pace of growth and momentum in new technologies, Citrix is planning to add more partners.

“Globally, we have benchmarked ourselves against other companies in the tech industry, to make sure that our Channel programs and incentives are very attractive for Partners. Our constant endeavor

is to make our channel incentives and programs partner friendly,” he explained.

Citrix is working with various government and PSU agencies in the

sectors of mobility, virtualization, networking and security requirements. “Frankly speaking, we are very focused on government sector now because of the various opportunities that are coming up like Smart City, Make in India and Digital India initiatives. Our participation into latest projects in India enforces our belief that it’s the way to go,” Eklavya concludes.


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CHANNEL CHIEF

DELL EMC channel is a $35 billion powerhouse

The new Dell Technologies comprises four different business divisions namely the Dell Client Solutions Group, Dell EMC Infrastructure Solutions Group (ISG),Dell EMC Services and the strategically aligned businesses – Pivotal, SecureWorks and VMware. Under the Dell EMC ISG business, there are three sales motions- Enterprise Sales Team, Commercial Sales Team and CSB (Consumer Small Business). Dell has a centralized global channel organization.

Dell EMC has also recently named Tian Beng Ng as senior vice president and general manager for its Channel business in the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region, except Greater China. In this role, he will report to John Byrne, president, global channels at Dell EMC.

In an exclusive interview with VARINDIA, Byrne and Ng discusses the highlights of the new Dell EMC Channel business and program -

Benefits to channel post-merger:Globally, we have formed platforms such as the Partner Advisory

Boards and Partner Advisory Councils. Our partners believe that the channel is an important growth engine and the community wants to grow the top as well as the bottom line. Globally, our Channel business is growing 3-4 times the market rate and in APJ, it’s growing at the rate of 6 times. - faster than the global channels.

We can truly offer the end-to-end solution, from the PC all the way to the Cloud - what we call edge to core to cloud. Dell EMC has the widest portfolio of products in the industry, and invests more than $ 4.5 billion (USD) annually on research and development, which is double from our competition. We are the market leaders in PCs, virtualization, All-flash storage, hence the partner community is confident about selling all our portfolios. We are the company that is #1 in everything, all in one place.

At present Dell and EMC will maintain separate deal registration and partner programs through 2016. We are working hard towards combining the two programs that will go live next in February 2017.

Role of Partner Advisory Council:Historically Dell and EMC have had separate Partner Advisory Boards

and Partner Advisory Councils, but starting February there will be one Dell EMC Partner Advisory Councilper region. We present all the data, ask our partners on their performance and suggestions for our program in these meetings. We will be listening and working to build a program that reflects partners needs and wishes. We also talk about partners’ roles of engagement, deal registration. We made sure they know there will be zero tolerance on any violation of deal registration. If you look at EMC’s model, which is front end, and the Dell’s model which is back end, and how we are coming together, we’ll need to assess which business model

will be effective for the partner’s business. Investment Plans:Other feedback that we have received is that we have to improve

our tool and processes. So we are making a significant IT investment of $26mn. In February, there will be one portal where partners of Dell or EMC can sign in, one deal registration. We will also hire people at the back end.

Channel Strategy:We are building one channel. During Dell EMC World in October,

we’ve announced the new Dell EMC Partner Program, a new partner program that combines the best of the legacy Dell and EMC partner programs into one for the benefit and profitability of our partners.

Currently, of the top 400 partners from the legacy EMC, 60% are already selling Dell solutions. In the past when the partnership between Dell and EMC was not officially formalized, the competition had tried to lure them but our partners did not budge from their position as they were waiting for the compelling value proposition from the new entity. Today, we are able to deliver this value proposition to our channel ecosystem through our new program that will be launched in February.

Roadmap for IoT:IoT is obviously a big market opportunity. In Asia, we have participated

in a number of key IoT projects. We did a project with Fujian University in China, where we did the Smart City project. We equipped 120,000 government vehicles with GPS devices to track the movement of the cars using Dell solutions, analyzing the traffic patterns of the cars in the Fujian province of China. n

Tian Beng Ng Sr. Vice President & General Manager-ChannelsAsia Pacific Japan- Dell EMC

John Byrne President, global channels Dell EMC


ROUND ABOUT

Digitally DemonetizedBy the time I finish penning this column,

demonetization, which is orchestrated as the first serious effort to purge the economy from the pangs of black money, would have completed one month. I am not giving any value judgment about the efficacy or otherwise of the move. I take demonetization as a fait accompli, which, I am sure, the matured political administration should have deliberated upon thoroughly before harping on the measure. I am more concerned about what steps should be taken to get us back into the rail. Undoubtedly, there was pain and there is no clear indication that it can be resolved shortly, going by the long-snaking queues in front of ATMs and banks across the country.

I am an incorrigible optimist and believe that every step or policy measure taken with right intentions will rebound with good results not necessarily immediately but in the long run. That way, no one can deny the tolerance level of the Indian citizens who brave the serpentine lines every day and frustrations when told there is no cash for disbursement, after waiting for long hours together in the queue. If someone loses his/her cool, it is incidental and the general mood of the people seems to be “let us sacrifice today for the sake of a good tomorrow”. If tomorrow also eludes that promised bonanza, let us be realistic. We Indians have a philosophical bent of mind. I sincerely pray the good intentions of the government will prevail and we will be able to breathe free air bereft of black money, corruption and free ourselves from the clutches of wily people who manipulate the system.

Necessity is the mother of invention. The prime necessity now is to come out of the dilemma that we have been caught up with. Many alternative solutions are floating around. Some say that we should move towards a cashless society; another set of people claim that a cashless society should replace all taxes with a minimal tax on all bank transactions. The third set of people opine that direct taxes – income and corporate tax – should be consigned to the sacred fire and the evolving GST could be applicable widely. There is no dearth of suggestions and opinions as to how to tackle the menace of black money differently estimated by different people and organizations. The Prime Minister did what many advocated and not only bitten the bullet, but also swallowed it. It is a different story what might come out of it. Good or bad, he dared where others feared to tread.

Even if I support demonetization in principle, a different view can emerge as to the methodology of implementation. The decision, I believe, now is irreversible since any attempt to roll back will have pernicious effect on the economy.

The limited scope of this column is to engage in an analytics to find out how best the plastic (digital) money can replace the paper money. The government is hopeful of making a dent on the transactional behaviour of the common man. It will plod the vast majority of the people living in rural areas and those who belonged to the disadvantaged class of the society to gradually move to the digital platform for cash transactions. In other words, a cashless society is the rule rather

than an exception. Smart or digital money seems to be alright since they convey broadly the paradigms that we are seeking to achieve.

To have a clearer view of things, let us analyze the extent of the cash economy in the country. On a thumb rule, of the 1,300 million people in the country, only 25 million use smart money or transact digitally either through debit or credit cards or instruments like mobile wallets which are increasingly becoming popular in the aftermath of demonetization. More than 22% of our transactions are based on cash. That is true all over the world. The proportion of cash economy may vary from country to country. For instance, in the US it is 8%, China and Japan it is believed to be very high though the exact percentage is unknown. But with 8% cash economy, the US will have higher absolute figures since that economy’s GDP is close-to US$35 trillion, whereas India’s GDP is only US$2 trillion. China also may have a higher quantum of cash economy because its GDP is several times higher than that of India.

What I am trying to drive home is that a cashless society is a utopian concept and it will exist along with the smart or digital money since it caters to certain set of transactions and people. Let us look at a scenario where there is no cash money in circulation. Assuming that the government is insisting on debit cards or any other instrument, how can we ensure a person working in the informal sector as a wage earner can refill his account on a regular basis to enable him to use that card? We should be guided by real-life situations and not imaginary or make believe prototypes. For instance, how can a rickshaw puller or a daily wager in the suburbs of Delhi or Kolkata receive his fare/wage through Paytm or any other modicum. Liquid cash is a major portfolio in the budget of any person, be they rich or poor, since it is needed for transactions of certain nature or meeting unforeseen expenses like hospitalization or any other eventualities of that nature. Let me focus now on black money. To put it simplistically, it is the money that evades the tax and parked not in the confines of banks or institutions. It is also true that black money constitutes only 6% to 9% of the black economy.

What is more important to chart a roadmap to decipher from here where we will go? Can it be done all of a sudden? Gradualism, I believe, is the best step forward. One cannot bring all

1,300 million people into the digital economy at a stroke. We have to have a roadmap for that. First, let us keep all transactions above certain threshold mandatorily through cheque or through digital money. While doing so, we have to introspect whether we have the infrastructure for that. How many bank account holders have opted for cheque or ATM facilities? Even if they exist, how many villages do have the facilities of ATM at the doorstep of the bank account holders?

Happily, the recent drive of the government to motivate the marginalized people to open a bank account has been a success. About 350 million new accounts have opened in the recent months, thanks to the efforts of the government. Available data shows that most of these accounts are dormant for quite some time. Visiting banks or an ATM not only involves time but also some knowledge and literacy to fill the form, write the cheque, basic knowledge of the operation of the ATM machine, etc. There are still a vast number of people who cannot operate these systems. How many persons are capable of doing that? Do we have any arrangements to help them learn these basic things not to speak about withdrawing money from ATMs? In many places, particularly in tea plantations and rubber estates, it is a tradition that the salaries are disbursed weekly or bi-weekly in cash since the bank branches are situated far from the places where the workers stay. How soon such salary cycles can be aligned with regular ones and the workers become savvy to use the credit, debit or another instrument.

We have to introspect whether our digital backbone is capable of coping with the pressure being exerted by banking transactions, once people switch over to the digital domain. The Internet bandwidth as it exists today is hardly adequate. Any disruption or hacking or other types of intrusions would affect their faith in the system as also in technology. I understand that the Niti Ayog is coming out with a scheme to incentivize switching over to the smart money. Payments made digitally for settling the utility payments will attract certain incentives. It is a good step to motivate people to switch over to the smart money. Equally significant is strengthening the infrastructure to help traders, tiny and small enterprises to install machines in their shops and establishments to help the customers, vendors and employees to use the digital money.

Last but not the least, a realistic target should be set for covering the entire nation to empower people to use digital money, including far-flung and tribal areas, and the government and bank officials should be made accountable to teach the customers as to how to use smart cards and transact digitally. Let me conclude by narrating a story. A farmer irked by the croaking of frogs huddled in a well in his farm drained the water from the pond to get rid of the frogs. While draining the water, frogs escaped and flocked into the courtyard since they being amphibious could survive both in water and on land. But the small fish, which lived freely in the pond perished en masse since they could live only in water. Let us be more concerned about that small fish.


HOT BYTES

“Digi Dhan Abhiyan” to empower people on digital payments

Toshiba appoints RPTech Care Center as its NSP

Epson continues fight against counterfeit

*astTECS appoints Distributors for Telecom Accessories

Logitech India signs Supertron Electronic as ND

HSMC aims Rs.1, 000 Crore revenues by FY18

To promote the Digital Payment

transaction in both public and private space, the Ministry of Electronics and

IT is taking a number of initiatives not only to offer better products in terms of technology but also to inform, educate and enable citizens in the country to

Toshiba Electronics Asia (Singapore)

has announced the appointment of the RPTech Care Center, a service division of Rashi Peripherals Pvt. Ltd as its only service partner for India. Toshiba India will be managing the partnership with RPTech Care Center and this alliance is aligned with Toshiba’s commitment in thriving to serve the needs of all the people by offering superior after-sales service.

Commenting on the association, Polad Garda, Country Head, Toshiba India, speaks, “Being an

make digital transactions. Ministry of Electronics

and IT under the leadership of Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad has conceptualized

a campaign, “Digi Dhan Abhiyan” to enable every citizen, small trader and merchant to adopt digital payments in their everyday financial transactions.

international legendary brand that is committed to people, we believe in offering world-class quality and inventive products to

our customers. Further, with our alliance with the RPTechCare Center, we are keen to offer our customers an excellent after-sales service experience and satisfaction. It is a driving step to allow our customers with numerous alternatives and reduced turnaround time.”

Epson has continued its fight against the

non-genuine ink business and the multiple measures taken recently to curb the sale of counterfeit bottles. To protect the rights of its customers, police authorities conducted a series of raids in Mumbai, Tirupati and Chennai recently, where operatives had generated information about fixers involved in filling, bottling, packaging and distributing counterfeit Epson ink. To send a strong message of zero tolerance towards the sale of fake cartridges, the police in different parts of

*astTECS has announced that the company plans to appoint distributors in the Tier-I and Tier-II cities and extend the availability of *astTECS range of telecom accessories, mainly PRI Cards, IP Phones and PRI Gateway to existing and future customers. As part of the company’s growth strategy, more cities and customers will be covered through strategic tie-ups and new partnerships.

“Today, partners require the most relevant technology solutions to meet the business needs

the country have stepped up their cooperation and efforts to arrest and terminate such practices.

Similar raids were carried out by the Chennai Police. Police conducted raids in T.Nagar and Saidapet areas and successfully seized counterfeit products of Epson in large quantities. Yashwant Kumar Chowdhry and Baskar Patel were arrested for manufacturing and supplying counterfeit Epson ink bottles.

of their customers and this initiative ensures that they have access to best-in-class telecom products and solutions,” said Dr Devasia Kurian, CEO, *astTECS. “We are very keen to expand our SMB offerings and form win-win partnerships, while ensuring to deliver the unique *astTECS experience,” he added.

Logitech India has announced

its strategic national distribution partnership with Supertron Electronic. Under the partnership, Supertron will be responsible for retailing Logitech products across its 53 outlets in India. Logitech will leverage the Supertron outlets across India as a touch point for consumers.

Moninder Jain, MD, ASEAN & India Region & Vice-President, Logitech, said, “This partnership is

an extension to Logitech’s commitment to give a great buying experience to its customers. With its strong retail presence in India, Supertron will be able to offer the wide range of Logitech products to more consumers.” He further added, “Supertron is one of the fastest-growing IT distributors in India known not only for its distribution strength but also for its efficiency in acting as an extended arm of vendor, thus adding value to the chain."

Hitachi Systems Micro Clinic

(HSMC) is expecting its revenues to grow from Rs.350 crore in FY 2015 to Rs.1, 000 crore by 2018. The company has registered a CAGR of 58% in revenues over the last three years. HSMC also said it expects revenues in the current financial year to exceed Rs.600 crore, buoyed by strong growth in cloud and cybersecurity businesses.

Tarun Seth, MD, HSMC said, “A rapidly-growing enterprise adoption of

cloud computing and cybersecurity has put us in a great position to continue our above-average growth. We are also looking to launch new strategic initiatives and target new customer segments as we work towards making our ‘Mission 1,000 crore’ a reality.”

HSMC has created a separate wing that works closely with Amazon, Oracle and Microsoft to help the customers optimize cloud apps based on their requirement.

SAP initiates transitioning into a Cloud EconomySAP has taken a

step forward to drive India’s shift to the Cloud Economy at the recently- concluded 2016 SAP Spotlight Tour. India’s move to a Cloud Economy is inevitable and SAP will play an important role in transitioning the country to a digitally-empowered powerhouse.

“Developing a cloud economy needs a truly transformational effort along with a robust digital foundation. We understand the importance and the scalability challenge in this journey India has embarked. SAP is committed to swiftly make India the world’s fastest-growing Cloud Economy,” said Deb Deep Sengupta, President & MD, SAP Indian Subcontinent.

L&T Infotech now a part of Nutanix Partner NetworkL&T Infotech (LTI)

has announced its partnership with Nutanix, a leader in enterprise cloud computing, headquartered in San Jose, CA. Enterprises looking to simplify and fast track cloud adoption will now be able to leverage LTI’s ecosystem of solutions and Nutanix Enterprise Cloud Platform with simplicity and lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO).

Speaking on the partnership, Aftab Ullah, COO, LTI, said, “While cloud-based solutions have been around for a while, this partnership promises to be a game-changer for our mutual clients. LTI and Nutanix will provide a ready-to-use cloud solution for companies that want to fast-track their cloud adoption strategy and achieve the benefits of consumption economics.”


QNAP joins hand with AMD

SUSE acquires Talent and Technology Assets from HPE

Dell boosts PC business with new “zero-cash” financing options

LG Electronics India introduces No-Cash No-Worry Campaign

ASSOCHAM collaborates with Tally Solutions to simplify GST

Avaya Japan partners with LINE on Contact Center Solution QNAP Systems

has partnered with Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (AMD), and

announced the release of the high-performance TVS-x73 NAS series.

With an AMD Embedded R-Series quad-core APU, up to 64GB RAM, AES-NI hardware

encryption engine, two M.2 SATA 6Gb/s SSD slots, USB 3.1 (10Gbps), 10GbE expandability, dual HDMI

output, and hardware-assisted 4K video decoding and encoding acceleration, the TVS-x73 series provides SMBs with a perfect NAS solution to build a private cloud for applications,.

SUSE has entered into an agreement

with Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) to acquire technology and talent that will expand SUSE's OpenStack Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) solution and accelerate SUSE's entry into the growing Cloud Foundry Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market. The acquired OpenStack assets will be integrated into SUSE OpenStack Cloud, and the acquired Cloud Foundry and PaaS assets will enable SUSE to bring to market a

certified, enterprise-ready SUSE Cloud Foundry PaaS solution for all customers and partners in the SUSE ecosystem.

The agreement includes HPE naming SUSE as its preferred open-source partner for Linux, OpenStack and Cloud Foundry solutions. In addition, SUSE has increased engagement with the Cloud Foundry Foundation, becoming a platinum member and taking a seat on the Cloud Foundry Foundation board.

Dell has announced a range of “zero-

cash” financing options for consumers, making it easier to purchase a PC. The financing options will be available for customers to avail through Dell’s association with Bajaj Finance Limited, and credit cards from the leading partner banks between 17th November and 31st December, 2016.

Ritu Gupta, Director – Marketing, Consumer & Small Business, Dell India, said, “It is our goal to ensure that in addition to offering innovative

LG Electronics India has announced

“No-cash No-worry” campaign to enable customers hassle- free

purchases of consumer durables. This attractive consumer-centric campaign, “60 days EMI holiday offer”, will take away the worries of cash payments at the time of purchase.

On the occasion, Niladri

technology solutions for multiple user needs, we are able to empower our customers to purchase a PC with ease. Purchasing a personal computer for the home or for an individual is regarded as an important buying decision and we want to make the process as simple and hassle-free for our customers as possible."

Datta, Corporate Marketing Head, LG Electronics India, said, “LG has constantly worked towards creating a good life for its consumers

by providing the best of products that are high on innovation, technology, usability and style. We have designed this campaign to help

customers purchase consumer durables without paying cash. Under this attractive finance offer, the first EMI will start post 60 days of purchase date. We have tied up with Bajaj Finance for this.”

The Associated Chambers of

Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM) and Tally Solutions have signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) to demystify, educate and train the retail community for the rollout of the Goods and Services Tax (GST) law in India. The MoU was signed between D.S. Rawat, Secretary General of ASSOCHAM, and Sathya Pramod, Chief Financial Officer of Tally Solutions.

ASSOCHAM and Tally

Solutions plan to conduct a series of conferences for the retail community across the nation, over the next few months. Tax experts from government bodies will be participating in these conferences to help clear the air about GST, by discussing the law and its implementation in these events. The conferences are designed to help the businesses to shift from the existing taxation method and adapt to the new technology-led law with ease.

Avaya Japan has partnered with

LINE Corporation on Avaya’s contact center solution that will integrate with LINE’s corporate customer service support service “LINE Customer Connect”. Businesses that operate a contact center will be able to add the LINE chat capability as a channel for customer inquiries and to centrally manage communications. Line is the most popular messaging app in Japan, Thailand and Taiwan. LINE has about 218 million monthly active users.

