E-Magazine August Issue 2018

Commvault enhances its partner program Kaspersky Lab launches AV consumer solutions

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VIVOTEK launches 4K cameras with Ultra HD resolutions

Western Digital introduces new dual-port SAS SSD

RPA: A Groundbreaking Technology 38pg VOLUME XIX

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Can a Data Protection law soon become a Reality for India?

34pg

NDMC launches Smart City projects inaugurated

by Rajnath Singh

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he Union Home Minister Rajnath Singh inaugurated a slew of Smart City projects undertaken by the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) at the Charkha Park in Connaught Place. He pointed out that the rollout of the Smart City projects will help New Delhi emerge as a world class city.

Rajnath Singh said that NDMC has set an example before other aspiring Smart Cities in the country to follow. He recalls that New Delhi was among the 20 cities included in January, 2016 in the First Phase of the Smart City Mission announced by the Prime Minister Shri Narendra Modi.

Cosmos Bank's server hacked, Rs. 94 cr moved to Hong Kong

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s per our report, there has been a cyber-attack on the Pune based, Cosmos Co-operative Bank Ltd, on Tuesday.

A complaint was lodged a complaint against an unidentified person and a Hong Kongbased company after the server of its main branch was allegedly hacked twice and over Rs 94 crore was transferred to accounts in India and outside the country.

The report also says that the server of the bank has been compromised on August 11 and August 13 and the cyber criminals carried out 15,000 transactions. According to the complaint, Rs 80.5 crore were initially transferred to a foreign bank in 14,849 transactions of the debit card, and another Rs 13.92 crore transferred in a SWIFT transaction.

SUPPORT ONE OLD MAN FOR SOCIETAL UPLIFTMENT

(Society registered under section 25 Company Act 1956)

FOR A NOBLE CAUSE! You worked hard all your life, hoping that someday you could put your feet up on a sunny porch and do nothing more than reading a book. But when that day does arrive, you start missing the frantic pace – feeling left out and without purpose. Most of the Indian families take good care of their elders but unfortunately there are people who treat their parents as liabilities making them feel neglected. We want to provide them the much needed relief and a life of dignity.

Real CSR! You are not the only one who feel this way. Many senior executives in the corporate sector think of how they can bring a smile in one needy Old man’s life. Understanding the need of a Senior citizen on how exactly they feel only help us serve them better. The problem with the world is that intelligent people are full of doubt, while the stupid people are full of confidence. Sometimes grown-ups fail to realize their duty and are so much engrossed in their personal lives that they feel it a burden to keep their parents with them. Hundreds of organizations in the country are working to make life easy for such destitute parents by developing old age homes in India.

SPOI is Registered society under section 12A and all investment, they will get the tax exemption certificate and then 80G certification.

SPOI will empower the existing old age homes for the senior citizens and aged people in places such as Delhi and he NCR region. Our passion is to serve & empower the senior citizen by providing a roof over their heads as we understand that an old age home is a critical need for the elders who are destitute, sick and abandoned by their family.

SPOI INITIATIVES

• Computerization Supporting • Elderly Citizens • Medical Support

• Hygiene Support • Edutainment For more information www.spoindia.org

SOCIO POLITICAL OBSERVER OF INDIA A-84A/3, Rose Apartment, Paryavaran Complex, IGNOU Road, New Delhi - 110030 Mob: 9818928406 | Fax: 011 46061809

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HELLO INDIA

Fuelling Organisations’ Digital Future!

The digital era has brought unprecedented change to technology, business, society and digital business demands. This brings the newer challenge for the CIOs and opportunities for the application leaders to deliver software capabilities to meet business goals.

The fact is Innovation is the end result of inclusion, diversity, and good leadership. As a result, customers are more empowered than ever, comparing experiences across industries and even potentially forcing regulators and governments to be more accountable. As a consequence, customer experience management is a key priority for CEOs. When we see the industrial growth, every single company is looking for disruptive innovation, which will enable them to differentiate from their competitors for expanding their market and boosting their growth; this is an increasingly competitive fast moving world we are living in. Likewise there are thousands of new blockchain companies offering a new token and a new technology. With so many different companies in this space, it makes it difficult and overwhelming for investors and consumers to learn more about them.

When we talk about the digital future, the most important factor coming to my mind is the security and cyber-attack, which are a concern today all around the world. This is because humans are the most important part of information security and all humans make mistakes; as the survey says, 52% of security breaches are due to human errors, most of them being unintentional.