With the wide penetration of smartphones,

web and Internet in recent years, inquiries from customers to businesses use multiple channels including email, chat, and website interaction, as well as voice. While businesses pursue an omnichannel contact center strategy that provides a seamless experience regardless of the channels used, from a system perspective the reality is that real-time coordination is difficult because customer histories and agents are still typically separated by channel.

TechnoBind inks deal with AMITechnoBind has

partnered with American Megatrends India (AMI¬) to distribute its StorTrends line ofdata storage offerings.

"With this exclusive tie-up, we will be able to leverage the strong brand equity that AMI enjoys in the market along with their strong product offering. Now, we will be able to help our partners address opportunities which they were getting stuck because of their positioning of the traditional storage players," said Prashanth G J, CEO -TechnoBind.

AMI's StorTrends brand comprises the entire range of storage offerings, starting from the affordable all-flash, hybrid and spinning disk storage arrays. The companies are tapping into the vast low-end storage market by offering feature-rich and cost-effective solutions.

IBM unveils security command center in IndiaIBM has inaugurated

its state-of-the-art security command center in Bangalore to service the security needs of Indian clients.

The local center will provide more value to clients through customized SLA-based security services uniquely designed for their requirements while simultaneously ensuring that the data resides within the country. The security command centre is equipped to provide the best in class security solutions to both enterprise and SME clients across the industry spectrum.

The command center will leverage the existing managed security services offered within the country and offer clients managed security services expertise and monitoring to anticipate and mitigate threats.

HOT BYTES


ON THE RAMP

ESET launches its new line of security products

Red Hat announces OpenShift Google Cloud Platform

Brocade expands SLX Family HP enhances security features in Managed Print Services

Microsoft launches Cloud Solutions for SMB sector

Eurotech Technologies brings BestNet HDMI Switches

ESET has launched version10 of its

premium line-of-security solutions for home users. ESET Smart Security Premium offers the optimal mix of detection, speed and usability. In addition, the new product provides features including ESET Password Manager for easier and safer authentication, as well as ESET Secure Data for convenient and strong encryption.

“More than ever users need different layers of protection to safeguard themselves in the cyber world. Our new consumer product portfolio not

Red Hat has announced the

general availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform. With the availability of OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform, users can speed adoption of containers, Kubernetes, and cloud-native application patterns, benefiting from Red Hat’s deep enterprise experience.

Red Hat also offers professional services to help customers migrate container workloads, adopt continuous delivery

only provides topnotch protection against malware threats, ESET customers can now protect their files, passwords, webcams and even their entire home network,” explains Parvinder Walia, Director of Sales and Marketing for Asia-Pacific and Japan, ESET.

and DevOps processes, and build micro services-based apps with OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform. And, via Red Hat Open Innovation Labs and Red Hat Consulting workshops, Red Hat can help customers build a blueprint for their digital transformation initiatives, alongside a specialized team of Red Hat technical consultants.

OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud Platform is now available for users with a valid Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform subscription.

Brocade has expanded its

SLX Family with new innovative switches that feature unparalleled network visibility and the addition of BROCADE W O R K F L O W C O M P O S E R A U T O M A T I O N SUITES for turnkey automation.

The new Brocade SLX 9140, SLX 9240 and SLX 9540 data center switches deliver flexible leaf, spine and edge connectivity while leveraging the Brocade SLX Insight Architecture. By embedding network visibility on every router and switch, organizations can achieve pervasive visibility

throughout the network to quickly identify problems, accelerate mean-time-to-remediation and improve overall service levels. New

automation suites, including Network Essentials, Data Center Fabrics and Internet Exchange Points for the BROCADE WORKFLOW COMPOSER platform, powered by StackStorm, provide automated network provisioning, validation, troubleshooting and remediation workflows.

HP has redesigned its Managed

Print Services (MPS) to help protect corporate print environments against cyberattacks with world-class secure printing.

New HP Secure MPS capabilities include advanced security professional services, software solutions and expanded core delivery capabilities for customers’

multi-vendor print fleets. In addition, HP has announced the pre-configuring of HP print devices for security.

“Networked printers can no longer be overlooked in the wake of weakening firewalls to the growing sophistication and volume of cyberattacks. That is why HP has established a new benchmark in managed print services, infusing security best practices into everything that we do to enable our customers to stay on top of growing endpoint security challenges,” said Ed Wingate VP & GM, JetAdvantage Solutions at HP, Inc.

Microsoft has launched business

solutions from its partner ecosystem to meet crucial business needs of Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs) across Maharashtra. Built by Microsoft’s ISV partners Smarter SMB and IDOS, these solutions address the key areas like Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Finance & Accounting and enhancing organizational efficiency. These solutions will run on Microsoft cloud and will be available at a very low cost.

“The SMB sector in Maharashtra has strong potential for driving growth through technology adoption and Microsoft is committed to providing them with the right set of solutions to achieve it. SMBs in the state understand the business dynamics and realize the need for a robust IT infrastructure to grow and scale up their business. This sector has witnessed tremendous growth in the recent years,” said Sudhir Nayar, Director – Partner Sales, Microsoft India.

Eurotech has announced the

launch of BestNet HDMI Switches. Available in 3 and 5 ports, the Bestnet HDMI Switches are a perfect solution to send one source of digital high-definition video to 3/5 displays at the same time. It supports all HDMI sources, such as DVD, Blu-ray or HD-DVD players, cable or satellite receivers and gaming consoles.

“The 3/5-Port BestNet HDMI Switches provide seamless transition

between multiple HDMI-enabled devices and an ideal solution, when you need to transmit one signal to multiple displays. It is extremely versatile, capable of supporting numerous audio & video formats and available in a very compelling price-to-performance ratio,” said Anuj Jain, Managing Director, Eurotech Technologies Pvt. Ltd.

BlackBerry launches Mobile-Security Platform BlackBerry has

launched its mobile-native approach to security with the launch of a comprehensive platform designed for the Enterprise of Things. The new platform has been designed to be the foundation that drives the company’s ongoing move to software, is cloud enabled and addresses the entire enterprise from endpoint to endpoint. This platform completes the integration of the company’s prior acquisitions of key technologies.

“Businesses must be able to confidentially and reliably transmit sensitive data between endpoints to keep people, information and goods safe,” said John Chen, Executive Chairman & CEO, BlackBerry.

Veritas brings NetBackup 8.0Veritas Technologies

has launched NetBackup 8.0 and an integrated Enterprise Data Management solution to help organizations manage data in the cloud.

“Nearly every organization in today’s data-driven and cloud-based world is undergoing digital transformation, whether mobilizing the workforce, creating online customer experiences, enabling electronic supply chains, or providing real-time access to medical records and financial statements. Using NetBackup 8.0 as the foundation of our vision for a sweeping range of solutions to help enterprises manage their growing data demands, Veritas is delivering a 360 enterprise data management solution that solves customers’ challenges,” said Scott Anderson, Senior VP & GM, Information Protection Solutions, Veritas.


ON THE RAMP

Hitachi introduces New VVMP Models

Western Digital releases NAS series

Emerson presents Industrial IoT Offerings

Tyco brings Illustra IP cameras

Canon India expands its projector portfolio

Kingston launches DT50 USB in India

Hitachi Insight Group, which

is responsible for driving Hitachi’s global unified Internet of Things (IoT) business and go-to-market (GTM) strategy, has introduced three new Hitachi Video Management Platform (VMP) models designed to aggressively move the company into the video security and monitoring market – amore than $6-billion total available market opportunity based on recent estimates from an independent research firm.

The new Hitachi VMP configurations combine virtualized compute and

storage and are delivered as fully integrated, turnkey appliances. These new models are optimized for enterprise video security and monitoring environments and support video analytics. Hitachi has also announced that it is growing its partner ecosystem and expanding its strategic alliances with digital video management system (DVMS) industry leaders Milestone Systems and OnSSI to develop and deliver joint solutions that offer increased levels of enterprise security, workplace safety, and industrial and operational efficiencies.

Emerson has launched its

Operational Certainty program in India to help industrial companies achieve top performance in safety, reliability, production and energy management. This initiative is supported by Emerson’s Plantweb digital ecosystem designed to deliver Industrial IoT applications that offer measureable business performance improvement.

Emerson’s Operational Certainty is a technology and engineering-based program designed to help industrial companies achieve top

Tyco has introduces video intelligence

analytics at the edge for Illustra IP cameras to improve security operations and reduce response time.

Illustra now offers its IP camera customers powerful video intelligence analytics to automatically analyze captured video and alert users of specific motion detected activities. The new intelligence analytics alert operators of key events that

Western Digital has launched

its latest WD-brand NAS offerings in India. The new NAS series has been specifically designed for the creative community that offers network storage to edit, save and share production files from anywhere with an internet connection. With space to store a massive amount of files, it is compatible with both PC and Mac computers enabling consumers to preserve their data and keep it organized, thereby streamlining their workflow.

Khalid Wani, Director, Content Solutions Business, India, ME and Africa, WD, said,"The Indian market has recently seen a boom in creative community, SMEs and DIY enthusiasts, which

has created a prominent need for portability, r e l i a b i l i t y , capacity, speed

and interoperability. We believe our new offering in the NAS segment – My Cloud Pro Series efficiently caters to these requirements, giving our consumers the belief to rely on the strength of the technology.”

performance and recover more than US$1 trillion in operational losses globally. With its industry expertise, consulting services, comprehensive automation technologies and Industrial IoT solutions, Emerson has been able to help customers extract greater value.

Emerson is also expanding its highly acclaimed Plantweb digital ecosystem, a scalable portfolio of standards-based hardware, software, intelligent devices and services for securely implementing the Industrial IoT.

need immediate attention for perimeter detection in airports and critical infrastructure and give additional insight to daily operations such as crowd

monitoring for retail applications.

Available on the Illustra Pro 2, 3 and 5 megapixel mini-

dome IP camera series, Illustra video intelligence analytics automatically detect alarms for key suspicious events. Illustra creates a cost-effective solution without the need for a dedicated analytics server.

Canon India has rolled out two

new models under their Projector series. The new launch includes LX-MU800Z, XEED WUX6010 and XEED WUX 450ST, loaded with world-class technology and user-friendly features.

K. Bhaskhar, Vice-President– Business Imaging Solutions Division, Canon India, said, “We have witnessed a shift in the usage pattern of projectors among Indian consumers. This has led to the diversification of the projection requirements, which is extending beyond

conference rooms now. In accordance with our constant pursuit of developing innovation-led products, we are excited to introduce our new range of projectors. The new models offer unmatched image quality and brightness along with lower operating costs enabling both businesses and end-users to deliver optimum results at a minimum cost.”

Kingston has announced the

launch of DT50 USB in India. DataTraveler 50 is a lightweight USB Flash drive that is available in capacities f r o m

8GB to 128GB. The drive’s

compact, capless design features a metal

casing that complements any compatible device and colourful accents that range by drive capacity. The pen drive is ideal for all those

who are mostly on the move and want to carry their data safely. With its sleek and lightweight body, it provides backward compatible with existing USB 2.0 ports for convenience to users as they carry their music, photos, videos and other data around with ease.

DT50, featuring USB 3.1 Gen 1, delivers decent transfer speeds with convenience, making it an essential tool for video and audio content professionals working with multiple bare drives. You can customize Kingston DT50 by adding your logo and/or digital files.

Unistal introduces Advanced Version of Locate Laptop Unistal Systems

has come up with an advanced version of software product Locate Laptop.

“We are offering the users an advanced version of Locate Laptop with amazing new features like selective decryption, image capturing, pinpoint location tracking, retrieving user id & password, etc which is going to be very helpful for Laptop users and employers as well,” said Alok Gupta, MD, Unistal Systems.

Locate Laptop keeps track of laptop's location whenever laptop gets connected to internet. What matters is not just the laptop but also the valuable, sensitive and confidential data in it.

TP-Link introduces Outdoor Wireless Broadband SolutionTP-Link has

introduced Pharos series – a high-performance enterprise-class outdoor wireless solution, designed for long-distance wireless backhaul, point-to-multipoint connections and outdoor Wi-Fi coverage solutions.

As connectivity to the internet grows, so do the challenges to reach more customers. Wherever the environment cannot accommodate traditional wired network infrastructure, broadband providers must turn to wireless delivery. Luckily, advancements in wireless broadband solutions have made WISP connectivity stronger and accessible than ever, and TP-Link Pharos series leads in every aspect.


VOICE-N-DATA

Jio Welcome Offer extended up to March 31, 2017

TDBS to foster Digital Transformation for SMEs

DIGISOL brings DG-BR5400QACZyxel announces Wi-Fi extenders

Mahindra Comviva aims for a two-fold business growth

Ruckus Wireless Expands its ZoneFlex Family

Jio welcome offers (JWO) users will

get free voice, data, video and full bouquet of Jio applications and content absolutely free up to March 31, 2017.

The existing Jio Welcome Offer (“JWO’) users will continue to enjoy the unlimited benefits under JWO up to 31 December 2016, following which they would be automatically signed-up for the JNO as well.

Jio has also announced the launch of ‘Jio Happy New Year Offer (“JNO”)’, which will be effective from 4 December 2016.

Tata DoCoMo Business Services

(TDBS) has highlighted its focus on the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and start-up segments in India. TDBS is a market leader in the enterprise space, registering a 15% year-on-year growth vis-à-vis 8% industry growth in the SME segment for the year 2015-16. The company has expanded its product portfolio with a recent launch of mobile device management (MDM) services.

All the Jio subscribers will be entitled to certain special benefits under the JNO, which shall comprise of Jio’s data, voice, video and the full bouquet of Jio applications and content, absolutely free up to 31 March 2017. During this offer period, Jio and Jio customers will be able to continue the journey of co-creating and building the best network experience together.

The benefits will be available to all subscribers signing up for Jio services up to March 3, 2017.

Prateek Pashine, President, Enterprise Business, Tata Teleservices, said, “Digital transformation will bring about a paradigm shift in the way companies do business and we, with our portfolio of product and solutions, are at the heart of this evolution. While the traditional companies are picking up entrepreneurial zeal, it is the smaller companies that are at the forefront of digital adoption and creating businesses which are asset light and internet-enabled.”

DIGISOL has launched AC

1200 Dual Band Wireless Broadband Router DG-BR5400QAC. The DG-BR5400QAC is IEEE 802.11ac next-generation wireless router which provides a better wireless performance.

D G - B R 5 4 0 0 Q A C use intelligent antenna technology to transmit multiple streams of data which enables users to receive wireless signals faster at your home. Not only the IEEE802.11ac technology extends the wireless range, it also works with previous-generation IEEE802.11b/g/n wireless

devices. The wireless router also includes QoS (Quality of Service) prioritization technology that analyzes and separates multiple data streams based on sensitivity to delay, enabling multiple applications to stream smoothly across your network.

Zy x e l Communications

has announced that their latest and the best Wi-Fi networking ally solutions are coming to Wi-Fi user's home. Two new Wi-Fi range extenders, the W R E 6 6 0 6 and WRE6505 v2, are now available to extend speedy 802.11ac Wi-Fi in places you couldn't reach before.

The WRE6606 and WRE6505 v2 come with a smart and intuitive design to make setup and connect

easy breezy. With the LED ring on

the WRE6505 v2, users can easily detect the signal strengths of both bands

(2.4 GHz and 5GHz) at various places at home, providing the easiest search n a v i g a t i o n . H o w e v e r , in the event where wall

outlets are absent, the WRE6606 comes with a micro USB port to connect to portable power banks, allowing users to extend Wi-Fi around the house.

Mahindra Comviva is aiming at

achieving two-fold business growth over the next three years. At present, India contributes 20 per cent to the company’s overall revenue.

To achieve the next growth phase, the company has invested in a mobile first, data enabled and contextually relevant, end-to-end solutions strategy. Towards this end, it aims to strengthen its research and development and operational support of

technologies in mobile financial services, big-data analytics, omni-channel experience, enterprise messaging and digital services. It has also identified growth through the strategic partnerships and acquisitions route as key to its strategy in India and abroad.

Mahindra Comviva has integrated mobile innovations at the heart of its business strategy and repositioned itself with a powerful vision of “The Business of Tomorrows”.

Ruckus Wireless has announced the

addition of two new access points (APs) – the ZoneFlex R610 indoor AP and the ZoneFlex T610 outdoor AP. Both products are based on the IEEE 802.11ac Wave 2 standard featuring multi-user MIMO technology, which optimizes airtime efficiency to client devices and increases aggregate network throughput in dense indoor or outdoor deployments.

The R610 is an indoor Wave 2 11ac 3x3:3 AP with USB interface capable of supporting future IoT applications that fills the

gap between the ZoneFlex R510 Wave 2 2x2:2 AP and the R710 Wave 2 4x4:4 AP, delivering data rates up to 1,900 Mbps.

The T610 is an outdoor Wave 2 11ac 4x4:4 AP with field accessible USB interface capable of supporting future IoT applications. The T610 is positioned between the ZoneFlex T300 Wave 1 2x2:2 outdoor AP and T710 Wave 2 4x4:4 AP and supports data rates up to 2.5 Gbps.

Juniper Networks launches carrier-grade routing and security Juniper Networks

announced the latest versions of its industry leading virtual routing and security platforms, Juniper Networks vMX and vSRX Virtual Firewall for AWS Marketplace.

Operating similar to their physical counterparts, the vMX and vSRX platforms will enable enterprises to flexibly deploy carrier-grade routing and firewall functions at the click of a button. Customers will have the option to purchase services on-demand via an annual or hourly subscription directly from the AWS Marketplace or from Juniper Networks, through a Bring Your Own License (BYOL) model.

Over 10,000 savings accounts opened with Airtel Payments BankAirtel Bank offers

basic banking services to customers by leveraging Airtel’s vast retail network and taking basic banking services to the doorstep of customers via neighbourhood Airtel retailers. In Rajasthan, Airtel Bank has rolled out pilot services across 10,000 Airtel retail outlets, which also act as banking points. Two-thirds of these banking points across Rajasthan are in rural areas. Airtel Bank plans to have a network of 100,000 merchants (shops) across Rajasthan by the end of the year. All these merchants will accept digital payments via Airtel Bank using a mobile phone. Airtel will not charge any processing fee from merchants for this facility.


Opportunities galore for Siemon in IndiaPrem Rodrigues, Director of Sales & Marketing Middle East, India & SAARC – Siemon

tells VARINDIA of the company’s positioning in the country with respect to the Data Center industry and about its partnerships to work together in the Smart City projects -

How is Siemon positioned in the Data Center industry in the country?

Siemon leads the market in technology and innovation, ensuring the widest choice of forward-thinking solutions available for Indian customers. Siemon's current focus is providing high quality, high performance IT copper and fiber cabling, cable management systems and services to Enterprise, Colocation and Cloud Data Centers, Internet Service Providers. Our interest also lies in Local Area Networks and Intelligent Buildings.

Siemon's elaborate solution portfolio consists of its WheelHouse Advanced Data Center solutions including category 6A and higher shielded and unshielded copper cabling systems, end-to-end single-mode and multi-mode fiber cabling solutions. We offer a complete range of innovative data center cabinets and power distribution units, independently tested high speed interconnect cable assemblies, V-Built preterminated and pre-kitted data center solutions, EagleEye Automated Infrastructure Management solution as well as comprehensive data center design services.

As far the opportunities for Data Centers are concerned, we feel that growing adoption of cloud services is one of the major reasons for growth of Data Center in India. Apart from this, the increased focus on mobility, big data activities, and analytics will also fuel the growth. BFSI, Telecom, IT & ITeS are the major sectors driving the growth. The rising IT penetration and demand for social media consumption in the country will also help. On the Government front, initiatives like Digital India and Start-up India will also be the major growth driver for Data Center infrastructure and network cabling market in India. Green technology will grow in demand as need for more efficient and environment friendly components will be the trend for future. However, companies need to look at long term value & future readiness when they choose products.

Adoption of premium products and global standards maybe a challenge for some companies as they would need to invest.

What kind of Data Center products & Solutions do you have in your offerings?

We provide superior quality, high performance low voltage infrastructure solutions and services for Data Centers,

LANs and Intelligent Buildings in India. We offer Copper and Optical fiber cabling systems, Data Center cabinets, racks, cable management, Data Center power and cooling systems and Automated Infrastructure Management solutions. Our Hyderabad center acts as the Centre of Competency (CoC) handling projects on Data Center design and IT programming for the global operations of Siemon. Over the years Siemon has introduced market leading products that lead the global industry in innovation.

Siemon also provides many value-added services that include Data Center design services, Education & Technical Services, Global project management services, logistics management and many more.

What are your growth plans with respect to the India market? Any significant partnerships you have signed for working together for the Smart City project/s?

Siemon looks at India as a highly strategic market and we are very optimistic about it. Siemon has renewed its focus on this important market and aims to achieve around 15% market share in next 2-3 years.

Siemon has partnerships with eminent companies like Cisco, CBRE on a global level and is working on expanding these relationships in India. As a matter of fact, Siemon is the only end-to-end cabling infrastructure partner within the Cisco Digital Ceiling Ecosystem

which aims to extend the benefits of the Internet of Things (IoT) and PoE LED lighting. Siemon also has a selective channel partner strategy. We work with some leading partners globally and regionally in India. We work with partners who share a common goal and are able to work with us on a long-term basis to deliver a unique value proposition to our customers.

Siemon has also partnered with a wide variety of complementary manufacturers involved in LED lighting, security, audiovisual and building automation control. Recently Siemon also held two Roadshows in India in association with Cisco on Data Centers & Intelligent Building solutions which resulted in overwhelming participation.

Siemon has long been an advocate of smarter, greener more efficient buildings by converging critical low-voltage building systems onto one integrated physical infrastructure, providing significant cost savings and sustainability over the life of a facility.

Through our intelligent building solutions, expertise and partnerships, Siemon is confident that it can take a significant position in India’s intelligent building and Smart City growth.

What is your GTM strategy?Siemon has been selling products in India

for more than 20 years. In 2011, Siemon decided to significantly expand its presence in India by opening the Siemon India headquarters in Hyderabad. Throughout India, Siemon has long had a base of channel partners, including value added resellers and Siemon Certified Installers. These support Siemon's multinational clients in India with high quality design, installation and world class service levels associated with the Siemon brand. From India, Siemon also provides back-office support for IT programming, Data Center design services, project management services, warranty processing and logistics management.

Siemon sees India as a source of valuable skills. Resources from India are not only serving our Indian clients but they are also serving our Global clients. Apart from that, Siemon has more than 40 channel partners and certified installers who are also part of the extended Siemon family. Siemon is extending its reach by associating with new channel partners and gaining more certified installer’s through our world class ISO 9001:2015 (Quality Management System) Certified training program. n

FACE TO FACE


CHANNEL BUZZ

Ricoh India Conducts "Sammelan-Ricoh Partner Connect Programs"

D-Link distributors celebrate their triumph at Hong Kong-Macau

Newgen successfully concludes Mumbai Annual Customer Meet

Inaugural GTCx India Mumbai sees big Success

Ricoh India kick-started the Sammelan – A Partner

Connect Initiative in the southern region in the strategic cities of Coimbatore and Chennai in the state of Tamil Nadu, Hyderabad,

Vijayawada and Kakinada in the states of AP and Telangana and Mysore and Bangalore in the state of Karnataka. These Sammelans were held at popular upscale hotels in these respective cities.

Few meets were organized in conjunction with the regional local IT associations like Tirupur IT Association (Tamil Nadu), CONFED (IT Association in Tamil Nadu) and AKITDA (Kerala). Ricoh intends to conduct such partner meets “Sammelan” at various strategic locations across the length and breadth of the country. These meets were attended by prominent partners of the region.

The Sammelan began with

As part of its sales incentive program, D-Link India

Limited rewarded its Business distributors with an exclusive luxury trip to Hong Kong and Macau on accomplishment of their business targets for H1, 2016-17.

The exclusive trip to Hong Kong and Macau had over 60 participants, which included business distributors and key members of D-Link management team. D-Link management team also felicitated its distributors at the awards night for their incessant

Newgen Software has successfully hosted its

Annual Customer Meet 2016 in Mumbai.

The Theme of the event was “Yesterday is History, Today is Gone, Be faster than the Fastest – Reinvent Your Workplace”. The conclave discussed the need for Digital Age decision-makers to respond to change faster than ever due to evolving customer needs and changing business dynamics.

At the meet, Newgen’s leaders conducted a journey walkthrough highlighting the present position of Newgen’s implementations, product roadmaps and future product offerings. They discussed Newgen’s growth and market foothold in Mumbai and India accentuating strong channel partnerships.

Diwakar Nigam, MD & CEO, Newgen Software, stated, “In this journey of over 24 years, our customers have been the biggest strength for us. Their indomitable trust in our capabilities has driven us to develop innovative technology solutions that are adaptable and future-ready. The Annual Customer

GTCx India on December 5-6 ran to a sellout

audience of more than 1400 attendees. NVIDIA’s Dr. Steven Parker, eminent scientist and Padma Bhushan awardee Dr. Vijay Bhatkar delivered Keynotes on the revolution in AI and Integrative Computing respectively, to a standing room only crowd. This

was followed by tracks on Deep Learning, HPC and Professional Visualisation, NVIDIA VR Village experiences, sponsor booths, the evening GTCx mixer and much more, with the buzz running to well over 8pm.

NVIDIA’s Deep Learning

an introduction to Ricoh by the Regional Sales Team, the Global Company with Global Products and Solutions to cater to the Indian market. The meet further went on to emphasize RICOH’s commitment to the Indian channel fraternity and our customer, the robust and workaholic products that Ricoh offers to the customers for their Printing and Imaging Solutions. These meets showcased a wide range of products that cater to personal and business needs. These meets have been able to re-establish and empower the faith of the Ricoh Product and Solution Offerings and Ricoh as a Brand, to cater to requirements of the Indian market.

The sessions were followed by sharing of the Synergies that Partners and Ricoh can achieve by partnering together, the rich benefits that partner can gain through the margin earned by selling Ricoh products, the technical and support programme from Ricoh for the partners and users, the Promotion Support given by Ricoh through multiple channels.

support & contribution to D-Link’s growth.

Organized between 12th to 16th November 2016, this incentive trip was a welcome break for partner/ distributors from their routine business. The

tour encompassed of Hong Kong-Macau sightseeing, a brief conference with D-Link Senior Management sharing company’s strategy & growth plans for 2016-17. The trip concluded with a Gala night at Hard Rock Café with live performance.

Meet gives us an opportunity to reconnect with our diverse clientele and deliberate upon the business needs and market drivers of tomorrow.” Some of the eminent speakers, Sanjay Narkar, Chief Technology Officer, IDFC Bank Ltd, and Milind Varerkar, General Manager, Saraswat Bank, discussed their journey with Newgen and successful implementations of Newgen Solutions at their facilities. Other participants included leaders from IndusInd Bank, Axis Bank, Aditya Birla Finance Limited, Bajaj Electricals, Fullerton India and others.

Newgen will hold its Delhi edition Annual Customer Meet in December 2016. The meet expects a greater success and participation of our esteemed clients.

Institute (DLI) Training ran to a full house for all three classes (introduction to deep learning, object detection & network deployment. The very interactive audience had NVIDIA expert Abel Brown teaching and fielding questions from 9:00 a.m. to almost 7:00 p.m., well over the original schedule.

Emerging Companies Summit (ECS) showcased 12 start-ups with exciting solutions ranging from an app which recognizes food ingredients and suggests recipes to another which observes inventory in brand coolers at retail outlets and automatically reorders supplies. The audience was a mixture

of start-ups, investors, companies and media.

The Keynote live feed was viewed extensively online and GTCx India was successful in bringing the Indian GPU community together on one platform to share knowledge, learn and network.


“A Holistic, well-rounded Security Approach is the need of the hour”

Rohit Oberoi, Director Channel - India & Middle East, Seclore Technology in an open discourse on End point security explains how 2017 will be a revolutionary year in terms of coming out with

stricter regulations and policies by organizations to secure their networks and data -

2016 has been an epic year for cyber security threats. The positive side is that awareness is also increasing. With data leakage stories

making headlines every day, the topic has entered mainstream discourse. The day is not far when companies are sued by customers for not keeping their private data safe.

“The growing awareness, coupled with the government’s willingness to acknowledge the national security risks posed by cyberattacks, makes us hopeful we will see meaningful progress made in the fight to create effective cyber-legislation by the end of 2017. 2017 will (hopefully) be the year global leaders finally recognize the need for an InfoSec Geneva Convention, setting standards for what cyber-activities are and aren’t acceptable. Holding highly confidential information hostage and using it as black mail or manipulate elections is a whole new level of warfare,” opines Rohit Oberoi, Director Channel - India & Middle East, Seclore Technology.

He continues, “Furthermore, in 2017, we can expect to see organizations placing stricter compliance regulations on their third-party outsource vendors and other external collaboration partners. Third-parties such as advisors, vendors, sub-contractors and business partners pose a huge risk to organizations because they require access to systems and data to conduct business, yet there is no accountability in the way they handle a company’s data.”

Drivers of the Endpoint Security MarketThe value offered by firewalls and anti-virus solutions has been on the

decline. Seclore predicts that 2017 will be the year when organizations will acknowledge the need to secure the data itself, and not just infrastructure and devices. “The shift to persistent data-centric has already begun with Enterprise Digital Rights Management (EDRM) capabilities as a key requirement in their Enterprise File Synch and Share (EFSS). In fact several vendors have already jumped on the data-centric security trend in 2016, with Citrix and IBM adding Rights Management features to their EFSS and Enterprise Content Management (ECM) offerings,” says Rohit.

Another primary reason for the increased interest in data centric security is that the business itself (which after all is the ultimate owner of the data) is becoming more aware. For example, when a bank sends confidential customer data to its credit card embossing vendors, the Operations Head is as concerned about data security as the CISO or CRO. For IT, this makes it easier to obtain buy-ins and budgets - not to mention making solution adoption much easier too. After all, employees are more likely to follow instructions if they come from their bosses rather than from IT.

Large organizations vs Smaller Organizations -

The days when Information Security was nice-to-have are long gone. Now it is considered a key part of overall Information strategy. “That is one reason we are finding that more and more organizations are opting for the integration route for data-centric security products i.e. integrating them with existing enterprise applications such as ECM and ERP products,” he says.

Awareness is increasing even among the verticals not traditionally associated with strong Data-centric Information Security programs, such as the Indian Manufacturing and Knowledge Process Outsourcing. Even government agencies have now started focusing their efforts in this

direction.It is however difficult to characterize the nature of data breaches today

in relation to company size. The reality is that most leaks are largely ‘equal opportunity thefts’ i.e. they do not discriminate based on the size of the company. “We feel that every organization’s security strategy should be driven by its individual needs and requirements, rather than size or market capitalization,” he says.

So does it suffice then to just resorting to endpoint security to avert advanced threats?

“Security today is fragmented and not centralized; data security has traditionally focused only on securing information that stays within a

boundary. A piece of data might be governed by one policy inside an application, by another policy on the endpoint, by yet another policy on a file server, yet another on the vendor’s inbox, yet another on the vendor’s file server, and so on. In fact, the very concept of endpoint security is boundary-centric and not data-centric – and endpoint security is the most potent symptom of this traditional approach,” explains Rohit.

And this approach, like he says while necessary has been proven insufficient in today’s flat world. Enterprises need a holistic, well-rounded approach to data security and governance. As hackers are taking a more targeted approach by exploiting higher value breaches beyond credit cards and social security numbers, no longer can we rely on just securing the infrastructure or devices. “And with new collaboration technologies and the use of outsourcing continuing to grow at a breakneck speed, it will be virtually impossible to keep up with hackers unless organizations evolve their infrastructures to support a data-centric security,” concludes Rohit. n

“Every hacking group will try to achieve the optimum balance between the organization’s cybersecurity

versus the quality of the potential data stash. Larger companies would have larger security programs but

also a larger amount of data available to steal. Smaller organizations, on the other hand, may not have the

best people or the best security strategies and would thus be low hanging fruit. But they would also have less

data to steal – both in terms of quality and quantity.”

FACE TO FACE


Demonetization is a big opportunity for India to reach $10-trillion economy by 2030, thanks to sustained double-digit growth for the next 14 years as presently a

large percentage of money will transact to the banking and digital system

Demonetization is not the final destination. It is just a beginning, said Prime Minister Narendra, while addressing the BJP parliamentary meeting on the last day of the winter session of Parliament.

Addressing law-makers, Shri Narendra Modi said that a digital economy should be a “way of life” and that such an economy would be transparent and effective. The centre has been pushing hard for a “cashless” economy exhorting people to engage in digital transactions.

This one announcement has given a big jump to the Digital Payment industry in India. The BCG-Google Digital Payment Report 2020 forecasts total payments conducted via digital payment instruments in India will be in the range of $500 billion by 2020, which is approximately 10x of the current levels.

According to the report, Person to Merchant (P2M) transactions driven by digital payments at physical point of sale, followed by business to business (B2B) and peer to peer (P2P) transactions are expected to be major contributors of growth. Digitization of cash will accelerate over the next five years with non-cash transactions overtaking cash by 2023.

Mobile-based payment solutions and proprietary payment networks will drive merchant acquisition by offering low-investment solutions that will make economics more attractive for merchants and acquirers, resulting in over 10 million merchant establishments that will accept digital/mobile payments.

Modified Unified Payments Interface (UPI) will be a game-changer as it provides a great platform for seamless interoperability of PSPs. Modified to overcome the present challenges, it can drive large-scale adoption of digital payments.

Non-cash payment transactions which, today,

Addressing the India-China Investment Conclave in October 2016, NITI

Aayog Vice-Chairman Arvind Panagariya said that the size of the Indian economy could increase five-fold to $10 trillion in the next 15 years, replicating a feat achieved by the Chinese economy in 2015.

“India started off to rapid growth a little later than China, but now it has the potential to accomplish in the next 15 years what China did in the last 15 years. India’s GDP stands at $2 trillion and it has good prospects of rising to $10 trillion in the next 15 years," commented Panagariya.

With $10.86 trillion (14.7 per cent share in the world GDP), the Chinese economy stood second in the world after the US in 2015 at

$17.95 trillion, while India, at $2.07 trillion (2.8 per cent), was ranked seventh. Analysts reckon that to reach $10 trillion, the Indian economy needs to grow at over 11 per cent for the next one-and-a-half decades, which is a daunting challenge but not impossible as China’s economy was $1.2 trillion in 2000.

Prime minister’s Narendra Modi’s November 8 announcement of discontinuing Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 notes has given a big fillip to India achieving $10-trillion economy as diemonetization of Rs.500 and Rs.1,000 bank notes will definitely help India with a faster GDP growth, help in bringing down inflation and products becoming more affordable which will fuel the demand and further growth of the industries.

Will demonetization help India to become $10-tn economy by 2030?

COVER STORY


constitute 22 per cent of all consumer payments will overtake cash transactions by 2023. Digital payments instruments will drive the growth in non-cash payments.

Not only the BCG-Google report, even the GSMA report talks about the increased role of mobile in digital payments. The GSMA report “The Mobile Economy: India 2016” noted at the end of June 2016, 616 million unique users had subscribed to mobile services in India, making it the second-largest mobile market globally, with almost one billion unique mobile subscribers expected by 2020. India also overtook the United States in 2016 to become the world’s second- largest smartphone market with an installed base of 275 million mobile devices.

The report forecasts 4G subscribers to reach 280 million by 2020 and operators capex investment growing to $34 billion over 2016-2020 period. As per GSMA, the India mobile economy is more than $140 billion (Rs.9 lakh crore) and it is expected to grow to $210 billion (Rs.14 lakh crore) by 2020.

Talking about the mobile economy, Mats Granryd, Director General, GSMA, said, “With The Mobile Economy: India 2016 report, all signs lead to a period of tremendous growth for India’s mobile economy, which will strongly support and enable the government’s Digital India initiative aimed at providing broadband connectivity to all.”

Speaking on digital payments, Pradeep Sampath, COO, mRUPEE (a subsidiary of Tata Teleservices), said, “The digital payments industry today is worth a staggering $9-trillion figure. With home to 1.25 billion people, India will still take time to go completely digital. As on date, payment revenues in India account for nearly $14 billion. However, the recent wave of demonetization is changing the shape of the digital payment industry.”

Commenting on UPI apps, Chinmay Agarwal, CTO & Co-Founder, Jugnoo, said, “On the mobile phone front, common minimum guidelines for UPI apps need to be defined so that user interface has a minimum common workflow. UPI distinctions for Peer to Merchant (P2M) and Peer to Peer (P2P) payments are confusing. P2P is simpler and should be promoted more. Further, we need to quickly release UPI SDKs for iOS and web platforms.”

“One of the key obstacles is trust and availability of mobile payment models – be it UPI or wallets to be available widely for transactions.

The penetration is still too low for the population size of India, which transacts using cash. Even credit card or debit card penetration has not been very successful in doing cashless transaction for lack of basic infrastructure,” says Govind Ramamurthy, CEO & MD, eScan.

Even demand for Point of Sale (PoS) devices is huge for cashless transactions, both for making payments or disbursing cash. So the Government has exempted it from excise duty, and consequently from CVD and SAD and it is valid till March 31, 2017. Digital Payment Options

As on November 30, 2016, RBI gave approval to 195 banks for providing mobile banking services to their customers. Further, to facilitate mobile banking, the process of registration has been made convenient by enabling such feature on ATMs.

National Payments Corporation of India (NPCI) has offered the facility of mobile banking using Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD) based mobile banking. USSD-based mobile banking offers basic banking facilities like money transfer, bill payments, balance enquiries, merchant payments, etc on a simple GSM mobile phone, without the need to download application on a phone, as required at present in the IMPS (Immediate Payment Service) based mobile banking.

Transactions can be performed on basic feature phone handsets. The user needs to approach his bank and get his mobile number registered. The bank will issue an MPIN (Mobile PIN) to the user. The user thereafter needs to dial *99# and the menu for using USSD opens. Thereafter customer has to follow selections on the menu to complete the transaction.

"Digital economy should be a ‘way of life’ and that such an economy would be transparent

and effective. The centre has been pushing hard

for a ‘cashless’ economy exhorting people to engage

in digital transactions"Narendra Modi

Prime Minister of India

"The Indian economy could increase five-fold to $10 trillion

in the next 15 years, replicating a feat

achieved by the Chinese economy in 2015"

Arvind PanagariyaVice Chairman, NITI Aayog


COVER STORY

Currently, there are over 200+ million mobile wallets with over 75 million transactions

every month and payment throughput of

over Rs. 2,000+ crore

Speaking on USSD, Aruna Sundarajan, Secretary, MeitY, said, “Banks should work towards making USSD a preferable and convenient mode of digital payments in the light of the fact that majority of Jan Dhan account holders would directly benefit from it.”

NPCI will soon launch a redesigned USSD platform and a common app for UPI for enabling digital transactions, as well as addressing interoperability issues.

Mobile Wallet business is picking up with demonetization announcement – be it Paytm, MobiKwik, Oxigen, Freecharge and others. Recently, the Paytm Android app crossed the 50 million installs landmark on Google Play Store. With this, the Paytm's Android base has now grown to over 75 million.

L. V. Sastry, Vice-President – Mobile Banking & Commerce, Aircel, said, “Indian wallet transactions over the last three years by value and volume have grown by over 500 per cent to reach $551 million and 2.6 billion, respectively in 2015. In India, nearly 95 per cent of all the transactions are cash based, signalling a huge opportunity and upside to this growing usage of mobile phones for financial transactions.”

Currently, there are over 200+ million active mobile wallets with over 75 million transactions every month and payment throughput of over Rs.2,000+ crore of payments is being processed across the country.