All an attacker needs is an entry point into the organization’s network. If this is achieved by human error, then the security measures implemented to protect your data are of no use and Phishing works no matter how hard a company tries to protect its customers or employees. Another survey says that a new attack vector against the Android operating system could potentially allow attackers to silently infect your smartphones with malicious apps or launch denial of service attacks.

We are surrounded by various vulnerability factors like smartphone and every time a service like Google Maps wants to use your location, Google asks your permission to allow access to your location if you want to use it for navigating.But a new investigation shows that the company does track you anyway. Google services on Android and iPhone devices store records of your location data even when you have paused "Location History" on your mobile devices. They might use location to improve people’s experience.

Now a question comes, whom to trust and whom not to.A recent report says that open-source tool that uses facial recognition technology to locate targets across numerous social media networks on a large scale. The facial recognition tool automatically searches for targets across several social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+ etc. that are based on their names and pictures.Most recently, a Melbourne schoolboy of 16 year-old broke into Apple’s mainframe from his suburban home on multiple occasions for over a year and downloaded 90 GB of data.

The digitized world of today presents us with an issue we have never faced before. Each and every little device in our home or office will be connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), which means that it will collect data and provide itto marketers for proper decision-making.This will also allow businesses to better understand behavioural and buying patterns of the customers.

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CONTENTS Website: www.varindia.com

Publisher: Deepak Kumar Sahu Editor: S Mohini Ratna Executive Editor: Dr. Vijay Anand Copy Editor: C. M. Dutta Deputy Editor: Samrita Baruah Sub - Editor: Aparna Mullick Correspondent: Lopamudra Das Art Director: Rakesh Kumar Network Administrator: Ashok Kumar Singh Manager-IT: Subhash Mohanta Manager-SEO: Bidyadhar Behera BUSINESS: Commercial Manager: Amit Kumar Jha Sr. Marketing Manager: Ashok Ranjan Dash Circulation Executive: Manish Kumar Marketing Manager: Dipendra Kumar

Can a Data Protection law soon become a Reality for India?

CORPORATE OFFICE: VAR House, A-84A/3 Rose Apartment, Paryavaran complex, IGNOU Road, New Delhi - 110030 Tel: 011-41656383, 46061809 Email: edit@varindia.com Bangalore: Bureau office Marketing Manager: S. Kamala kar Correspondent: L. G. Swami D-103 G.F., Ashish JK Apartments Thubarahalli Extended Road Bangaluru- 560066 Tel: 080-49530399 | Mobile:09886280836 E-mail: kamlakar@varindia.com Mumbai: Bureau office Regional Manager (West): Anil Kumar Sr. Correspondent: Mamta S. Anurag Residency, 203 - “B” Wing, Plot No-5, Sector-9, Kamothe, Navi Mumbai-410 209 Tel: 022-65561292, Mobile: 08108017479 E-mail: anil@varindia.com, mamta@varindia.com Chennai: Bureau office Branch Manager: K. Parthiban F1, Meadows Green Apartments, 64, Chetty Street 1st Cross, Mel Ayanambakkam, Chennai - 600 095 Cell No. : 98400 55626 E-mail: parthiban@varindia.com Hyderabad: Bureau office Branch Manager: Sunil Kumar Sahu 32-161/3, 202 Neha Paradise, Nr. Maissamma Temple, Venketeswara colony Ramakrishna Puram, Hyderabad - 500056 Telangana, Tel: 040-32989844/ Cell No. 08100298033 E-mail: sunil@varindia.com Kolkata: Bureau office Marketing Officer: Sunil Kumar Correspondent: B Kiran Dutta 123 SDF Building, Block GP Sector V, Salt Lake City, Kolkata - 700091 Mobile: 08100298033, E-mail: sunil@varindia.com Mobile: 09903088480, E-mail: kiran@varindia.com 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.

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All payments favouring: 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.

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FACE TO FACE

COVER STORY

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49 51

NetApp sees Commercial Segment as an Opportunity for its Partners For Vertiv, datacenter market is a growing opportunity Schneider Electric addressing the global energy crisis through sustainable solutions

EVENT 42

New-age CIOs come out as the showstoppers at 9th VARINDIA EIITF 2018

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Can a Data Protection law soon become a Reality for India?

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Dark Web: The World beneath the Internet!