Paytm has set a target of 200 million accounts which will include current and savings accounts as well as mobile wallets within 12 months. The company also aims to reach a base of half a billion accounts by the year 2020. The company has also announced that it would transfer its wallet business to the newly incorporated Paytm Payments Bank after receiving necessary approvals. Paytm claims to have close-to 155 million e-wallet users, which include users on the web and smartphone apps.

On the merchant front, Paytm expects to onboard 500,000 merchants on its platform to accept offline payments as the country grapples with a shortage of cash due to the Narendra

Modi demonetization move.To enable millions of feature phone users

to go digital, Paytm has launched a service with which consumers and merchants can pay and receive money without internet connection. The company has announced a toll-free number 1800 1800 1234 to enable consumers and merchants without an internet connection to pay and receive money instantly and also recharge their mobile phones.

MobiKwik is another Indian wallet major with a network of over 250,000 direct merchants and 40 million-plus users. Founded in 2009 by Bipin Preet Singh and Upasana Taku, the company has raised three rounds of funding from Sequoia Capital, American Express, Tree Line Asia, MediaTek, GMO Payment Gateway,

Cisco Investments and Net1.Indian mobile wallet major, MobiKwik

recently announced the launch of MobiKwik “Lite”, India’s lightest mobile wallet, to cash on demonetization bandwagon and help unorganized retailers and shopkeepers across India in receiving payments seamlessly.

MobiKwik Lite is an under 1 MB app that works smoothly on EDGE connections and slow data connectivity. Users can download this app with just one missed call at 8097180971 and sign up with their mobile number only,

Speaking on the launch, Bipin Preet Singh, Co-Founder, MobiKwik, said, “MobiKwik Lite will be available in all the major Indian languages

soon. MobiKwik Lite will work without any net connectivity too, therefore addressing all the challenges being faced by the masses in accessing wallet payments – be it language, connectivity or quality of smartphones.”

Oxigen has a retail footprint of 200,000 outlets and has processed over 2 billion transactions till date with a current transaction volume rate of 600 million transactions per annum. It has a large customer base of over 150 million.

Oxigen Wallet is India’s first non-bank mobile wallet app approved by RBI, which allows users to send and receive money through popular social channels like Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, SMS and e-mail. A customer can instantly send money to any mobile number or bank account in India, even if the recipient is not a registered Oxigen Wallet user.

Oxigen Wallet claims to have 30 million users and is accepted at over 9,000 merchant locations and 10,000 online sites like Bookmyshow, ebay, PVR, OYO Rooms, Jabong, and more. Oxigen Wallet offers a safe, secure and convenient payment solution via the mobile.

Loading money into Oxigen wallet app is easy. One can use credit card, debit card or pay cash over the counter through any of Oxigen’s 200,000 retailer/ partners across the country. In 2016, Oxigen Services introduced its Micro ATM. Oxigen MicroATM provides Aadhaar biometric-based transactions for financial services.

Ankur Saxena, CEO, Oxigen Wallet, said, “In terms of transaction value, the company is planning to reach Rs.14,500 crore in FY 2016-17 in comparison to Rs.10,500 crore in FY 2015-16.”

Speaking about security, Ankur said, “Oxigen application is pretty secure. Once you log onto it is bound into one device. The transaction is all encrypted so security is no concern at the application end. Even when the phone is stolen, it does not make much of a difference as money is in cloud.”

In the age of demonetization, mobile

"Reliance Jio Money is also planning an aggressive pitch and is planning to sign over 10 million small merchants retailers in the coming weeks across 17,000 towns and 4 lakh villages"

Mukesh AmbaniChairman, Reliance Jio

"DigiShala will enable and empower every citizen of the country, especially, farmers, students, dalits and women in rural areas to learn the usefulness and benefits of digital payment in everyday life"

Ravi Shankar PrasadMinister of Electronics and

IT and Law & Justice

"With the launch of Vodafone M-Pesa PAY, we are accelerating this journey by creating a platform for merchants and retailers to easily embrace digital payments and also encourage their millions of customers to pay via digital currency"

Sunil SoodMD & CEO, Vodafone India


operators like Bharti Airtel, Idea Cellular, Reliance Jio, Tata Teleservices and Vodafone are all banking a lot on mobile payments in a big way. All these operators are targeting consumers as well as merchants in an aggressive way to increase their share from mobile payment.

Bharti Airtel through Airtel Payments Bank has rolled out its pilot services in Rajasthan, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and Karnataka. Airtel has done a pilot rollout in Rajasthan, where over 100,000 customers opened savings accounts in less than two weeks of the commencement of services. In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Airtel Payments Bank is rolling out pilot services across 8,000 Airtel retail outlets in Andhra Pradesh and 7,000 outlets in Telangana, which also act as banking points. In Karnataka, Airtel Payments Bank is rolling out pilot services across 12,000 Airtel retail outlets. Airtel is planning 70 per cent of these banking points in rural areas, thereby driving financial inclusion and reaching unbanked/underbanked areas.

Customers will now be able to open bank accounts at any of the designated Airtel retail outlets and enjoy a host of convenient banking services. As a special offer, customers opening a savings account with Airtel Payments Bank will also get one minute of Airtel mobile talk-time for every Rupee deposited. For example, if a customer opens an account with a deposit of Rs.500, then he/she will get 500 minutes of free talk-time for calls to anywhere in India on his/her Airtel mobile number.

Shashi Arora, MD & CEO, Airtel Payments Bank, said, “We are pleased to roll out our pilot services in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and look forward to serving customers and contributing the financial inclusion vision of the two states. We have received an extremely positive response from customers in Rajasthan and would like to replicate the same in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana before we rollout our services nationally.”

Airtel Payments Bank is a fully digital and paperless bank and customers can access services over their mobile phones, including all feature/

basic mobile phones. Airtel will leverage its vast customer base of over 260 million customers and educate them on the benefits of digital payments.

Airtel Payments Bank plans to develop a nationwide merchant ecosystem of over 3 million partners that will include small kirana stores, small shops and restaurants, etc.

Reliance Jio Money is also planning an aggressive pitch and is planning to sign over 10 million small merchant retailers in the coming weeks across 17,000 towns and 4 lakh villages.

To enable digital transactions, Reliance Jio is working to empower Indian merchants by building a digital retail ecosystem, called Jio Money Merchant Solutions. This will enable

digital transactions of all types – be it at mandis, small shops, restaurants, railway ticket counters for bus and mass transit and even for person-to-person money transfers.

Starting December 5, every merchant can download Jio Money Merchant Solutions, whereas customers can use their Jio Money wallets to pay merchants from their bank accounts, and merchants can use the Jio Money Merchant app to accept these payments directly into their bank accounts.

Using Jio Money Merchant App, merchants can also make supplier payments, transfer money between his bank account and use digital petty cash.

The Jio Money ecosystem will be a

“With The Mobile Economy: India 2016 report, all signs to a period of tremendous growth for India’s mobile economy, which will strongly support and enable the government’s Digital India initiative aimed at providing broadband connectivity to all”

Mats GranrydDirector General, GSMA

"Banks should work towards making USSD a preferable and convenient mode of digital payments, in light of the fact that majority of Jan Dhan account holders would directly benefit from it"

Aruna SundarajanSecretary, MeitY

“The MobiKwik Lite will be available in all major Indian languages soon. It will work without any net connectivity too, therefore addressing all the challenges being faced by masses in accessing wallet payments, be it language, connectivity or quality of smartphones”

Bipin Preet SinghCo-founder, MobiKwik

Source: NITI Aayog


committed and enthusiastic partner for the smooth implementation of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's game-changing vision of creating a digitally- enabled and a strong Indian economy.

Jio is committed to support the growth of a digitally-enabled, optimal-cash economy in India. In order to make this possible, JioMoney is rapidly expanding its reach to millions of touch points where Aadhaar-based micro-ATMs will be deployed.

mRUPEE, a subsidiary of Tata Teleservices, is a semi-closed wallet that is licensed by the RBI for offering customized solutions to corporates for simplifying employee payments and other processes. mRUPEE will be available as a

payment option across all HPCL outlets, whereby the customers can make payments through mRUPEE. The company is also partnering with Intex, a leading mobile phone vendor, to launch “Intex MyWallet” app for its customers. Earlier this year, the company had tied up with IRCTC to provide a payment gateway, allowing users one-tap payments for rail ticket bookings.

The company has also tied up with ICICI Bank to launch a recharge facility for Delhi Metro cards. MMPL also launched the open loop prepaid, VISA-powered card in partnership with RBL Bank (Ratnakar Bank). By obtaining a PaySmart card, mRUPEE customers can withdraw money from VISA licensed ATMs and pay for goods and services at all merchants that accept VISA debit/credit cards nationally.

According to Vishal Gupta, Co-founder and CEO, Seclore Demonetisation will increase digitization; making information fluid and easily shareable with the right parties. Free movement of data oils the wheels of the modern enterprise – as well as the modern government. Improved productivity and better delivery of services are quick and provide immediate benefits however, the other key aspect of demonetisation is keeping track of all digital data across organisations, offices, networks, servers, devices and all other things – impossible with traditional security solutions. Traditional security solutions cannot deliver data-centric security and auditing of the entire digital cash trail. This is only possible with the data-centric security solutions like EDRM offered by Seclore.

Vodafone India has announced the launch of Vodafone M-Pesa PAY, an easy and ready-to-use digital payment solution to enable merchants and retailers to receive payments from their customers without any exchange of cash.

To start using this digital payment solution, retailers and merchants simply have to download Vodafone M-Pesa app and register for Vodafone M-Pesa PAY as a merchant. Once registered, they can notify an individual customer to make the payment due. Customers just need to click on the notification and make payment digitally using their M-Pesa wallet, bank account and debit or credit card.

Launching Vodafone M-Pesa PAY, Sunil Sood, MD & CEO, Vodafone India, said, “We started our journey towards enabling financial and digital inclusion in 2013 with the launch of Vodafone M-Pesa and have since made considerable progress by successfully establishing a franchise of over 8.4 million customers and nearly 130,000 outlets across the country. With the launch of Vodafone M-Pesa PAY, we are accelerating this journey by creating a platform for merchants and retailers to easily embrace digital payments and also encourage their millions of customers to pay via digital currency.”

All the mobile operators need to undertake a cross-country drive to educate and onboard retailers, merchants and consumers to start using mobile wallets as the preferred solution for receiving and making payments.

Digital Payment PromotionsThe government petroleum PSUs/oil

marketing government companies were asked

by the Government to give incentive by offering a discount at the rate of 0.75 per cent of the sale price to consumers on the purchase of petrol/diesel if payment is made through a digital mode.

The government and RBI have taken various steps to bring down the cost of digital transactions. The MDR charges have been brought down significantly in the case of transactions up to Rs.2,000 made through debit cards, i.e. 0.25 per cent in the case of transactions below Rs.1,000 and 0.50 per cent in the case of transactions between Rs.1,000 to Rs.2,000.

With a view to promoting digital transactions and encouraging merchant establishments to

“Indian wallet transactions over the last 3 years by value and volume have grown by over 500 per cent to reach $551 million and 2.6 billion respectively in 2015. In India nearly 95 per cent of all transactions are cash based, signalling huge opportunity and upside to this growing usage of mobile phones for financial transactions”

LV Sastry, vice president – Mobile Banking & Commerce, Aircel

“Oxigen application is pretty secure. Once you log onto it is bound into one device. The transaction is all encrypted so security is no concern at the application end. Even when the phone is stolen it does not make much of a difference as money is in cloud”

Ankur SaxenaCEO, Oxigen Wallet

“Traditional security solutions cannot deliver data-centric security and auditing of the entire digital cash trail. This is only possible with the data-centric security solutions like EDRM offered by Seclore”

Vishal GuptaCo-founder and CEO

Seclore

“The digital payments industry today is worth a staggering $9 trillion. With home to 1.25 billion people, India will still take time to go completely digital. As on date, payment revenues in India account for nearly $14 billion. However, the recent wave of demonetization is changing the shape of the digital payment industry"

Pradeep SampathCOO, mRUPEE

COVER STORY


accept such card payments, the Government has waived service tax on such amount charged while making payments though credit card, debit card, charge card or any other payment card. However, this waiver is limited to payments up to Rs.2,000 in a single transaction.

To expand digital payment infrastructure in rural areas, the Central Government, through NABARD, will extend financial support to eligible banks for deployment of 2 PoS devices each in 1 lakh villages with a population of less than 10,000. These PoS machines are intended to be deployed at primary cooperative societies/milk societies/agricultural input dealers to facilitate agri-related transactions through digital means. This will benefit farmers of one lakh villages, covering a total population of nearly 75 crore who will have the facility to do cashless transaction in their villages for their agri needs.

Railways, through their suburban railway network, will provide incentives by way of discount up to 0.5 per cent to customers for monthly or seasonal tickets from January 1, 2017, if payment is made through digital means. All railway passengers buying online ticket shall be given free accidental insurance cover of up to Rs.10 lakh.

Public sector insurance companies will provide incentive by way of discount or credit, up to 10 per cent of the premium in general insurance policies and 8% in new life policies of Life Insurance Corporation (LIC) sold through the customer portals, in case the payment is made through digital means.

Public sector banks are advised that merchants should not be required to pay more than Rs.100 per month as monthly rental for PoS terminals/Micro ATMs/mobile PoS from the merchants to bring small merchants on board the digital payment ecosystem.

For the payment of toll at toll plazas on National Highways using RFID cards/Fast Tags, a discount of 10 per cent will be made available to users in the year 2016-17.

To promote digital payment transaction in rural and urban areas, the Ministry of Electronics and IT (MeitY) has launched DigiShala to inform, educate and enable 2 crore citizens in the country to make digital transactions.

MeitY has launched DigiShala, a free to air channel which will impart information and education, especially in rural and semi-urban areas relating to Digital Payment ecosystem, its tools, benefit and processes. The channel will be available without any subscription fee and hence will be affordable to poor people.

To realize this objective, the Government has also conceptualized a campaign, “Digi Dhan Abhiyan” to enable every citizen, small trader and merchant to adopt digital payments in their everyday financial transactions. During the campaign, citizens as well as small merchants will be informed about various modes of digital payments by educating them to download, install and transact for various modes of digital payments.

On Digishala, citizens will be informed and educated about various digital payment options through step-by-step demos of making digital payments using UPI, USSD, Aadhaar-enabled payment systems, e-Wallets, Cards, etc, along with talk shows and panel discussions with experts.

Speaking about free DTH channel, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and IT and Law & Justice, said, "DigiShala will enable and empower every citizen of the country, especially farmers, students, Dalits and women in rural areas to learn the usefulness and benefits of digital payment in our everyday life and to adopt the same on a mass scale.”

Apart from electronic channel, MeitY is also organizing DigiDhan Mela at the Major Dhyanchand National Stadium, Delhi. The event aims to handhold users in downloading, installing and using various digital payment

systems for carrying out digital transactions. MeitY is also working with the MInistry of Urban Development and CSCs to organize DigiDhan Mela at smaller towns, cities and villages.

DigiDhan Mela will witness participation from banks, telecom companies, mobile wallet operators, transportation network companies, Aadhaar-enabled payment system (AEPS) vendors, Department of Post, merchants (through marketing associations), cooperatives like Kendriya Bhandars and organized retail fruits and vegetable chains like Safal, milk booths, Agricultural Produce Marketing Committees, etc.

Even NITI Aayog has launched incentive schemes Lucky Grahak Yojana and the Digi-Dhan Vyapar Yojana to give cash awards to consumers and merchants who utilize digital payment instruments for personal consumption expenditures. The scheme specially focusses on bringing the poor, lower middle class and small businesses into the digital payment fold. The scheme will become operational with the first draw on December 25, 2016 leading up to a mega draw on Babasaheb Ambedkar Jayanti on April 14, 2017. The scheme consists of two major components – one for consumers and the other for merchants.

In Lucky Grahak Yojana for consumers, there is a daily reward of Rs.1,000 to be given to 15,000 lucky consumers for a period of 100 days and weekly prizes worth Rs.1 lakh, Rs.10,000 and Rs.5,000 for consumers who use the alternate modes of digital payments. This will include all forms of transactions for example UPI, USSD, AEPS and RuPay Cards, but will exclude transactions through private credit cards and digital wallets.

In Digi-Dhan Vyapari Yojana for merchants weekly prizes worth Rs.50,000, Rs.5,000 and Rs.2,500. Mega draw on April 14 will have 3 mega prizes for consumers worth Rs.1 crore, Rs.50 lakh and Rs.25 lakh for digital transactions between November 8, 2016 and April 13, 2017. Three mega prizes for merchants worth

“Singapore, Sweden and Hong Kong are seen as the biggest 'stand out countries’. India has a populace of more than 1.2 billion, however there's still a considerable measure of potential for development in broadband use. There is immense capacity for innovation which needs to be worked upon for better performance. India needs to develop a world-class digital infrastructure, through public-private partnerships”

Suneet Singh Tulipresident & CEO, Data Wind

“If security is not addressed early, the cost and complexity of Digital India could make it difficult to address problems”

Altaf HaldeManaging Director

Kaspersky Lab South Asia

“Digital payment can bring down corruption, improve traceability of funds, reduce frauds/theft and also get rid of fake currency”

Abhishek RungtaCEO

Indus Net Technologies


Rs.50 lakh, Rs.25 lakh and Rs.12 lakh for digital transactions between November 8, 2016 and April 13, 2017 will be announced on April 14, 2017.

To ensure that the focus of the scheme is on small transactions (entered into by common people), incentives shall be restricted to transactions within the range of Rs.50 and Rs.3,000. All transactions between consumers and merchants; consumers and government agencies and all AEPS transactions will be considered for the incentive scheme.

The estimated expenditure on the first phase of the scheme (up to 14th April, 2017) is likely to be Rs.340 crore.

Digital Payment Challenges The possibility of cybercrime, low-digital

literacy and lack of infrastructure in the remote areas is the biggest challenge for digital payments in India.

Commenting about the challenges, Abhishek Rungta, CEO, Indus Net Technologies, said, “Improved infrastructure in terms of bandwidth quality and quantity, digital literacy, financial literacy, availability of payments software in vernacular and simple interface and security.”

Promoting digital literacy at the grassroots level, the Government is extensively using business correspondents and Gramin Dak Sevaks in the rural areas both to deliver and create an awareness.

The Government is asking telecom service providers to provide infrastructure for having internet facility on a continuous/permanent basis, without any disruption for making digital payments successful, especially in the suburban and rural areas. Besides it, there is a need to create good IT infrastructure for high-speed internet and fibre-based technology needs to be expedited.

Banks, mobile operators and mobile wallet companies should have a strong cybersecurity framework and should organize workshops etc to sensitize their customers about the digital transactions as well as the safety precautions to

be followed in the case of digital transactions. Speaking about PPP, Suneet Singh Tuli,

President & CEO, DataWind, said, “Singapore, Sweden and Hong Kong are seen as the biggest 'standout countries’. India has a populace of more than 1.2 billion. However, there is still a considerable measure of potential for development in broadband use. There is immense capacity for innovation which needs to be worked upon for better performance. India needs to develop a world-class digital infrastructure through public-private partnership.”

Commenting on cybersecurity, Altaf Halde, Managing Director, Kaspersky Lab South Asia, said, “As part of Digital India, the Indian Government has already planned to launch ‘Botnet cleaning centres’. This proposal is part

of the national cybersecurity policy to cleanup Botnet infections in Internet-enabled devices. Botnet is a network of malicious software that can remotely gain control of devices, steal information and carry out cyber-attacks like Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) that prevent access of websites. This facility will be under the guidance of the national cybersecurity watchdog Indian Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-IN).”