VAR SECURITY

INDUSTRY EVENT

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Hyderabad hosts India’s first International Blockchain Congress Zoho ONE completes ONE year

VAR ANALYSIS 24 28 31

E-Commerce: The Best Is Yet To Come Indian Telecom Services: Disruption Like Never Before Mobile Phones: The Chinese Dominance

OPEN YOUR EYES 27

Eye Connect 2018 closes on a positive note

RPA: A Ground-breaking Technology

LEAD STORY

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34pg

Connected Devices most vulnerable to Cyber threats: A10 Networks

VAR MOBILITY 52

BT considers digital transformation as empowering customers, businesses and employees

REGULARS CHANNEL CHIEF

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ROUND ABOUT

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HOT BYTES

12, 14

ON THE RAMP

16, 18

VOICE N DATA

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CHANNEL BUZZ

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MOVERS & SHAKERS

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ROUND ABOUT

Complex and Crowded E-Commerce Space in India If e-commerce is a barometer to measure the penetration of internet in a country, one can assume that India is in its fast pace towards a fullywired and online society. E-commerce is growing by leaps and bounds.

Whether it is real or hyped-up is something that analysts can foretell.

A few illustrative descriptions may be relevant in this regard. The foremost is about the war between two American e-commerce companies – Amazon India and Walmart for supremacy in the Indian market.

Amazon might have established its Indian subsidiary before Walmart.

But the latter’s takeover of the homespun online distribution company – Flipkart – has changed the profile and reach of the U.S. online giant.

Close to US$17-billion takeover deal, which will be hopefully completed by the end of this year, has created flutter in the corporate circles across the world. E-commerce companies have realized the potential of India as a future market for online business.

Does it mean that the brick-and-mortar distributive trade is on the back burner or it would cease to exist? If you visit some of the websites, which dish out data on online users, one may get perplexed and will conclude that physical retail will not have any time span left. I believe that the brick-and-mortar stores will continue to exist with enhanced and new business model.

Available data gives a different picture. The latest figures released by the Census Bureau of the US Department of Commerce says that the estimates of U.S. retail e-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2018, adjusted for seasonal variation, but not for price changes, were $123.7 billion, an increase of 3.9 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2017. Total retail sales for the first quarter of 2018 were estimated at $1,3067 billion, an increase of 0.2 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2017. The first quarter 2018 e-commerce estimate increased 16 per cent from the first quarter of 2017, while total retail sales increased 4.5 per cent in the same period. E-commerce sales in the first quarter of 2018 accounted for 9.5 per cent of the total sales. On a net adjusted basis, the estimate of U.S. retail-commerce sales for the first quarter of 2018 totalled $114.4 billion, a decrease of 19.9 per cent from the fourth quarter of 2017.

Less than 10% share of the e-commerce to the total retail trade in the US does not foretell a sweep of online trade in the coming years.

Since the U.S. is one of the countries where e-commerce is relatively well entrenched, the low percentage of e-commerce penetration calls for introspection. It is definitely not a cake walk of the e-commerce over the conventional trade mode. The proportion of retail trade transacted in India and even China would be much lesser. Though the exact figures are not available, some analysts put that figure for India at around 3% of the total retail trade. China and India are the two countries, which can greatly influence the quantum of e-commerce transacted and people taking to online for trading. The reasons are that both countries are imbued with a large population, nearly half of world’s population, and a large proportion of tech-savvy people. Even if one targets at bringing close to 10% of the population to the online trading, it could be a fabulous catchment of people and that too in the upper-income group.

E-commerce also promotes disruption. Let us take new devices being innovated by Amazon and Walmart to reach out to their clients and ease their problems being faced in transacting businesses. They have technology platforms that are linked to banks to enable customers transact through dedicated banks. Walmart and Amazon are going to hire thousands of technical people for disrupting technologies to reach out to their customers and also to make their payments easy. For instance, Amazon, Google, Walmart and Facebook are entering the UPI payment system in India to help their clients to transact businesses through specific apps that they have developed. Most of the global operations based on disruptive technologies are being carried out in India, creating a large number of gainful jobs.

One of the handicaps that the e-commerce companies are facing in India is the last-mile connectivity. Online companies do not have the reach to penetrate tier-2 and -3 cities and rural areas with the result that they cannot spread their operations to these areas. Innovative technologies are being developed to address these problems.

Many wondered where the U.S. companies had gone and predicted the Chinese and Japanese dominance would be a bygone story. Amazon was

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present but was not aggressive enough to gobble up the market. Walmart’s presence was mostly in the business-to- business (B2B) segment and not in the online retail per se. In less than a year, things have changed. Now, the Chinese and Japanese companies are lying low and selling their stake.