Speaking on cybersecurity, Shri Ravi Shankar Prasad, Minister of Electronics and IT and Law & Justice, Government of India, said, "To address concerns of cybersecurity,

the Department will soon conduct a security drill both for the banks and NPCI. He urged the banks to adopt villages and promote digital inclusion and awareness about digital payments with them. He also requested that villages with majority tribal population be prioritized by banks for creating awareness on digital payments and transactions. This would be an opportunity for banks to become change agents to spread awareness about Digital India.”

In order to ease the digital payment operations at the level of merchants, UIDAI would shortly roll out the common Android-based Aadhaar-Enabled Payment System (AEPS) application developed in collaboration with TCS. In order to use this application for carrying out cashless transactions, merchants will need a smartphone and a fingerprint scanner. Transactions on this application can be done without any card or PIN. The application would be made available to all banks and the banks would encourage merchants in their vicinity to adopt this application.

Ratan P. Watal Committee on Digital Payment has suggested interoperability of the payments system between banks and non-banks, upgradation of the digital payment infrastructure and institutions and a framework to reward innovations and for leading efforts in enabling digital payments.

In its report, the committee has recommended that a medium-term strategy for accelerating growth of Digital Payment in India with a regulatory regime which is conducive to bridging the Digital divide by promoting competition, open access and interoperability in payments. The report recommends inclusion of financially and socially excluded groups and assimilation of emerging technologies in the market, while safeguarding security of digital transactions and providing a level-playing field to all stakeholders and new players who will enter this new transaction space.

All these initiatives will definitely help India in achieving $10 trillion by 2030. n

Pravin [email protected]

“High MDR which are as high as 0.65 - 2% of transaction costs are one of the biggest bottlenecks”

Chinmay AgarwalCTO & co-founder

Jugnoo

"We have received an extremely positive response from customers in Rajasthan and would like to replicate the same in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana before we rollout our services nationally"

Shashi Arora, MD & CEO Airtel Payments Bank

“Sweden and Denmark are some of the countries who have adopted mobile payment methods most successfully”

Govind RamamurthyCEO & MD

eScan

Banks, mobile operators and mobile wallet companies should

have a strong cybersecurity framework and should organize workshops etc to sensitize their

customers about the digital transactions as well as the safety

precautions to be followed in the case of digital transactions

COVER STORY


Ingram Tech Forum 2016 Introduces its Partners & End-Customers to

THE NEW FUTURE

The wholesale provider of supply chain services and technology products,

Ingram Micro has recently organized the Ingram Tech Forum 2016, a series of sessions in three major cities of India- Delhi, Bangalore and Mumbai. Aimed at establishing a strong connect with CIOs and its partners, the Forum covered the day in 2 sessions – the morning session and the evening session.

While the morning session was designed for the end customers, the evening session was kept entirely for connecting with its channel partners. Both the morning and

the evening sessions in all the cities tried to update and take its customers and partners through the bouquet of its enterprise-grade solutions.

By organizing a Forum of such grandeur, Ingram Micro also became the first national distributor in the country to be conducting an event where it brought together all the top OEMs in the country, and which no other distributor has attempted earlier. Ingram plans to make it an annual practice and is contemplating of coming up with such events every year.

The top OEMs of the country such as HPE, VMware, IBM, Axis Communications, VMware, Emerson and Dell EMC participated in the forum, promising high level of premiumness to all the guests attending the event. Some of the notable industry leaders who attended these sessions include names like Santosh Shriyan, Channel Business Leader – West, IBM India; Prasun Talukdar, Country Manager-Channel, HPE; Rohan Bhasin from IBM, Sanjay Achawal, Executive Director, Ingram Micro India, Kannan Rangamani, Director Sales, Ingram Micro.

The Morning Session…The Tech Forum 2016

envisioned focusing on areas of development, challenges and notions that surround the IT industry. The Forum brought to light and discussed several industry norms and notions pertaining to digital transformation, ongoing trends in the IT distribution space, besides discussing the entire IT eco-system at large comprising of latest trends in Big Data, Power Management, data security, the

printing industry and so on. Industry leaders like Santosh Shriyan, Channel Business Leader – West, IBM India; Prasun Talukdar, Country Manager-Channel, HPE spoke about the challenges that customers face in the new digital disruption era and about the Cloud Security landscape that needs to be a high area of concern for end customer visibility.

In the Bangalore session, “The changing face of distribution and

SI biz in India”, Sanjay Achawal, Executive Director, Ingram Micro India put forward his views on the cloud competencies of Ingram and also discussed how partners can reap benefit from these offerings. He also highlighted the fact of how Ingram’s transformation has taken place from a conventional distributor to an end-to-end player in IT distribution space over the years.

In Delhi, the session was initiated by Manoj Pandey, GM, North, Ingram Micro India. Continuing on the theme of the session and keeping the agenda of Secure, Analyze and Prosper intake, he addressed various accounts on how to power the Next Gen Enterprise. He also affirmed the position of Ingram Micro as the Giant Distribution Network and defined the company’s pan India coverage that will be of outmost help for the partner community.

In the Ingram Micro TechForum 2016 organized in Mumbai, the forum focused on the future roadmap and strategic vision to improve industry portfolio. Atul Gaur, Executive Director – Mobility, Ingram Micro India who opened the session mentioned that Ingram Micro has continuously increased the product offerings and also enhanced its services. He further highlighted that the company at present has more than

20,000 channel partners and over 100 vendors and that it acts as a link between technology provider, OEMs to fulfill customer needs via its capabilities.

In all the cities, different formats of interactions were designed which

aimed at a 2-way communication with the audience. So while there was an interactive Coffee session organized in Mumbai, there were respectively an open discussion and a panel discussion designed for the cities of Delhi and Bengaluru.

Ingram Tech Forum 2016 organized in the cities of Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru was an eye-opener for customers and enterprises and

attempted to answer relevant questions on technology disruption - Ingram Micro would also like to take this opportunity in thanking their Participating Vendors

– viz HP, VMWARE, EMERSON, IBM, AXIS , CISCO AND DELL EMC, in its first year

ChannEl EVEnT


To conclude…

The Evening Session…

Transformation to Digital is not easy. Vendors always need the support of its partner eco-system to serve its clients in order to bring bigger dividends for their work. The evening session of the Ingram Tech Forum 2016 put forth several opportunities harping at the greater good for the partner community and on how they can leverage these opportunities.

Senior Ingram Micro executives set the agenda and roadmaps for the future association between the leading technology OEMs and the channel fraternity. Since the company’s business model was entirely partner driven, Ingram Micro emphasized that the thrust of the sessions with partners was to decide what the business solutions that they develop should look like.

Vendor Presentation & Solution Displays…Prasun Talukdar, Country Manager-Channel, HPE dealt with the

challenges faced by companies in his interaction. He stressed upon the buzzword of a phenomena that disruption of technology is becoming the new norm and showed several statistics as to how 70% of the Tech landscape is wireless in support of his statements on current trends hovering over the technology circuit. “India ranks 77th in the league of Digitized nations. Going by the inroads made in the nation’s tech circuit, by 2020 we might be in a position to witness the value creation of India’s landscape to peak billions.” He was also quick to opine that 2020 will be the eventful year in which we will see the Nation adding another feather to its cap, by earning the sobriquet of ranking in the order of countries that will be having the highest GDP growth by making inroads in verticals ranging from Social Mobility to IOT.

Milind Sonawane, Sr Sales Engineer, Nimble Storage on his part elucidated Nimble’s school of thought and relationship with buyers and partners.

Discussing about security, Santosh Shriyan, Channel Business Leader –West, IBM India said that as 55% of the attacks are from insider threats,

only the perimeter security is not enough. Cloud security is the first step towards end user visibility. He also mentioned that IBM has a diverse and wide security portfolio. “There is a need for a holistic and integrated approach towards cybersecurity that takes all factors into consideration. IBM has the most diverse and deepest security portfolio,” he said.

IBM also provided a demonstration of its security systems for servers since on-premise security was a crucial area of concern. Santosh Kulkarni, Country Manager, Business development- Smart Solutions, Emerson Network Power touched upon the points that stand

advantageous for partners, whosoever will avail Data Center Solutions from Emerson. He quipped that in the case of Data Centers, there are some pre determiners which are there by default such as metrics ranging from monitoring to smoke detection, water leak detection, temperature measurement, fire suppression and cooling features in-built within the rack of Data Centers that are critical for the health and congenial functioning of the Data Center Installation deployment itself. He informed that Emerson in the Data Center segment has a large product offering in store. “Emerson India is becoming Vertiv in 2017 and is currently undergoing a transition. Our transition shall not impact any areas of our business,” he announced. Kulkarni also expressed a great degree of knowledge with regard to Big Data.

Vincy Kwatra, Distribution Account Manager, Axis Communications held a session on surveillance and physical security. He shared some of the latest surveillance technology by Axis Communications. Some of these were being used in border control applications and other areas demanding the highest degree of security. He also shed some light on the work that Axis was doing towards the Internet of Things (IoT) since it was a strong emerging field. Kwatra said, “Zatar is an IoT enabled platform that makes it easy to build IoT enabled devices and apps.”

There were also sessions that focused on the role of the Internet of Things, the opportunities in analytics and cognitive computing, disruptive technologies such as 3D printing.

Amidst all the powerful presentations, what became clear is the fact that Information Technology as a standalone entity has come of age and it stands tall. It is no longer a part of the business, like it used to be a few years back. The audience also agreed that cloud security is

a crucial aspect for quality end user visibility as hackers generally attack devices rather than security systems. At a time when the world is witnessing paradigm shifts in the global technological circuit, Data is the new buzzword and “Digital Disruption” is the new phenomena. Also, in

the wake of digital technology and start-up ecosystem gaining pace, the industry is leveraging technologies such as analytics, datacenters, cloud computing, networking etc.

The Ingram TechForum in the coming years aims to reinforce the relation with its CIOs further

to help them easily undergo the transformation. The Forum also served as a realization that the leading Distributor tried to wake up its partners to, before it became too late for them to catch up with the new business developments discussed during the course of the event. n


Is Endpoint Security the answer to Advanced Persistent Threat?

The threat landscape in the country, and the world, is changing by the minute.

According to a report by Data Security Council of India (DSCI), India's cybersecurity market size is about $4 billion, which is expected to grow to $35 billion by 2025. According to Gartner, the overall IT spend on security in India in 2016 is expected to reach $1.12 billion, 10 percent up from $1.01 billion in 2015.

Putting forth his views on the same, Altaf Halde, Managing Director Kaspersky Lab South Asia says, “It is important to understand

the gigantic growth we are expecting within the next 2 years, to understand the impact area of all potential threats -

• By 2018, we are expecting that one in five people in the world, that’s in excess of 1.5 billion people, will be shopping online.

• By 2017, 60% of e-commerce business will come through smart phones.

• More and more attacks are being discovered every month, that can go very long, undetected

In light of all these facts, the threat

landscape in India is not just very complicated, it offers unique challenges.

• There are significant cyber security threats to buyers, sellers and payment system providers alike. Not to mention businesses, especially the solely online ones, who have everything at stake

• Very intelligent, smart attacks such as ProjectSauron will target highly sensitive businesses

• During high activity seasons, such as sales during festivals, criminals try to connect

With India going through a major digitization drive and with the current security landscape under constant threat, the

rise in the demand for integrated endpoint security solutions has gone up. The endpoint security market finds huge

opportunity to proliferate in the next five years. But are these solutions sufficient to avert advanced threats?

Jitendra GhughalNational Channel Manager, India & SAARC, Fortinet

Shibu PaulRegional Director (IN, GCC & SEA) - Array Networks

Sunil KripalaniSenior Vice President - Global Sales & Marketing – eScan

lEad STORY


their malicious campaigns such as phishing.” According to Sunil Kripalani, Senior Vice

President - Global Sales & Marketing – eScan, endpoint security has now extended beyond the fixed desktops to laptops and BYOD devices that are also used in other unsecured Wi-Fi environments. “This invariably puts the risk of being compromised by a cyber-attack or malware, which might use the host endpoint as bots to enter into a network later. Apart from this the usage of storage devices which are not authorized or compromised could also be carrier of the malware to bring down a network when used in a network which is not using endpoint security to protect its network.”

Data is the single most vital asset that corporations own today; a security breach results in financial losses and causes a bigger dent on reputation. Supporting his views with his own observations,

Murali Ramalingam, Country Manager-Sales, Ixia says that Indian enterprises have started to realize that cyberattacks affect their business continuity, agility, and brand image equally. “We have noticed that companies across verticals are now investing significantly in network security solutions to fend off future attacks. Growth in online and digital data has played a significant role in driving the security market in India. Indian enterprises are more vulnerable to security attacks as they have not adopted and implemented the best of security solutions available.” He further continues, “We recommend organizations to look at security as a continuous practice than just an IT function. Test before you deploy, monitor when you go live and secure continuously, do not wait for an attack to occur.”

Ajay Dubey, Senior Channel Manager, Forcepoint opines that the enterprise and consumer threat landscape is in for a tectonic shift in the coming times. There would be the need of a blend of technology and strategy to combat security threats as cyber threats today are more complex and targeted and customized to attack a particular network’s vulnerabilities. “A most visible change in the landscape now is the fact that customers are investing in Forensics and are interested in the ‘Post Facto’. They are looking at solutions that leverage data – modelling, big data, analytics to identify anomalies in user behaviour to protect networks,” he says.

It is indeed becoming important for

organisations to reshape their cybersecurity approach in order to survive the digital cyber attack. “IT Security needs to evolve from a support conversation to become a boardroom agenda. CTOs as well as CSOs should now play a bigger role for IT to demonstrate that technology can deliver what the business wants in a secure fashion,” he further says.

In the last few years, there have been numerous systematized security breaches in India that have caused data losses worth millions of dollars. The recent ATM security breach in the country should be an eye opener for the enterprises and government to take network security seriously. There is immense need for developing strong security practices within banks and have separate IT/IS and cyber security budget.

“The cyber security landscape and climate feels like there’s storm after storm happening almost on a daily basis, and reminds us that when it rains it pours. Data breaches are not stopping, and emerging cyber threats are leaving bigger business impact than ever. For many individuals and organizations, information technology (IT) is no longer an ancillary part of the business but a key ingredient for success,”

observes Jitendra Ghughal, National Channel Manager, India & SAARC, Fortinet.

According to him, innovation is a good thing because it makes our lives better. But it can also represent another entry point for threat actors and hackers. “For example, LinkedIn made it easier for professionals to stay connected but also introduced additional risks. Clearly, there weren’t data breach reports about 100 million LinkedIn accounts being compromised 15 years ago because there was no LinkedIn at that time. Why does this matter? Each new innovation is yet another opportunity or entry point for the bad guys to launch an attack against a potential victim,” he says.

The move to ramp up local cybersecurity expertise is well timed to augment the country’s focus on Digital India, a campaign mooted by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to use technology in government and offer government-to-citizen services. The Indian government has been bullish in its digitization efforts. Digital India, the Aadhaar movement, and becoming a cashless economy are just a few examples. “It’s important to realize that as

we digitize and rely more on technology, we become more vulnerable to cyber attacks. India is an attractive target for cyber attacks, thanks in part to geopolitical tensions and relatively weak defences due to an underinvestment in cyber security,” says Vishak Raman, Senior Regional Director for India and SAARC – FireEye.

He further points out that advanced attacks aren’t the only concern. Cyber criminals are also growing more sophisticated and more successful. “Over the past year, FireEye has observed a sharp rise a cyber threat called ransomware. FireEye found ransomware detections increased 292 times from November 2015 to February 2016,” says Vishak.

At the same time it is also true that today organizations are spending millions of dollars on traditional endpoint security and losing the battle against advanced threat groups. “This is because most existing endpoint security solutions use conventional antivirus and anti-spam software and host intrusion prevention services that are useful against commodity malware but ineffective against advanced attacks,” he adds.

Factors driving endpoint Security market...

Verticals that can be seen to actively adopt end point security solutions are e-commerce, finance, banking, telecom, healthcare, IT & Telecom, energy, online payment systems and many more. However, in keeping with the Indian government’s very aggressive stance on going digital, the government leads the race in adopting endpoint solutions.

“The endpoint security market in India as well as the globe are primarily driven by factors such as – need to address IT risks, growing trend of Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) in organisations and increasing number of internal threats. Moreover, the growing demand for mobile and tablet security solutions is also driving the demand for endpoint security. The verticals that are increasingly adopting endpoint security solutions include BFSI, healthcare, and IT and Telecom verticals, Government and defense verticals,” asserts Nilesh Jain, Country Manager, (India and SAARC) - Trend Micro.

Ajay concedes that endpoint security is the first step to fight against cyber attack. “The endpoint security market is specifically driven by factors, such as the need to mitigate IT security risks and increase in the frequency of internal

ajay dubeySenior Channel Manager, Forcepoint

Murali RamalingamCountry Manager-Sales, Ixia

Sudeep das Manager – Presales – RSA


threats. In a tossup between the conventional method of having core investments in central location and pushing updates to end point versus a modern approach of equipping the end points with analytics and other tools, the modern approach is gaining traction,” he adds.

Increased penetration of mobile devices is further fuelling the market growth. People are nowadays increasingly using their mobiles to shop online, pay bills and access social networking sites. Jitendra states that while a majority of businesses are already leveraging the advantages of connected IoT devices, 92% of security professionals are concerned about the security challenges posed by these billions of devices. “Many of these devices are “headless” offering few or no security or management controls. This has exponentially increased the attack surface and left IT struggling to manage IoT devices using complex architectures consisting of numerous point solutions. So IoT is a security problem for all verticals − BFSI, Government, Healthcare, Retail, Education, Manufacturing or even home networks,” he says.

“The primary driving force behind the endpoint security market is the sheer numbers,” points out Altaf. “Billions of people are expected to come into the net of active online services. As more and more people get online to buy, sell, watch movies, shop and game, the need for endpoint security is growing rapidly by the minute.”

The incidents that are being reported internally within organisations and the inability to investigate these incidents using the existing tools is driving security managers to look further. “Organisations are spending significant amounts to engage consultants to help with their incident investigations; security teams are realising that they need to realign their investments to ensure effective protection against these threats. While we are seeing accelerated adoption within the Banking and Financial Services industries we are also seeing quick adoption by the IT/ITES companies as well for their internal security,” says Sudeep Das – Manager – Presales – RSA.

Manoj Taskar, Country Manager - Tenable feels that factors like remote working, BYOD and cloud have changed the end-point environment in a significant way. The need for visibility of endpoint vulnerabilities coupled with compliance requirements at the

infrastructure level, till the last point, are the driving factors. “The more we move to remote working, the more the importance for endpoint visibility and compliance to policies,” he says.

Large organizations vs smaller organizations – Which is more vulnerable?

India has a thriving Micro, Small, Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) ecosystem of over 40 million business firms. They are also a ripe target for cyber attackers as they are more connected to the Internet than ever before, yet their cyber security capabilities are more limited than businesses elsewhere. Many Indian MSMEs lack the technology, intelligence and expertise required to deal with even relatively modest cyber security threats.

It must not be forgotten that attackers today target 'low-hanging fruit' in order to gain dominance over an organization. It can be through the company’s vendors, phishing of

employees and staff to get unauthorized access to business sensitive data, etc. SMBs need to be as cautious as large businesses.

Most importantly, Mid-level organisations do not have the budgets that larger organizations do. This definitely exposes them to greater security threats, because hackers have understood this and have been attacking small-and-mid-sized organisations more and more in the past decade. The main threats that these organizations face are in the form of physical attacks on systems, authentication attacks, and malicious internet content. As per a report released by PwC, small firms are cutting down their investment on security, which is a huge mistake.

“SMEs are preferred targets for cybercriminals as automation makes it easy to attack them by the thousands, and far too many of them are easy targets. It is the data that makes a business tempting, not the size – especially if it is relevant data, such as customer contact info, credit card data, health data, or valuable intellectual property,” points out Nilesh.

“SMB and mid-level organization are often seen to be struggling, more so because of the mindset of being a small organization and not a matter of interest for cybercriminals. In the absence of appropriate security controls, organizations mostly tend to delay in incident

detection and response and may sometimes even fail to detect incidents. However, some of the SMBs are relying on cost effective cloud security solution or moving their business applications in cloud to address application availability and security concerns along with the cost,” observes Shibu Paul, Regional Director (IN, GCC & SEA) - Array Networks.

It is important to note here that smaller organizations increasingly serve as vendors, contractors, and business partners of bigger firms, and as such they may have trusted access to the networks and data of these partners. SMEs indeed need to improve their security within their budget by going for cloud based solutions.

Large organisations on the other hand are relatively better prepared to battle the online threats. They have sufficient budgets and manpower allocated to manage their digital security. This makes it much easier to understand the security threats for the organization and hence, look for the best integrated security suites.

However, despite an experienced CISO leading a competent team, there have been some common challenges that even the larger organisations face -

• Under-estimating potential threats: Even if they do not seem very threatening currently, some threats can quickly spiral out of control.

• Distribution of the budget: Often, more budgets are routed to some areas, while other areas suffer from being short-funded. This leaves some very crucial endpoints open to large threats.

• Understanding which suite works best for the company: Very often, companies go for the most popular integrate security suite that is prevalent in their industry. Sometimes, that may not be the best suite for that particular company. Each organization, due to its unique structure, needs a customized security solution. What works for most companies, may not work for you. So, there’s a need to understand what are the best suite options for a company.

• Keeping the security budget constant through the years: As security threats increase, the solutions need to fast adapt. Newer, better technology sometimes costs more than older one. This means that the security budgets need to grow, with the times. A budget that worked last year, may not work this year. And in the compulsion to maintain it, companies

Manoj Taskar Country Manager Tenable

Vishak RamanSenior Regional Director for India and SAARC FireEye

Sunil SharmaVP- Sales (India & SAARC)Sophos

lEad STORY


sometimes keep a large part of the business either unsecured or under-covered.

There is however no difference between the security required by an enterprise and that required by a small business other than in the scale and resources to manage it. “Small businesses face a significant competitive disadvantage if they cannot respond effectively to incidents, and face the same penalties as the enterprise. The vanishing perimeter due to cloud-based services, social media, remote offices, Internet of Things, roaming workers and BYOD brings new security challenges,” opines Sunil Sharma, VP- Sales (India & SAARC), Sophos.

“The truth is that everyone with a computer on the Internet is vulnerable, and disruptive attacks have become a legitimate issue. Businesses must plan and prepare accordingly. The best way is to detect threats before it disrupts the system of the victim,” suggests Vishak.

“India is still in a stage where the ability to understand what’s going on in the network is still in an early stage when compared to other countries. This is something that has to be addressed because today’s networks have no boundaries. Cyber attacks can happen in India as it can happen in Australia or in any other part of the world. We have to make our customers understand it’s no longer a question of if I will be breached − it’s a question of when I will be breached,” Jitendra clarifies his point.

Regardless of size of the company, security would depend upon scale of network and tools implemented. It is often observed that nature of business would determine the amount of risk a business is exposed to. For instance, an SMB bank would be more vulnerable to cyber-attack than a SMB IT services company. Budget for security or for any investment comes from company’s topline. Having a huge security budget and spending a lot on security doesn’t still guarantee being safe. The recipe here is to employ right tools. There have been instances of biggest corporations from fortune 500 companies employing huge amount of security budgets but still got breached.

Sudeep however observes a steady rise in the level of awareness and purpose in large organisations to work on integrated security suites – the need to share information across tools to provide richer context to every incident investigations is a basic requirement for effective and complete response procedures. “RSA’s view

is that realignment and reprioritisation of existing investments should allow any organisation to build capabilities around modern threats. The new generation security tools are not necessarily

more capital intensive than existing security products; what is needed for organisations is to assess the efficacy of existing investments and plan the most appropriate plan to upgrade the approach towards security,” he says.

Is endpoint security sufficient to thwart threats?

So now the question is, with so many threats emerging every day, is having merely an endpoint security enough to avert them. The answer is no. While these are great for preventing a lot of attacks, many advanced threats will slip through.

Apart from endpoint security, businesses must try to also cover:

• Virtualisation Security• Mobile Security• Anti-Targeted Attacks• DDoS Protection• Security Intelligence Services• Security for Data Centers• Fraud Prevention• Industrial Cyber Security• Targeted Security for Business

Altaf HaldeManaging Director - Kaspersky Lab South Asia

nilesh JainCountry Manager- (India and SAARC), Trend Micro

Jitendra puts across several pointers on how a business can be far from getting breached or compromised. “The response to increasingly complicated networked environments needs to be simplicity. Securing these evolving environments requires three things:

• Collaborative intelligence – Local and global threat intelligence needs to be shared between security devices, and a coordinated response between devices needs to be orchestrated centrally.

• Segmentation - Networks need to be intelligently segmented into functional security zones.

• Universal policy - A centralized security policy engine that determines trust levels between network segments, collects real time threat information, establishes a unified security policy, and distributes appropriate orchestrated policy enforcement

Sunil too vouches for an integrated approach to IT Security deployment that he feels is essential to stay safe from advance cyber threats. Few of the important steps to be followed is to implement a robust advance level security solution across gateway and endpoints, train & educate the employees on security policies and on the use of Handheld or laptop devices with utmost care while using in unsecured wi-fi networks and thirdly to create a strong IT security policy across organization.

And so...Low awareness of the risks posed by cyber

attacks is a big challenge to an organization in India, irrespective of its size, because today, it is far too easy to disrupt the operations of an Indian company with easily available tools. A sound security strategy that recognizes shifts in the threat landscape is thus the need of the hour that can help mitigate these risks. n

Samrita [email protected]


Triggering transformationwith new-age marketing

Marketing today is not just the brand custodian but also holds complete responsibility for product innovation, customer experience and organizational alignment with new-age technology to impact business outcomes.

The dynamic team at Sify Technologies Ltd., led by the passionate, next-gen, digitally-savvy, data-driven marketer Arvind Saxena –Group Marketing Head, is ushering in a transformation. Arvind has expertly orchestrated a higher brand recall in less than a year leveraging digital disruption supported ably by a young, dynamic and energetic marketing team.

The team at Sify had a unique challenge on hand; the challenge was that Sify enjoyed a stronger recall as of its initial positioning as a retail Internet services but a very feeble communication of its existing capabilities in the market today. A complete re-positioning of the brand as a “ICT Powerhouse” was required.

The team introduced new-age disruptive marketing techniques and aligned them seamlessly with the existing business plan. A deep focus on performance marketing from Day One to ensure bottom-line growth was identified as the single-point agenda for all marketing efforts. Data-driven insights shaped all omni-channel marketing campaigns and decisions at all times.

Deliver CAPTIVATING Customer Experiences:The team invested significantly in delivering deeper, more engaging

customer experiences this year. The team used event and experiential marketing techniques to connect with customers, learn about their challenges and experiences and gather feedback and inputs for product innovation. They established marketing synergies with Global & Local players to build a deeper connect with customers that further helped in “mapping customer journey” with technology, people and processes that form part of the journey. Analysis of mountains of our internal data with valuable customer insights revealed trends and opportunities that had potential for significant bottom-line growth.

Deliver on Brand PromiseSify, believes in selling experiences, not just products. The team took

complete ownership of delivering a holistic experience to our customers, which is aligned to our brand promise. A handshake between Sales, Marketing & Customer Support department was crucial to ensure consistency in messaging, approach and adherence to corporate values across all customer touchpoints. The teams worked together closely and also captured, shared and interpreted customer insights methodically. The end result was customers became brand ambassadors. Customers have spoken candidly about their delightful journey with Sify at various industry forums. Some of those videos can be found on Sify’s Youtube channel (hyper link)

Digital Literacy In order to fill critical skill gaps and better prepare the entire team

to leverage digital and communicate effectively, the team conducted comprehensive workshops and boot camps keeping in mind the complexity of the new-age marketing responsibilities. Use of new technology and tools has made it simpler for the teams to crunch mountains of data and extract meaningful, actionable insights for personalized, targeted and impactful marketing.

The team proactively interacted with functional teams across the organization to embrace digital technologies, so as to simplify the way they work and interpret data. This organization-wide digital transformation helped Sify become further aligned, effective and agile as a company. In this new age of Digital Disruption, companies that will not reinvent themselves and innovate across teams and borders, will struggle with customer delight and loyalty issues in the long run.

The new value proposition in the new worldFrom a business perspective, Sify wants to build “pay-as-you-go” revenue

models for most of the solutions, to make it far more convenient and cost-effective for the customers. With the ever-increasing industry convergence, customers today have no dearth of options. A genuine attempt at improving their overall product experience and cost-effectiveness will go a long way in enriching these relationships.

Sify leverages it’s healthy ecosystem of partnerships to deliver value to these enterprises. The more the participants in the ecosystem, the more comprehensive the offering and greater the reach. Today Sify is a trusted technology partner for Enterprises across industries. A recently concluded Brand Recall survey commissioned by Sify in partnership with a leading media house suggests an increase by 60% over the last 6 months period in Sify’s Top of Mind Brand recall. Nearly 72% of the target audience base has experienced a favorable change in perception of Sify. Service Reliability accounted for the most prominent brand attribute followed by Domain Expertise, Customer Experience and Innovation. Our converged ICT ecosystem and 'bring it on' attitude gives a competitive advantage to our customers.

Arvind SaxenaGroup Marketing Head, Sify Technologies Ltd.

Sify’s recognitions: • DQ LIVE – National Award for Best Technology for Social

Cause - Department of Posts• Best Enterprise Data Center, 2015 – The Economic Times• CIO Choice Award, 2016 (Managed Network Solutions, Data

Center Transformation Services and Integrated Data Center Solutions)

• One of India’s Top 100 IT Giants, 2016• Microsoft Hosting Partner of the Year, 2016• Business Superbrand for the Year, 2016-2017

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Open Source: An Enabler of Digital Transformation in India

Open Source is the new paradigm change that is sweeping the industry away

from the traditional proprietary software model. The major feature of Open Source platform is flexibility and above all the freedom of innovation. The platform offers liberty to create or build, modify and use as per the requirement. So the more is your freedom the more it becomes accessible to the masses, the more is the area of data, because data transformation is always about transcending the barriers or allowing people to balance work life and personal life and give the maximum output.

The open source platform has underwent a lot of innovation in the past which has empowered organizations to experience new and advanced

technologies at a reasonable price. “Open Source has witnessed rapid innovation over the past few years. It has enabled organisations to explore newer technologies at competitive prices without having to invest in proprietary software thus allowing them to focus on other facets of the Digital Transformation process. Apart from scalability and cost, Open Source is addressing the needs terms of choices of innovation, cost, security and flexibility. It allows organizations to gain benefits not only from their own employees but also from the entire open source community,” opines Neeraj Bhatia, Director - Partner, Alliances & Commercial Sales, Red Hat.

“Organizations are seeing Open Source as

a flexible and innovation–enabling alternative to various non-Open Source Options. Since innovations budgets are also limited within organizations, Open Source is playing an important role and as such has become very popular over the last five years. Open Source is expected to provide flexible & customizable platforms that can be readily be deployed. For e.g. Several Global 2000 companies already use Drupal as a platform for their websites, offering benefits such as rapid development, extensive API support and being SEO & mobile friendly. So, in the digital age where customers are looking for an omni–channel customer experience, Open Source helps in adopting strategies that fulfil the requirements of customers by

Kalyan KumarExecutive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer – IT Services, HCL Technologies

Neeraj BhatiaDirector - Partner, Alliances & Commercial Sales, Red Hat

George ChackoPrincipal Systems Engineer & Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade

Digital Transformation is gaining momentum in India. Cloud, mobility, big data, IoT and security are among the few technologies that are helping India to take this major leap. But

along with it, open source is playing an important role in this big transformation. Vendors from the industry speak out of how open source is facilitating this digital transformation -

lEad STORY


delivering innovative products & services,” said Kalyan Kumar, Executive Vice President & Chief Technology Officer – IT Services, HCL Technologies.

“The industry is increasingly embracing open source telephony, since it offers a service delivery platform that is interoperable with the existing infrastructure, offers a wide variety of intelligent applications that can be customized to suit the organizations requirement and simplifies communications management along with extensive flexibility and scalability to launch and sustain all mission critical requirements. I would like to make a strong statement here that – ‘By 2018, 99% of the Companies will embrace Open Source in one form or other’,” observed Dr. Devasia Kurian, Founder & CEO, *astTECS.

Open Source platform has strengthened its position because it is such kind of a platform that can be modified by anyone and everyone in the vendor community. This leads to a faster innovation process.

“The modern enterprise embraces open source capabilities to accelerate its digital transformation efforts. Open source components increasingly underpin today's major technology markets. It has reduced the cost of creating and developing new digital platforms that drive transformation. Open source has solidified its position as the platform best able to deliver these types of solutions as a result of the fact that an entire community can innovate faster than any one vendor. There is a significant shift in networking as well around open source with software-based networking solutions. Increased traction is seen in OpenDaylight, a Linux Foundation Project which is a multi-company open source software project building a platform to further adoption and innovation in Software-Defined Networking (SDN). This platform unites industry leaders in developing an open SDN platform in a vendor-neutral environment and is significant example on open source in the networking domain,” stated George Chacko, Principal Systems Engineer & Lead Technical Consultant, Brocade.

Investments in Open SourceRegular investments are needed to improve

and develop a technology and a good traction for Open Source technology is being observed. Both small and big enterprises are moving towards Open Source. It is now widely accepted

in areas like Operating Systems, Databases Software etc. and with the growing popularity it will also be embraced in other areas.

“We are seeing a significant increase in Open Source adoption by both small and big enterprises. Over last five years, amount of investments in open source has increased many folds. The rate of adoption of Open source is highest among areas/technologies like Operating Systems, Databases Software/Dev Tools etc. Going forward we expect this focus to grow and cover other areas like Service/Support etc,” said Kalyan Kumar.

Enterprises are witnessing great value in adoption of Open Source technology. It is offering innovation, architectural control and thus attracting investments.The open source technology is also creating an impression on Software Defined Network (SDN). In SDN, Openstack is gaining momentum and is adopted widely by small and large enterprises.

“Software defined is also getting impacted

big time due to Open Source technologies. The major impact is led by OpenStack. OpenStack is seeing good adoption by various small and big enterprises. The enterprises are making investments into implementation, design and support for OpenStack and its related versions. Key businesses that are adopting OpenStack include CSPs, telecommunications companies etc. Businesses are able to see value in using Open Source as being enabler of innovation and architectural control with unlimited opportunities to experiment,” added Kalyan Kumar.

Reiterating similar views, Girish Gupta,

dr. devasia KurianFounder & CEO*astTECS

Rahul ChopraOpen Source India

Girish GuptaGirish Gupta, Technical Services Director - Citrix Systems

Rajarshi BhattacharyyaCountry Head, SUSE

Technical Services Director - Citrix Systems said, “From an open source perspective, we have regular investments in these areas. It started when we acquired XenSource based on open source hypervisor of Xen platform. One of the recent investment is in Software Defined Networks (SDN) technology in a project called OpenDaylight. Apart from us there are investments from Cisco, IBM etc. It is an industry movement for building programmable networks that are flexible and responsive to organizations' and users' needs. OpenDaylight, the largest open source SDN controller, is helping lead this transition.”

He further added that Citrix is enabling lot of organizations that want to use open source as a medium to deliver applications or desktops. “A lot of times the secure and performance aspects of it are not met and then at that point our technology comes into play. A lot of government agencies use our technology to deliver a Linux desktop or a Linux hosted application to remote branch offices.”

Talking from an architecture perspective, Traditional Rights Management vendors had kept a closed and limited usage architecture. However now the market is changing and players like Seclore is on the forefront of the new paradigm. Robust and easy-to-use APIs are the key concepts used by Seclore for its ‘Open Rights Management Architecture’, this helps to seamlessly integrate with any Enterprise’s IT infrastructure. According to Abhijit Tannu, Founder & CTO, Seclore, “APIs are available for File Protect and Unprotect functions that are typically used when automatically protecting files are being downloaded from or uploaded to enterprise systems. What’s more Seclore APIs and SDKs are optimized for high-volume usage and are designed for scalability which is a key ask of many industry leading CIOs and CISOs.”

The biggest example is however Microsoft that is bringing a big revolution into the Open Source field. The tech giant now has its own BSD Unix operating system, supports Ubuntu as a subsystem on Windows 10, and recently open-sourced the Xamarin software development kit. Earlier this year, Microsoft and Canonical partnered up to bring Ubuntu to Windows 10 to make it easier for developers to write programs for Ubuntu on the Azure cloud. Its liking towards open source just deepens.


Digital India & Open SourceLike said, the market is evolving from

proprietary solution to Open Source solutions, designed to support next-generation communications. In fact, talking of India, a significant amount of work in the field of Open Source has happened in the government of India earlier as well, but nothing much concrete had come out so far. However of late, the momentum is seen to have risen with the government's new Open Source policy coming in place, and this is making things hopeful for different agencies of the Government of India to be implementing open source very soon.

There is a myth around Open Source that security is the biggest concern. But it is a fact that this technology is more secured because the techniques deployed has to be more robust so that no one can breach the security. Moreover, the major differentiator with the proprietary systems is that it is reviewed by many people which helps in faster innovation.

When it comes to the security aspect of Open Source, the entire community has a vigil that the right code gets it as the source code is available to all. Now government is also opening itself for Open Source technology and it is also very clear about the secured usage of this technology.

“Enterprises and Government initiatives & programmes are giving a strong push to the development, support and promotion of Open Source Software and make telecom solutions accessible and affordable to all industry verticals and businesses. The biggest fallacy in Open Source movement is the perception that Open Source has a security problem. Open Source is in fact more secured because the security techniques deployed has to be so strong that even a person who knows the technique cannot break it,” opined Dr. Devasia.

“As the source code is available you know what is there and what is not. So no longer we need to worry about back doors because there is the whole community that acts as a gatekeeper to ensure that the right piece of code gets in. Then you also have the freedom to customize and restrict as you fit. Apart from that citizens and organizations have a lot of play. Our government has also been open to open source technology for a long time and essentially they are pro open source for the longest period of time. They have started to see a bit of investment in OEMs like Microsoft and Cisco. They have got a rule book where it is mentioned how and where the technology can be used and how to secure it. It defines how the government can use the technology,” explained Girish Gupta.

Open Source is now used in various government projects under Digital India programme. The government has also announced the policies regarding this technology and there are a lot of plans that are ongoing for a national repository of this technology.

“There is a lot of Open Source adoption in the GoI—for the Digital India programme. India’s first Open Source policy has been announced by the current government. A lot of IT implementations are being done by NIC across the nation, powered by Open

Source technologies. Plans are underway to develop a national repository of Open Source software (like Github) for all government applications—so that these can be reused by other government agencies across the centre and states,” commented Rahul Chopra, Open Source India.

Bridging the Digital DivideIndia has the largest mobile population in

the world and the penetration of mobile devices has made it easy to touch every life digitally which has in turn helped to bridge the digital divide to some extent.

Open Source is based on collaboration and sharing which has acted as a vital component to bring down the digital gap. The availability of innovations strengthened and helped people to grow. These factors has helped open source to grow and also goes to the last mile to connect people.

“Open Source has been a major contributor in bridging the Digital Divide across the globe. The underlying principle of collaboration and sharing on which Open Source is established is the perfect catalyst to help reduce this divide at a greater pace. Readily and freely available innovation via software such as Linux, DevOps, Containers etc. help empower communities & people to learn and grow without any restrictions. Digital empowerment should not be the privilege of a select few and Open Source ensures that Digital Innovation reaches the lowest of strata of society. In areas where setting up the infrastructure is a hassle and affordability is an issue, Open Source becomes the perfect medium to connect people,” said Neeraj.