Recently, SoftBank sold its stake in Flipkart to Walmart at over US$ 4 billion. So are the cases with other foreign e-commerce companies which have invested in the Indian companies.

Can the U.S. dominance in B2C be taken for granted? It is difficult to say since there can be a shakeup after Reliance Retail has shown interest in the online business. Buoyed by the announcement of Reliance entry, it is being reported that many other Indian companies are strategizing their entry into the e-commerce space. Easily some of these companies can graduate into the league of global companies sooner or later. That way, India can make its presence felt in the global e-commerce space.

E-commerce, in spite of opportunities, also has many challenges.

Internet is the backbone of e-commerce. Unfortunately, internet penetration in India is so far low compared to many developed and developing countries. But India has a very high penetration of mobile phones. It should be leveraged to bring e-commerce closer to the common people.

Loopholes in cyberlaws to regulate transactions in the net are another handicap. Large-scale theft of data and use of stored data for illegal purposes have led to widespread concerns across the world. India is not an exception.

Issues related to payment and tax are to be sorted out amicably.

Electronic payment is settled through credit and debit cards. But their penetration in the Indian system is very low because of digital illiteracy and skepticism around use of such transaction modes. Also, e-commerce is a seamless worldwide trade. Tax collections and appropriation of collected taxes are complex under the e-commerce. It is important to evolve tax payer-friendly schemes to ease the likely impact on the system.

Indeed, e-commerce has its place in India. But more important is to create an ecosystem for its growth and consolidation. The aim is not to replace e-commerce with traditional retail. Let brick-and-mortar retail coexist with online retail giving the customer the choice to pick either of the two or both to suit his/her convenience.

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August 2018

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CHANNEL CHIEF

AI to be used to create advanced tools to support Cyber Experts India has come a long way in the field of cybersecurity by taking major steps with policies that were incorporated in 2013. Also, the government has initiated Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) which helped the country to address the cybersecurity challenges. Apart from these developments, there are other initiatives like Digital Swachhta Kendra and CISO to better address cybersecurity concerns.

“India has worked incredibly hard on the cybersecurity front. The National Cyber Security Policy was incorporated as early as 2013. The policy aimed at developing a secure and resilient cyberspace for Indian citizens and businesses. Additionally, it launched its own Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-In) back in 2004, but supported the nation’s determination to dynamically address the burgeoning cybersecurity challenges. MeitY (Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology) launched Digital Swachhta Kendra, a botnet cleaning and malware analysis centre, in 2017 as botnet-based attacks increased on a global level. It had also instituted a federal CISO to spearhead and monitor cybersecurity policy, planning, and implementation,” says Keith Martin, F-Secure Head Asia-Pacific and Japan for Corporate Business.

Martin further adds, “Something that isn’t recognized on a macroscopic level is that India is also equipped with two-factor authentication for online payments. This decreases its exposure to fraudulent transactions.

The country also constantly collaborates with industry partners, as well as international players, and is benefited by this threat intelligence collaboration. These initiatives and collaborations add to the nation’s defensiveness as it emerges as a promising digital market across the globe.”

Artificial Intelligence and Cybersecurity The upcoming technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI) will support cybersecurity fields with advanced tools. The researchers in cybersecurity can also leverage AI to analyze huge sets of data for abnormalities and malicious behaviour.

“Artificial Intelligence will be used to create advanced tools and automation to aid experts in the cybersecurity field. This effort is already under way. Artificial Intelligence techniques allow cybersecurity researchers to analyze large data sets, and high-volume streaming data, on-the-fly, for anomalies and patterns indicative of malicious behaviour.

Machine learning models, deployed on both clients and backend systems, are already being used to detect anomalies in computing infrastructure.

Artificial Intelligence will give cybersecurity researchers more time to work on creative solutions to problems they’re seeing in the field. That knowledge will then be used to create even better tools and models for the future,” explains Martin.

In a chat with VARINDIA, Keith Martin, F-Secure Head Asia-Pacific and Japan for Corporate Business, discusses about the current cybersecurity landscape in India, AI, cybersecurity, ransomware, etc

Ransomware F-Secure, in a recent report, discussed thoroughly about ransomware which reveals that it remains a serious threat. Elaborating more on this, Martin explains, “We have ourselves recently released the Changing State of Ransomware, wherein we have thoroughly discussed how ransomware still continues to be a substantial threat. A fact that easily goes unnoticed as we talk about prominent ransomware attacks, including WannaCry, is that they’ve largely had a very limited scope of attack. For instance, WannaCry targeted limited versions of desktop OS, leaving other operating systems, mobile devices, and IoT framework out of its purview. Had that been so, it would’ve dealt an exponentially greater damage to the global IT infrastructure. The only way to safeguard ourselves from such likelihoods is by protecting each and every layer of our digital perimeter that stands to be vulnerable. It can be done by a range of F-Secure products and services based on individual business requirement and IT framework.”

Safeguard from Cyberattacks Though in recent times we have not noticed any cyberattack based on AI or Big Data, but there is a possibility of such kind of attacks which cannot be overlooked. If this takes place, many global IT systems will crumple.

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“Technology, as advantageous as it is to us, offers a similar advantage to cyberattackers as well. Thankfully, we haven’t yet observed advanced Artificial Intelligence and Big Data-driven attacks, but it is still an imminent possibility. Global cyberattackers are, sooner or later, going to develop new TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures) using these state-of-the-art technologies, and if they manage to do it effectively, a majority of global IT systems are destined to collapse,” mentions Martin.

Explaining further, Martin adds, “In cybersecurity, the best protection has always been in maintaining a prudent approach visà-vis the prevalent and emerging challenges. At present, the average industry dwell time is 99 days. This means a cyberattacker has an undetected access for an average period of 99 days within a network until the threat is finally detected and remediated. However, at F-Secure, we’re able to detect and conduct remediation within 30 minutes by leveraging disparate technologies, including Artificial Intelligence. Businesses must cherry-pick cybersecurity solutions, considering what they stand to lose in an eventual cyberattack. And as the cyberattacks are continuing to become more dynamic, it is apparent that they stand to lose everything. n

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August 2018

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HOT BYTES

RAH Infotech inks deal with Cambium Networks

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AH Infotech has announced that it has signed an agreement with Cambium Networks for wireless networking solutions.

AshisGuha, CEO, RAH Infotech, says, “Cambium Networks access network solutions are proven rigorous and reliable over the long term, reducing maintenance costs and delivering a low total cost of ownership.

Their Networks make it possible for stakeholders such as service providers;

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enterprises; governmental and military agencies to name a few, to build powerful communications networks. We are very excited to be teaming up with them and extend their world class solutions in Indian markets.”

Atos buys Syntel for $3.4 billion

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tos has signed an agreement with Syntel with respect to the acquisition by Atos of Syntel, for aggregate consideration of c. $3.4 billion or $41.0 per Syntel share.

The transaction represents c. 14% premium over the 30 trading days volume weighted average share price. The transaction is structured as a one-step cash merger between Syntel and Atos requiring above 50% of Syntel outstanding share capital to execute the merger. On July 20, 2018,

the Board of Directors of Syntel unanimously approved the transaction based on the unanimous recommendation of a special committee of the Syntel Board. Written voting agreements with Syntel shareholders, including founders, to vote in favour of the transaction represent 51% of the outstanding shares.

The Board of Directors of Atos meeting held on July 20, 2018 also expressed its full and unanimous support for the transaction.

Streamcloud to launch its first data center in India

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treamcast Group has announced its plans to launch a high compute data center in

Sawantwadi, Maharashtra, through its cloud computing business, Streamcloud.

Spread across 12 acres of land,Streamcloud’s new data center will mark the company’s first data center in India with an investment

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TechnoBind Trend Micro announces Channel with Tableau Rewards Program – Trendsetter enters Data in India Micro has Analytics market Trend announced its

of over Rs.2, 200+ crore over the next four-five years.

Laying the foundation of Streamcloud’s first data center in India, Streamcast Group has held a groundbreaking ceremony in presence of Hon. Minister D e e p a k Kesarkar as the Chief Guest of the occasion along with Hon. Vinayak Raut, Member of Parliament for Ratnagiri and Sindhudurg Constituency, and Nimish Pandya, Chairperson, Streamcast Group.

www.varindia.com

echnoBind has announced the addition of Data Analytics to its technology portfolio.

These services will be part of their solution portfolio coming in from their strategic collaboration with Tableau. Together, they will cater solutions to their customers in the data analytics and visualization market across the India.