“Today, if you look at the Indian Mobile population, it is currently the largest in the world. So the only way we can make them touch the digital living world is through mobile. Also, if you look at the mobility state today, not only the mobile phones should be affordable, I feel the mobility services which we get, should also be readily available. The cost of ownership of the service providers like Airtel, Reliance, BSNL etc. if they invest, the actual cost of delivery to the masses will decrease which will effectively spread digitalization process inside the market,” explained Rajarshi Bhattacharyya, Country Head, SUSE.

He puts forth a small example that today the government of India has got a lot of initiatives

to MHRD through programs like RSM (Rajeev Gandhi Shiksha Mission) the difference MHRD covers to land up with every student should have a tablet or a laptop. So if we look at that space also, to make those technologies or devices available to the common masses i.e. the people below the BPL line, we need to have an industry which is very cost effective and efficient. We cannot expect them to put the high technology operating system which can be anytime infected by a virus and the mission goes crashing and then no use for that mission. “And so we need to have strategies around open source which will allow you to give the software delivery and the hardware to all this masses to the different school education initiative so that the generation which is coming up will slowly take a pace and actually match with the digitalization. We can make it available and very much cost effective,” said Rajarshi.

Dr. Devasia on his part feels that open source is changing the way enterprise telecommunication works and has begun to grow in popularity, as it offers greater functionality and control. “Open Source tools are bringing costs down to the bare minimum, making it highly affordable. The affordability of Open Source solutions by companies in different strata helps in bridging the digital divide. SAP solutions can be deployed only by companies with large revenues, whereas open ERP can be deployed by small and medium sized enterprises also,” he stated.

Another point of view is that this technology can be customized as per user needs without paying any royalties to foreign companies. This empowers techies to work on major projects and offer solutions to customers globally. To top it up, it also offers lower cost of adoption of IT.

“Open Source is a great ally to bridge the Digital Divide in India. Why? Because it allows us to customize software as per our needs, without us having to pay any royalties to any foreign firms. Thus, our entire investment remains in India, with Indians. Such projects give our entrepreneurs and techies an opportunity to work on major projects, build expertise, and then offer similar solutions to customers across the globe. Last but not the least, Open Source allows us to lower the cost of adoption of IT—as what we have to pay for—is the customization and support—and not any royalties,” opined Rahul Chopra, Open Source India.

And so…Though there are myths about the platform,

but it cannot be denied that open source is accepted by everyone due to its flexibility and customizable feature. Innovation happens at a faster pace than the proprietary platform. All these factors play a major role in stating open source to be a big enabler in the digital transformation of India.

Having said that, Open Source can be a big game changer in the Digital Transformation strategy. Its importance can be felt from the simple fact that both large and small organizations considering Open Source as a potential area of investment.n

Aparna [email protected]

abhijit TannuFounder & CTO, Seclore

lEad STORY


Raghunath Mandava appointed as MD and CEO of Airtel Africa

Bharti Airtel has appointed Raghunath Mandava who is currently the chief operating officer - Airtel Africa, will take over as managing director and chief executive officer – Airtel Africa with effect from January 1, 2017.

Raghunath Mandava, Raghu joined Airtel Africa as chief operating officer in July, 2016 and having well settled in his role will take full leadership control. Raghu will be a permanent invitee to the board of Bharti Airtel, representing Airtel Africa.

Forcepoint appoints Meerah Rajavel as CIOGlobal cybersecurity leader Forcepoint

has appointed Meerah Rajavel as its new chief information officer (CIO).

A member of the executive leadership team, Rajavel will lead the global information technology organization and play a central role in extending Forcepoint’s delivery of cloud-based cybersecurity capabilities to customers worldwide.

Rajavel brings more than 25 years of experience in information technology to Forcepoint. Most recently, she was the CIO at Qlik, a visual analytics company, where she led efforts to build an IT and operational excellence strategy to support rapid growth on a global scale.

GoDaddy's India MD Rajiv Sodhi quits, joins Microsoft

GoDaddy's India & Australia MD & Vice President, Rajiv Sodhi has tendered his resignation and would be heading to Microsoft starting December where he would be leading the Cloud and Server business.

Sodhi joined GoDaddy in 2012 and is credited with setting up GoDaddy's India business with a strong focus on small businesses. Sodhi is an old timer at Microsoft where he was earlier the Director - India SMB, Cloud and Software Sales. He had been at Microsoft between 2002 and 2012, when he quit to join GoDaddy.

Justin Harvey Joins Accenture SecurityAccenture has announced that veteran

cybersecurity expert Justin Harvey has joined the company as managing director and global lead for the Incident Response Practice.

Harvey brings more than 20 years of experience to Accenture and specializes in endpoint detection and response, defense against cyber espionage, security operations, incident response and threat intelligence.

In his new role, Harvey will focus on expanding Accenture’s incident response and breach readiness solutions that address preparedness through threat identification and eradication for Accenture’s global client base.

Joergen Jakobsen Joins Sophos as VP APJSophos, a global leader in network and

endpoint security, today announced the appointment of Joergen Jakobsen as regional vice president for Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ).

Jakobsen brings more than 25 years of experience as a senior executive for global technology brands and has a successful track record for driving business growth through the channel. Jakobsen will be based in the Sophos Singapore office and will report directly to senior vice president of global sales, Michael Valentine.

Intex appoints Sumit Sehgal as CMOIntex Technologies has appointed

Sumit Sehgal as its Chief Marketing Officer to strengthen and professionalize its management for achieving accelerated growth and business excellence.

In his new role at Intex, Sehgal will lead the brand transformation and conceptualize all marketing initiatives across the various business lines of the company.

Sehgal is a tenured marketer with over two decades of experience in sales & marketing with companies such as JWT, Bharti Teletech and ITC Ltd. He is an MBA from IMT, Ghaziabad with specialization in marketing. During his tenure, he has built many brands, including his last assignment at Max Life Insurance Ltd, where he was instrumental in strengthening the franchise.

BMC Software appoints Peter Leav as President and CEO

BMC Software today announced Peter Leav as president and chief executive officer.

Peter Leav succeeds Bob Beauchamp, who continues to serve as chairman of the board of directors and will play a key role going forward.

Leav joins BMC from Polycom, a $1.2 billion global collaboration business serving the enterprise market, where he served as president and CEO for the last three years. He brings to BMC 20-plus years of strong leadership in operations, general management and sales across technology and services.

FreeCharge appoints Anand Sinha as DirectorFreeCharge has announced the

appointment of Anand Sinha as director – Partnerships & Strategic Initiatives.

Anand has previously co-founded PressPlay – India’s first omni channel entertainment platform and headed sales for Tomato. Anand brings to the table deep passion and experience of working in a start-up landscape along with an intricate understanding of partnerships and consumer products.

In his new role, Anand will be leveraging his experience in leading both the online and offline partnerships to help FreeCharge scale up its merchant operations.

Movers & Shakers


Avaya’s Transition to a Software-and-Services Model is Customer Driven

Avaya has recognized that one-size-NEVER fits all and hence made the strategic decision to transition to a software-

and-services led company by bringing a change in its product mix. Chiradeep Rao, Head- Channels and Alliances,

India and SAARC, Avaya shares more on this aspect and how it is going to be impacted by the transition -

Avaya’s move to a software-and-services model is being driven by customer

demand. Today there is significant interest among businesses in the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, in preparation for the challenges of tomorrow and enabling improved operational efficiency, employee productivity and enhanced end user and customer experiences. To meet this shift in demand, Avaya has innovated to transition itself from being a hardware supplier to a software-and-services provider, with software and services now accounting for about three quarters of our revenue.

“A one-size-fits-all approach with a few customizable pieces and parts is no longer acceptable. Customers are the users of the solution. They know better than anyone what problems the solution needs to solve. So this has what necessitated our transition to that of the software-and-services model,” says Chiradeep Rao, Head- Channels and Alliances, India and SAARC, Avaya.

Avaya understands that “going digital” requires not only a commitment to user-defined engagement but also a commitment to an all-software development platform. “Digital transformation requires us to continue to evolve and simplify our portfolio of solutions and services to prioritize the quality, speed, accuracy and security of every experience when engaging with or within an enterprise. In fact, our expanded portfolio addresses customers’ growing demand for digital transformation, software-based solutions and smart analytics, while offering compelling migration paths for both partners and customers,” Chiradeep points out.

Avaya’s go-to-market strategy provides customers the choice to work either directly with Avaya or through its indirect sales channel, which consists of a global network of alliance partners, distributors, dealers or value-added resellers. Its enterprise go-to-market approach focuses on a services-led strategy, acquiring new customers and increasing wallet share.

India – a potential market for Avaya…India is a major piece of Avaya’s corporate

infrastructure and it sees immense opportunity of growth in the Indian market. India is at the heart of Avaya’s innovation focus and represents the company’s largest R&D center globally, spread across Pune, Bangalore and Hyderabad, providing more than 30% of product & solution

development globally. Also, as Indian economy is heading towards digital transformation, with initiatives like ‘Digital India’ and ‘Smart city’, it strongly believes that the mid-market and SME sector in India will form the backbone of this transformation and will be the key driver for its growth.

Avaya also sees Government projects as major growth drivers.

“We are working closely with State governments on providing

emergency response systems and digitization of education initiatives as major target areas. Our 15-20 per cent of the India revenues are from

Government projects, we expect this number to go up to

the “late 20 to 30 per cent” in the next 18 to 24 months,” Chiradeep

explains.

Avaya ‘Edge’ – A new dimension to Avaya’s Channel

Partners are a very crucial part of Avaya’s business and they have a significant contribution in its enterprise business and are also supporting its enterprise customers. They have been associated with Avaya for the last five to ten years. The business they do is service oriented and customers have high dependency on them, so it becomes imperative for Avaya and partners to keep the customer engagement platform at a high level wherein customer needs are addressed

at the right time. Avaya ‘Edge’ is a new streamlined channel

program that gives partners the flexibility to meet their customers’ needs in today’s fast-paced digital marketplace, while providing greater rewards for those partners that deliver exceptional value. This new program will help drive mutual profitability and better equip partners with the skills needed to help customers achieve their Digital Transformation objectives. This program has enhanced partner benefits tied with five new tracks tailor-made for specific markets (enterprise, midmarket and SMB) and individual solution providers. It addresses some of the biggest needs for technology partnerships – a simpler structure, greater benefits, and flexibility. The key elements of the program include Simplified Structure, Greater Benefits and Flexibility.

2017 – New business opportunities…The past few years have been quite successful

for Avaya as it observed 13-19 percent of growth in the last three years. India is amongst its top ten markets in terms of turnover.

In 201, Avaya is executing on strategic transformation to a software and services led platform and are focused on expanding its innovative product portfolio while driving sales and services growth in both the enterprise and mid-market segments. Avaya is seeing a melding of customer and team engagement solutions, and also see acceptance of collaboration solutions.

Samrita [email protected]

Chiradeep RaoHead- Channels and Alliances, India and SAARCAvaya

FaCE TO FaCE


Hyperconverged is the new engine for future data centre

Disruption is unavoidable in this day and age of digitisation. Today, it is no longer a matter of ‘if ’, but rather — ‘when’

yourorganisation will be disrupted.The cloud is now revolutionising how businesses operate and workers collaborate. There is alsoa tidal wave of data, with billions of devices and people interconnected via Internet of Things (IoT). Coupled with cognitive computing and analytics,these developments can be used to unearth new insights for business leaders. The myriad of changes have given rise to companies such as Uber and AirBnb,which have successfully disrupted their respective industries.

To prepare for this eventuality, organisations need to rethink their IT strategy.Only so can they truly harness the full potential of digitisation. To keep up with an increasingly digital world, IT systems will also need to be smarter, more agile and reliable.

Hyperconvergedfor true one-box solutionThe intelligence of asystem has alwaysbeen determined by the software

that runs it,which can be lacking for existing offerings based on a three-tier architecture.The systems were static in their behavior, as their firmware was “fixed” and difficult to upgrade and manage.

Hyperconvergedtechnology changes this entirely, byintegrating storage, compute, and hypervisor together intoasingle system.All these sub-systems can be easily managed leveraginga singlesoftware,whichdelivers everything that you would need froman IT system.

Besides integration, hyperconverged systems provide a higher degree of flexibility whichseamlessly link businesseswithIT like never before. This significantly enhances organisations’agility and resilience while reducing operating costs.Major benefits include:

• A pay-as-you-grow (linear scaling) model for all your IT needs• ‘Per virtual machine’ pricing model for public and private

clouds• Ability to address ever-changing business needs and environment

with elastic application performance • Self-healing capabilitythat automatically look after unplanned

failures without affecting users• Easy integration with open standard-based IT systems for a

‘single pane of glass’ managementThe above benefits may have triggered great demand for hyperconverged

systems.According to Gartner[1], this market is expected to grow as much as 13 times by 2019.To capitalise on this opportunity, we have developed the Lenovo Hyperconverged Infrastructure (HCI) — a turnkey, one-box solution that incorporates compute, storage and networking.

Pushing the boundaries of hyperconvergedThe Lenovo Converged HX Series has also seen an explosive growth

in demand —thanks to its high level of differentiation. This is due to tighter software integration and better performance than the competition, as illustrated by the following accolades from independent research and consulting firms:• LeadingvirtualisationperformanceLenovo HX is the fastest two-socket, x86-based virtualisation

system,validated by the industry-recognised SPECvirt_sc2013 benchmark.It has garnered world records for‘Server Performance PerWatt’, and ‘Total System (including storage) Performance Per Watt’.• LeadingreliabilityLenovo HX offers the highest overall uptime and availability among

all x86-based systems on the market, with themajority (61%) achieving 99.9%, 37% at 99.99% and 2% at 99.999% availability. These were the findings ofa 2016 report released by Information Technology Intelligence Consulting.• LeadingcustomersatisfactionLenovo finished ahead of all its competitors for every attribute, from

planning to evaluation and implementation.This is the key takeaway from

the Technology Business Research’s Corporate IT Buying Behaviour and Customer Satisfaction for x86-based servers.

At Lenovo, we never stand still and are constantly innovating to give our customers the best-in-class solutions, co-developed with the leading technology providers and extensively tested by our experts:

• Lenovo is the only original equipment manufacturer(OEM) to offer management of hardware tasks for PRISM, VMware vCenter, and Microsoft System Centre

• Our alliance withNutanix ensures industry-leading professional service and support

• We are the only OEMvendor with a complete SAP-certified HANA solutionwhich is “SAN-less”, eliminating the need for costly enterprise shared storage.

Making the switch to hyperconvergedDigitisationis rapidly reshaping ourworld and the business landscape.

Its impact is evidenteverywhere we go — just think about devices like connected cars and collaborative robots (cobots) in smart factories. Organisations cannot afford to be laggards, while their competitors embrace new technologies like hyperconverged.

Hyperconverged systems are going to be the growth driver for businesses, and an important engine for future data centres (DCs). Lenovo with our end-to-end portfolio of services and solutions, as well as a rich heritage in the DC space, is well poised to help organisations accelerate theirdigitisation journey. Time is of the essence, and the earlier you embark on this journey, the better.

By Sumir Bhatia - VP of DataCentre Group for Asia-Pacific

TEChnOManIa


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Canon is the Growth Partner for the Emerging Indian Entrepreneurs

C Sukumaran, Assistant Director- Consumer Systems Products (CSP) division – Canon in an exclusive interview with VARINDIA shares the growth story of CSP in the country and the factors that has helped the company remain on top in the printing industry, in both Laser and Inkjet printer space -

The CSP division of Canon has been one of the leaders of the industry specializing in crafting technological innovations in the

consumer printer segment in India. Canon India has been performing quite well as compared to the other players. In line with its new Laser printer portfolio, Canon would extensively focus on strengthening its reach to the B2B and B2G segment.

C Sukumaran, Assistant Director- Consumer Systems Products (CSP) division – Canon, who as part of his current role looks after the marketing and sales wing of both Laser and Inkjet printer business in India intends to take the marketing and sales of the products of the company to the next level, making Canon the industry leader in the printing domain.

“At Canon, we are looking at boosting our services and strengthen our association with our existing and potential customers for both Inkjet and Laser segment. We have undertaken a robust plan to address the various needs and requirements of customers with our comprehensive range of products and services. With our introduction of PIXMA G-series printers in the ink tank segment, we aim to increase our market share in the CISS segment,” he explains.

Talking from a growth point of view, both consumer and enterprise segments hold equal importance for Canon and the company has continuously strived to innovate itself and cater to the varied requirements of its target customers. Since, consumers are rapidly increasing their dependence on printing technology; Canon has witnessed considerable growth coming from the home segments as well as the enterprise segment.

“As Canon has a wide array of products catering to consumers as well as enterprises we evaluate growth overall across verticals. We would continue to thrust its growth upon the innovative products and services that we would bring to the market. Our range of printers lead in innovations like integrated ink-tank, cloud connectivity and attractive designs,” Sukumaran points out.

And perhaps this is why, despite the dwindling market demand, Canon India has witnessed growth in the consumer printer segment in India. The market for both Inkjet and Laser products is growing at a good pace, owing to the changing customer needs and technological advancements.

The ‘highly’ competitive Printing market…With major vendors launching Ink Tank

printers, the competition is going to get tougher and better in the inkjet category in coming quarters. The inkjet market is expected to grow at a higher pace than the laser market due to high-capacity ink-tank printers. The commercial segment that was earlier completely dominated by laser printers is now being penetrated by the Ink Tank printers. The increased demand for printing from the home, SOHO and SMB segments is expected to provide an impetus to the market.

The growth of inkjet printing technology is attributed to the

introduction of high-speed, commercial color printing inkjet technology. The laser printers on the other hand are extensively used by SMBs, Government, SOHOs and large enterprises. Laser printers are for bulk printing and with new innovations and

technology, Canon is witnessing color laser printers being used by organizations.

“We have observed a huge interest among Indian consumers for our Canon PIXMA range of printers which has unique propositions to offer in terms of looks and design and excellent print quality that are attuned to the lifestyle of today’s consumers. We will be extensively focusing on SMBs and SOHOs with our varied product portfolio of both inkjet and laser printers,” states Sukumaran.

Going forward…Canon looks forward to working closely with

its Channel partners and Value Added Resellers (VARs) in tier-2 and tier-3 cities to further enhance its market share, build a stronger customer base and to bring its printers and related services to SOHO consumers. “Canon CSP division would continue to become the enabler of ideas and transformation by providing products that meets customer requirements and enhance their

experience. We also plan to reach out to Tier I & Tier II markets through sustained marketing campaign, easy upgrade offers and add-on solutions,” he says.

In its effort to reach out to its end customers, Canon will also be focusing on online channels and Large Format Retails. n

C SukumaranAssistant Director- Consumer Systems Products (CSP) division – Canon


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LG V20 The swappable battery is its great feature, as is its ability to add storage via microSD.

The V20 is its ability to record high-quality audio. The V20 comes with metal body with a thin bezel design that delivers good looks and a convenient grip. The sleek metal body is equipped with aircraft grade aluminum. Si-PC, a great shock-absorbing material, protects the top and bottom edges of V20, while the flat display and rear PET cover protect the front and back. In fact, the phone is complaint with the U.S. military standard test.

V20 has 5.7-inch QHD IPS Quantum display. The LG V20 is powered by Snapdragon 820 quad-core processor paired with 4GB of RAM on the 64GB internal storage. The smartphone also features a 16 MP + 8 MP dual-camera on the back and a 5-megapixel selfie camera. On the software front, it runs on Android v7.0 (Nougat) based on LG 5.0 UI. Other connectivity options include fingerprint sensor, 4G LTE with VoLTE support, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and USB. The LG V20 will be available in Titan, Pink and Silver color options.