Tableau offers a data visualization platform that helps customer visualize data. TechnoBind understands the Indian market dynamics to the core. This collaboration aims to address the pain points in data analytics space and help customers' to overcome the challenges.

Knowlarity acquires Tentacle

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nowlarity has completed the two-step integration process by absorbing Sunoray’s “Tentacle”, an end-to-end cloudSaaS CRM that covers the entire customer acquisition workflow from telemarketing to fieldforce management.

Tentacle is cloud and app-based and eliminates the need to purchase any hardware or software.

This removes any CapEx, which is always a barrierto-adoption. It replaces manual tracking by SMEs that by inherent nature is extremely inefficient.

At the same time, Tentacle helps enterprises manage larger fieldforce teams. Additionally, real-time reports via an easily manoeuvred dashboard give firms immediate information and actionable insights.

Tentacle is integrated with several lead generation platforms and CRMs like Salesforce, JustDial and Sulekha.

new channel incentive and reward program in India.

The TrendSetter reward is designed to help resellers grow their business with Trend Micro, while offering reseller representatives the opportunity to earn personal rewards.

TrendSetter Channel Rewards Program allows Trend Micro channel representatives to earn reward dollars on a

personalized Virtual Visa Prepaid card for every eligible sale. This incentive program aims to encourage its existing channel partners and the broader channel community to work together and grow with Trend Micro. In India, Trend Micro has 2 Platinum partners, 8 Gold partners and the rest are Silver and Bronze partners.

eScan introduces its incentive program for its channel partners eScan Total security solution has completed its 25 years in the IT security industry this 2018. eScan has introduced a special incentive program for its esteemed channel partners all over India to acknowledge and reward the efforts and support shown by them to boost the sales of eScan. The offer includes various gifts like a trip to Goa and Udaipur, gold coins, backpacks, helmets umbrellas, etc to be claimed by the partners

for their outstanding sales contribution during JulyAugust-September 2018.

The specially designed program is valid on fresh purchase of eScan's products of the SOHO segment which includes eScan Total Security Suite, eScan Internet Security Suite, etc. eScan values its relationship with the channel partners and with this scheme rewards their commitment for their contribution to make the company reach the endusers.

Tech Data inks distribution agreement with NComputing

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ech Data has signed a distribution agreement with NComputing.

The agreement will see Tech Data distribute NComputing’s nextgeneration portfolio to their customers in India, including the Citrix Ready workspace hub (RX-HDX thin client solution) and all related hardware and software suite solutions.

Sundaresan Kanappan, Vice-President & Country General Manager, India, Tech Data, says, “Virtualization has transformed the IT industry, and the arrival

of technologies like cloud has made the traditional IT model inoperable.

Our agreement with NComputing means we can provide customers with comprehensive virtualization solutions at disruptively affordable prices. We will work closely with NComputing to expand the use of virtualization in India, introducing their solutions to our customer community, and aligning with our commitment to provide our customers with a broad range of platforms and products to take to market.”

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HOT BYTES

Microland with PTC strengthens its Industrial IoT portfolio

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icroland with PTC to launch a new set of IIoT services and solutions, including IIoT Data Interoperability powered by KepServerEx,

drive higher efficiencies, increase productivity and reduce operational risk.

It further allows both the companies to leverage complementary resources,

Equipment Optimization powered by Thingworx and Thingworx System Integration Services.

The partnership brings Microland’s IT-OT integration capabilities along with PTC’s industrial automation platforms, resulting in integrated Industrial IoT solutions to

technologies to expand and strengthen Industrial IoT footprint and create joint goto-market strategies.

ThingWorx contains the most complete set of integrated IoT-specific development tools and capabilities available, offering the industry’s deepest functional capabilities.

Nutanix to launch its Channel Charter

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utanix has announced that the company is officially launching its new channel charter, Power to the Partner.

The charter stands out from traditional channel programs by providing a unique emphasis on partner investments in Nutanix rather than solely on revenue targets. Further, the charter focuses on empowering Nutanix partners with the tools they need to support their

customers in adopting next-generation data center technologies.

Nutanix first shared the high-level vision of its channel charter during the company’s Partner Xchange event in May. The charter has tiered status with partner status based on a number of deals closed and depth of Nutanix skills rather than revenue targets. This new structure enables partners of all sizes to achieve the highest partner category.

Commvault enhances its partner program

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ommvault has expanded its dedication to partners through significant commitments to personnel, programs and resources, all of which put partners firmly at the center of C o m m va u l t ’s g o - t o - m a r ke t strategy.

It creates an even stronger foundation for the mutual success of Commvault and its worldwide partner network.

Building on direct

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feedback from partners, and in concert with the formal launch of its new partner program year, Commvault has improved all aspects of partner engagement in an effort to make it easier to do business, understand its product offerings, and take full advantage of the growing opportunities with customers in the backup & recovery and data management markets.

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MindTree partners with Tookitaki to help banks reduce crimes

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indTree is using artificial intelligence and machine learning technology to help banks improve their ability to detect financial crimes and enhance reconciliation management. These service offerings are made possible through a partnership with Tookitaki’s machinelearningpowered platform.

Banks and other financial institutions are challenged by both the rising sophistication of financial crimes worldwide and increasingly complex regulations requiring strict operating and reporting standards.

Cyient to be a consultant for VNN

C

yient has been selected as a consultant by the Varanasi Nagar Nigam (VNN), to develop the Geographical Information System and Management Information System for the city of Varanasi. The project is part of the Institutional Development Program, financed by Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) under the Ganga Action Plan-II. It is a Government of India initiative, led by the National Mission for Clean Ganga and the Ministry of Water Resources, River Development, and Ganga Rejuvenation. The project is expected to be completed within 12 months.

The project aims to achieve sustainable operation and maintenance of the current and future water supply and sewerage assets of the JalKal Vibhag, VNN, and the Uttar Pradesh Jal Nigam’s Ganga Pollution Prevention Unit.

Ericsson sets up Skill Center for computer and mobile repair

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ricsson has set up an “Ericsson Skill Center” in Ghazipur, Uttar Pradesh. Set up in partnership with the Electronics Sector Skills Council of India (ESSCI), the Skill Center aims to skill young men and women residing in and around Ghazipur in two trades – mobile hardware repair and technical training on computers and peripherals, thereby ensuring better

livelihood opportunities for them and encouraging micro-entrepreneurship.

The Ericsson Skill Center

was inaugurated by Manoj Sinha, MoS for Communications (I/C) and MoS for Railways.

Stellar adds 70 Channel Partners to its Partner Program

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tellar Data Recovery has added 70 channel partners to its recently- launched Partner Program in India. These new partners will represent the important last mile to deliver Stellar’s world-class data recovery and data erasure solutions at a local level across India.

There will be two types of Channel Partners, namely • Value Partner: Represent Stellar in offering Data Recovery Services – Logical Recoveries,

Software and Data Care Pack (DCP) • Green Partner: Represent Stellar in offering Data Erasure Solutions – BitRaser, BitRaser for File and BitRaser Lite These Channel partners will provide data-recovery service from all storage devices such as PCs, laptops, servers, NAS, SAN and mobile phones. This eliminates the need for customers in local regions to always travel to big cities for their data recovery needs.

BT opens cybersecurity operations centre in India

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T’s new Cyber S e c u r i t y Operations Centre (CyberSOC) in Gurugram India was inaugurated

by Sir Dominic Asquith, British High Commissioner to the Republic of India.

Using a range of advanced cybersecurity tools, the Cyber SOC will monitor threats against BT’s own assets and its customers’ networks on a 24x7 basis. BT’s cybersecurity specialists will be able to detect, analyse and mitigate cyberthreats in real time, working closely with incident response teams to ensure that issues

are addressed as soon as they are discovered.

The Cyber SOC in Gurugram will provide “follow-the-sun” services for international businesses, including threat assessment, investigations, intrusion detection & prevention, ethical hacking and penetration testing.

The new Cyber SOC will employ a further 100 cybersecurity specialists.

Everything you need to know to stop ransomware.

67% of Indian organizations were hit by ransomware in the last year.*

91% were running up-to-

date endpoint security at the time of the attack.*

Protect against Ransomware with CryptoGuard The proven CryptoGuard capabilities in Sophos Intercept X block ransomware as soon as it starts trying to encrypt your files, returning data to its original state.

“Intercept X stopped all ransomware attacks we tested against it in seconds.” - ®ESG Labs “Since deploying Intercept X we’ve had zero ransomware infections.” - ®Flexible Business Systems For more details visit www.sophos.com/intercept-x Tel: +91 79 66216838 Email: indiamarketing@sophos.com *The State of Endpoint Security Today survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, an independent specialist in market research. This survey interviewed 2,700 IT decision makers in 10 countries out of which, 300 respondents were from India, based in Delhi, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kolkata and Chennai.

www.varindia.com www.varindia.com July 2018

17 41

ON THE RAMP

Corning releases Corning Gorilla Glass 6

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orning has introduced Corning Gorilla Glass 6. Built on a decadelong legacy of delivering the toughest cover glass available f o r consumer mobile devices, Gorilla Glass 6 is Corning’s m o s t durable cover glass, to date.