The LG V20 is also the world’s first smartphone to come with wide-angle cameras on both the front and back of the phone. The V20 can take wide-angle photographs with rear-facing 135-degree and front-facing 120-degree lenses. Even more interesting is the Hybrid Auto Focus feature which delivers optimal picture sharpness while Auto Shot simplifies selfies with a face detection feature that triggers the shutter automatically. This is the first smartphone to feature 32-bit Hi-Fi Quad DAC (digital to analog converter) capabilities, bringing a superior audio experience to mobile phones.

Cisco Accelerates Digital Transformation of GujaratCisco has announced a series of strategic

initiatives to help accelerate the digital transformation of Gujarat. Cisco signed two Memoranda of Understanding (MoU), which include establishing an Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation hub to develop and customize digital technologies and solutions with International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Technology (iCreate) and a Smart City project in Gujarat International Finance Tec-City (GIFT).

iCreate is an autonomous institute and a centre of excellence of the Government of Gujarat that has been set up under the visionary leadership of the Honorable Prime Minister Shri. Narendra Modi. iCreate’s mission is to catalyze new age entrepreneurial pursuits of the youth and focuses on innovative applications for wealth generation, employment creation and global competition.

The MoUs were signed in the presence of the Honorable Chief Minister of Gujarat, Shri Vijay Rupani; Deputy Chief Minister of Gujarat, Shri Nitin Bhai Patel; Dr. J.N Singh, Chief Secretary, Govt of Gujarat; Shri P. K. Taneja, Additional Chief Secretary Industries and Mines Department; Additional Chief Secretary Urban Development, Shri Poonamchand Parmar; Shri Ajay Pandey, MD and Group CEO of GIFT City; Shri AnupamJalote, CEO, iCreate and Shri Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC.

Hon’ble Chief Minister of Gujarat, Shri Vijay Rupani said, “This technology will lay the foundation to transform India into a developed nation and create an enabling environment for entrepreneurship, foster innovation and accelerate economic competitiveness. My vision

for the State is to digitally empower every citizen, enhance the quality of life, enable ease of doing business and become an innovation and knowledge hub for the Country. We are happy to have Cisco partner with us to help build Gujarat’s economy of the future."

Dinesh Malkani, President, Cisco India and SAARC said, ‘’Digitization and Innovation are the key drivers of the Indian economy, leading to jobs, growth and long-term prosperity. The announcement today underlines Cisco’s commitment to enable Gujarat to capitalize on digital opportunities, strengthen the vibrant innovation ecosystem in the state, enhance quality of life of citizens and accelerate the digital transformation of the state.”

Cisco in collaboration with iCreate will explore the setting up of an Internet of Things (IoT) Innovation Hub at iCreate’s new campus at

Dev Dholera near Bavla, Ahmedabad, to foster local innovation. The innovation centre will enable startups and entrepreneurs to build smart city and IoT-based solutions. Cisco experts, together with industry partners and start-ups, will develop proof of concepts; identify features and functionalities required for digital solutions, and engage in rapid prototyping. Long known for its expertise in manufacturing, this IoT lab will help Gujarat leapfrog ahead of other states in the use of innovative technology solutions to increase the competitiveness and efficiency of its industries.

The Center will include a dedicated space to demonstrate IoT in action, and creates a place in which customers, startups, open communities, researchers, entrepreneurs and technology enthusiasts are invited to work and brainstorm on new ideas and technologies.


Cloudera Leverages the Power of Big Data to serve Customers

Cloudera delivers a modern platform for data management and analytics. As the first commercial provider of

Apache Hadoop-related software and services, Cloudera provides the world’s fastest, easiest, and most secure

Hadoop platform to help businesses across the globe solve the most challenging problems with data.

In an exclusive interaction with VARINDIA, Amr Awadllah, Founder, CTO - Cloudera speaks about how the company

has gained momentum in the India market and about its customers to which it is a dedicated vendor -

Cloudera is revolutionizing enterprise data management by offering the first unified platform for big data: The Enterprise Data Hub. Cloudera offers enterprises one place to store, process, and analyze all their data, empowering them to extend the value of existing investments, all while enabling fundamental new ways to derive value from their data.

The Customer eco-system of ClouderaCloudera has started serving the Indian market from approximately

a year ago, as organizations continue to look to technology and data to solve real business problems. NxtGen and Airtel are some examples of its valued customers and partners in the India market. Organizations such as Airtel are continuing to develop a 360 view of customers to build revenue streams, drive efficiency in product and service delivery, as well as manage risk, compliance and cyber security. Having this 360 programme helps customers such as Airtel interpret customer data at a more accurate level deriving data insights used to churn a prediction of customer retention. It helps to understand the customer much better.

“Airtel can be an end user or enterprise customer, depending on which perspective you come from. A lot of companies make a mistake of signing up more customers than the infrastructure they have to support these customers. The solution for them is to then move to micro cell towers that are covering much smaller region, with people in a particular region connected to the respective cell tower. There are many companies that are doing that right now. But in our case, our way of solving this situation is to collect data, whether from social media or from apps the customer is using, and if the customer needs help, appropriate actions to retain him or her as a customer can then be taken,” explains Amr Awadllah, Founder, CTO – Cloudera.

Legacy databases allow customers to ask only certain types of questions which are not very important. Cloudera’s technology on the other hand is useful for any datacenter customer and allows them to ask bigger questions. The technology is unique from three dimensions -

1. It can take any type of data 2. It is scalable to

as much data the customer likes

3. It can analyze this Data in newer ways

There is a mountain of unstructured (images) and semi structured data (data from cell phones) today for telecommunication companies, government, pharmaceutical companies and lot many other verticals. They need to analyze this entire data set to make better decisions. “For instance, 20 years back, automated teller machines (ATMs) only took structured data. Today’s ATMs are providing both structured and unstructured data. Like you can see there is a camera inside the ATM machine that is taking the picture of your face in the form of unstructured data. We have to analyze that picture and recognize that yes it is you. Cloudera is about how we allow our customers to consume all types of data and make better decisions using that data. We serve different industries and verticals with these solutions. We also have several of these customised solutions for the insurance industry in the United States and a few of the European markets, but we

have not brought it to India market yet,” he says.One of the key uses of Cloudera’s technology is cyber security. Intel

is Cloudera’s largest investor and also a customer. Intel (not Intel Security) builds its own cyber security solutions to prevent hackers from hacking their systems and their solution runs on top of Cloudera’s platform called SPOT.

“Our system picks up abnormal, weird behaviours to detect cyber threats. A system that can learn dynamically and can adapt is very important and that is what is special about Apache SPOT technology. In summary, Cloudera’s capabilities of the Hadoop platform to handle large volumes of data and Intel’s investment in the internet of things fuel the growth in data

collection and analytics,” Awadllah observes.

To conclude...Cloudera sees a massive opportunity in the Asia Pacific region, as

they hold immense business potential. It is equally committed to the India market. Its strategy right now is to continue to focus on building customer relationships and expanding the current team. “We can do this as Cloudera’s technology is poised to help transform how organizations maximize the value of one of their most important resources today – their data,” concludes Awadllah. n

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Strategic Sponsor

Elite Sponsors Cloudera Partner PavilionInnovators Cloudera Partner Pavilion

Contributing SponsorsExabyte SponsorsImpact Sponsors

Making data workSingapore:Strata + Hadoop World is the world’s leading conference on Big Data that took place from 6th to 8th December 2016 at Suntec Singapore Convention & Exhibition Centre, Singapore. It was presented by O’Reilly and Cloudera. It is the event where big data's most influential business decision makers, strategists, architects, developers and analysts gathered to shape the future of their businesses and technologies. The event was clearly focused on big data, cutting-edge data science and new business fundamentals to work. The event was well attended by thousands of data scientists and business managers who gather every year to learn how the latest developments in data can transform their business.

In an exclusive interaction with VARINDIA and Ben Lorica, Chief Data Scientist, O' Reilly Media spokes on, data scientists build information platforms to provide deep insight and answer previously unimaginable questions. Spark and Hadoop are transforming how data scientists work by allowing interactive and iterative data analysis at scale. There are deliberations on topics like advanced analytics, data strategy, enterprise adoption, business case studies, and real-time applications.

Key highlights - Turning Big Data into Big Opportunities

As the value of information skyrockets, so too does the business’s thirst for more. Despite the growth of big data, the adoption

of tools to manage it remains quite low. Taking center stage amid these digital challenges is the business data lake, a unified data landscape in which organizations can efficiently evolve and gain value. A business data lake provides managed access to all the information and concentrates on all business information requirements—not simply those that fit within the enterprise’s data model. For end users, this means that desired data is integrated and analyzed on demand; they no longer must always engage with IT to leverage the data. For IT, it offers the ability to achieve speed, cost reduction and increased security while providing a new, more business-centric approach to data governance.

With the rise of deep learning, natural language understanding techniques are becoming more effective and are not as reliant on costly annotated data. This leads to an explosion of possibilities of what businesses can do with language. Secondly, deep learning has made a huge impact on predictive analytics and is here to stay.

The event was really worth travelling to understand on how Big data and data science have great potential for accelerating business, but how do you reconcile the business opportunity with the possible technical solutions and with a scientific and mathematical approach and understand the emerging technologies that are going to influence our business process.

Presented by

The event was focused on some of the most forward-looking leaders in the industry, and explored on topics such as:

• Bigdataintelecommunicationsandfinance• Becomingadata-centriccompany• Datascienceandadvancedanalytics• Design,visualization,andVR• Hadoopusecases• Hadoopinternals&development• IoTandintelligentreal-timeapplications• Chat,machinelearning,andAI• Smartcitiesandurbanautomation• Production-readyHadoop• Security,governance&ethics• Spark&beyond

EVEnT


Aircel leverages technology to offer better customer experience

service quality with the use of Big Data. Aircel is extremely proud to be one of the early birds within the industry to have realized its potential and integrated it into its day-to-day business operations,” remarked Alok Kumar.

Cost optimization in service centres

To optimize the cost in service delivery, Aircel has adopted a few steps like the B2B2C service model. Through this, the company has created “easy-to-navigate” self-service options and digital channels.

“At Aircel, we continuously explore cost optimization techniques that are not only strategic in nature but also practical in their approach. Currently, Aircel is working on a B2B2C service

In a talk with VARINDIA, Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer, Aircel, spoke about how technology is enabling the company to understand customer’s behaviour and offer better customer experience

In a competitive industry like telecommunications where the market dynamics change often, customers are of utmost importance to the service providers. This industry is based upon unique services and customer’s experiences. In order to understand the business dynamics, Aircel has concentrated on one of their foundational values, which is “customer first philosophy” that has helped the company to grow.

Leveraging technology for customer’s behaviour

To understand the customer in a better way, the company has leveraged the latest technologies like Big Data and Data Analytics. These technologies have helped the company to understand various customer’s behaviour, the usage of products and customer’s pain points to offer practical offerings.

“Technology is an enabler for business growth, innovation and operational effectiveness. The use of data analytics plays a big role in understanding diverse and complex customer’s behaviour and product usage patterns. The customer services practice at Aircel has a special cell that looks into collection and analysis of the Big Data,” said Alok Kumar, Chief Service Delivery Officer, Aircel.

Elaborating, Alok Kumar further said, “Customer metrics and smart algorithms help us predict what our customers want before they even enquire about it. All our product innovations and retention strategies are a result of churning and a comprehensive analysis of the Big Data. Another competitive advantage, the use of Data Analytics provides us with is in identifying customer pain points and offering practical solutions to the customers.”

The telecom service provider, Aircel, sees a huge scope to grow and offer exceptional service quality with these technologies which will further help them to retain customers. It is one such company which has realized the power of technology and adopted and integrated in the everyday operations.

“There is an immense scope for a telecom service provider to grow and deliver excellent

model for cost optimization, wherein we have created multiple ‘easy-to-navigate’ self-service options on the IVRS/ SMS/USSD and Digital channels. This enables our retailers to become service nodes for walk-in customers around their neighbourhood. The adoption of a domestic BPO partnership like this works brilliantly in regional markets where local talents are well equipped to address customer’s queries due to linguistic commonality and connect,” explained Alok Kumar.

An App to serve betterTo provide a better customer’s experience,

Aircel has an integrated app which serves as a service solution to customers. The company is focussed on communication and customer engagement to improve the brand.

“What distinguishes digital from other media is the ability to have a two-way conversation. Aircel has an integrated Aircel app that provides end-to-end service solutions to our customers. This app serves as an interactive platform allowing our customers and retailers to enquire about products, schemes, commissions, etc. The Aircel app works even in a low bandwidth area.

The focus is clearly to have communication and customer engagement that enhances brand resonance,” stated Alok Kumar.

RoadmapThe company has already chalked out its future

plans to position the brand differently. Aircel always focusses on adopting groundbreaking technologies to satisfy customers. Furthermore, Aircel will be upgrading its network quality, robot-based backend support system and “Customer Listening” platform.

“The principal focus for Aircel is to always be ‘future-ready’ and constantly adapt to new and innovative customer services techniques in the market. Empowering our customers by providing self-services such voice assistance IVRS or service through App in regional languages is certainly how we would like to create a differentiated positioning in the minds of the customer. Additionally, we will also be looking at scaling up our geo-centric alerts on network quality, developing robot-based backend support system and an automated ‘Customer Listening’ platform using Data Analytics. All our efforts in the coming time will be centred on creating an experience-driven customer service system,” revealed Alok Kumar. n

Alok KumarChief Service Delivery Officer, Aircel

Committed to Customer Service

Aircel has a committed customer service team backed by strong technical infrastructure that addresses and provides solutions to customer’s queries and issues in real time. • Emergency response tree in the IVRS

for company to quickly reach to its retail partner or customer service partner in case a customer loses SIM/handset – in order to quickly block the SIM. We have a special team assigned at the backend to effectively handle such emergency led issues

• In case a customer is unable to find solution to an issue, we also have a centralized help desk mechanism that directs the issue to the right personnel

• We have a 24X7 retail support helpline on the Call Center /WhatsApp number for retailer to reach out to the company to seek assistance on behalf of a customer


Alcatel Unveils IDOL 4

Meizu launches M5 Note

Lava unveils Metal 24 feature phone

Lenovo launches K6 Power 4G Smartphone for Rs.9,999

Micromax launches Vdeo range 4G smartphoneMi c r o m a x

Informatics has partnered with Google to announce the launch of its Vdeo range entry level smartphone.

Aimed at reviving the affordable smartphone segment and popularising the video calling experience, the Micromax Vdeo range is country’s one of the most affordable 4G VoLTE smartphone with pre-loaded Google Duo app.

The company launched two smartphones under the Vdeo range - Vdeo 1 and Vdeo 2, which is a complete package with 4G VoLTE, latest Android Marshmallow, spectacular metal body, to kick-start the smartphone adoption in every corner of the country.

The smartphones also come with a pre bundled Reliance Jio SIM, which offers three months of unlimited free data and voice calling option to all the Vdeo users. The smartphone will power the next phase of smartphone adoption in the country by hand-holding consumers to upgrade to smartphones. In the coming months, the company will be extending the Vdeo range with the introduction of Vdeo 3 and Vdeo 4.

The two variants in Micromax’s Vdeo range feature a 4-inch and 4.5-inch WVGA and FWVGA display, respectively, offering excellent graphics quality enabling users to enjoy video calls and multimedia content.

Both smartphones offer an efficient performance with the on-board 1.3 GHz Quad Core processor and a 1 GB RAM which enable users to juggle between apps seamlessly. With the 8 GB ROM, both smartphones ensure that users can download and store enough applications, documents and multimedia content right on their smartphone.

Lenovo India has announced the next

generation of its popular K series, Lenovo K6 Power 4G smartphone for young millennials looking for nonstop entertainment at Rs.9,999.

K6 Power smartphone provides blazing fast speeds made possible by Qualcomm Snapdragon Octa-core processor, 4G LTE connectivity and the Android Marshmallow operating system.

"With the launch of the next kickass phone in this series – K6 Power, we hope to build on this successful association and our commitment to make the most differentiated smartphone technology accessible to our 100 million+ customers,” said Ajay Yadav, Vice-President – Mobiles, Flipkart.

The 13MP rear camera

Alcatel has launched IDOL 4 in India.

The uniquely –designed IDOL 4 smartphone take everything up a notch with the new Boom Key and an augmented multimedia

exper i ence. IDOL 4 also marks

Alcatel’s entry into the

expansive VR space and it will be available exclusively on Flipkart.com.

The IDOL 4’s innovative packaging design transforms into a pair of virtual reality goggles which, when combined with the smartphone, becomes the portal for users to enter the world of immersive 360-degree viewing and gaming. Virtual reality content such

as videos and games can be downloaded onto the device from the Onetouch VR Store, a built-in app to easily access saved virtual reality content or streamed in realtime via LittlStar. Alcatel's VR set is available in the box along with JBL in-ear headphones.

The IDOL 4, featuring the Qualcomm Snapdragon 617 processor, deliver advanced features and capabilities that allow

consumers to experience console-quality 3D gaming, enhanced photography and

videography, as well as home theater-quality

audio. Additionally users will be able to enjoy all-day battery life. The smartphones sport displays that provide superb readability even in bright sunlight and clear viewing from any angle using Qualcomm Technologies’ Assertive Display technology.

IDOL 4 Series smartphone will be available priced at Rs. 16,999.

Meizu has unveiled M5 Note in the

Chinese market. The new offering from Meizu’s M-series, M5 Note comes with full metal unibody

design and a 5.5-inch Full HD display. The new device M5 Note is designed for consumers who seek affordable smartphones with excellent industrial design and smooth user experience.

The new M5 Note has the classic full metal unibody that has gone through 12 steps of 3D sandblasting for smoother touch, and comes in four colors – champagne gold,

silver, grey and blue. The speaker hole located at the bottom of the phone is carved in a rectangle shape and made by CNC equipment for more natural

and even sounds. The 5.5-inch Full

HD display with 2.5D glass features the latest smart eye-protective mode to ensure a more comfortable viewing experience. The display produces vivid colors and lively

visuals. The powerful new

generation 8-core 64-bit Cortex-A53 processor has a peak frequency of 1.8GHz. The M5 Note is equipped with either 3GB or 4GB RAM and users can choose between 16GB, 32GB, and 64GB of internal storage to satisfy every kind of user.

Although the M5 Note is only 8.1mm thick, it is powered by a 4000mAh battery.

Lava International has announced

the launch of Lava Metal 24 under its new “Metal Series” of Dual-SIM feature phones.

The Dual-SIM phone comes with a premium looking Metal back finish and offers a combination of features, including a 6.1cm (2.4”) screen, 1.3MP rear camera with flash and a long-lasting 1,000mAh Li-ion battery.

With this, Lava strives to digitally empower consumers’ lives by providing affordable and reliable devices. Priced at Rs.2,000/-, Lava Metal 24 is available in black and gun metal colour variants across national retail stores and multi-brand outlets.

The device is equipped with FM with recording and a 3.5mm audio jack port, delivering truly remarkable headphone sound quality. Other key features include Bluetooth 3.0, internet browsing (EDGE) and USB-PC connectivity.

Lava Metal 24 sports

a 6.1cm (2.4-inch) QVGA screen for better viewing experience and 1.3-megapixel camera with flash, which is capable of video recording and allows digital zoom as well. The device is powered by a MTK6261D processor, and supports memory expansion up to 32 GB through a micro SD. Along with all these striking features and stylish looks, the device comes with a manufacturer warranty for 1 year along with 6 months’ warranty for the in-box accessories which include battery, headset, charger and a USB cable.

powered by Sony IMX258 with Exmor RS technology lets you capture full HD videos to capture your important moments and gives a complete control of how you want to click pictures with the help of pro-mode settings.

Powered by a 4,000mAh battery, the Lenovo K6 Power gives the power you need to last all day, while you play games, browse the web or stay in touch with friends on social networking sites.

VaR MOBIlITY


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