John Bayne, VicePresident & General Manager, Corning Gorilla Glass, says, “As consumers become more dependent

on their smartphones, the opportunity for potentially damaging drops is also on the rise."

Corning Gorilla Glass has been designed into

more than 6 billion devices by more than 45 major brands. Corning Gorilla Glass 6 is the latest example of Corning’s continued commitment to innovation.

Pegasystems to provide digital experience with its new API

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egasystems has launched the Pega Digital Experience API, a set of design and application development capabilities that allows organizations to provide elegant and powerful digital experiences on any web or mobile channel.

Part of the Pega Infinity digital transformation suite, the Pega Digital Experience API allows front-end developers to create consumer-grade user interfaces that seamlessly

embed Pega’s industryleading process automation and customer experience functionality. Developers face technological silos that make it challenging to deliver consistently superior experiences across digital channels.

FireEye adds advanced machine learning to its endpoint security

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ireEye has announced the addition of MalwareGuard - a new advanced machine learning- based detection and prevention engine to its Endpoint Security solution.

MalwareGuard is designed to help detect and block cyber threats including never-beforeseen threats to provide customers an added level of protection to stop attacks and protect customer information, sensitive data, and intellectual property.

MalwareGuard is integrated into the FireEye Endpoint Security agent and is

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August 2018

available now for current customers at no additional cost, and via a free trial for other organizations interested in upgrading their endpoint defenses.

The MalwareGuard model is trained using advanced machine learning techniques to enable MalwareGuard to make intelligent malware classifications on its own and without human involvement. The machine learning model is trained with both public and private data sources, including data gathered from over 15 million end point agents.

www.varindia.com

Check Point announces SandBlast Mobile 3.0

Check Point Software Technologies has announced new capabilities for its mobile threat defense solution, SandBlast Mobile.

SandBlast Mobile 3.0 becomes the only solution in the category to offer threat prevention technology for the enterprise, allowing employees to safely conduct business using their mobile devices.

The latest additions to SandBlast Mobile will now – Prevent phishing attacks on all applications; Prevent browsing to malicious sites where devices may become infected; Keep infected devices from accessing corporate applications; and Mitigate threats without relying on user action or mobile management.

Microsoft introduces Surface Book 2 and Surface Laptop in India

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o empower enterprises and consumers to achieve more, Microsoft has unveiled its new entrants to its Surface family in India, the Surface Book 2 and Surface Pro. The expanded Surface family provides a strong portfolio of Microsoft devices that will allow users in India to unleash their creativity through Windows 10 features. They will empower every individual to be productive in their own way.

“Globally and in India, it is encouraging to see the rapidly-growing Surface community in both consumer and enterprise.

Surface Book 2 and Surface Laptop have created new benchmarks in style, speed, security and enabling creativity,” said Anant Maheshwari, President, Microsoft India.

Kaspersky Lab launches AV consumer solutions

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aspersky Lab has made a splash with the announcement of its latest AV consumer solutions. Alongside their power-packed features that give one the best security across all devices, it comes with a new packaging model that showcases their new data-guardian Midori Kuma. Midori Kuma is Kaspersky Lab’s original character tasked to remind internet users on how to

keep their data safe from cybercriminals.

The brand-new Midori Kuma packaging is going to be showcased across

Kaspersky Lab’s updated key range of solutions for home users, designed to safeguard everything that is valuable to them – privacy, money, memories, and much more.

HP Inc. launches new HP Elite Series

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P Inc. has unveiled a bold new line-up of premium notebooks, desktops and displays designed to allow to work safely. The latest HP Elite series, including the EliteBook x360 1030 G3 and HP EliteOne 1000 AiO G2, features maximum versatility to securely connect, create and collaborate from anywhere, anytime.

The all-new HP EliteBook x360 1030 is the first device to feature optional HP Sure Recover with Embedded Reimaging.

This option stores the software system image

in embedded memory, ensuring data recovery even if the hard drive is wiped and no network connection is available.

The overall worldwide security spending in 2018 will reach $96 billion, up eight percent from 2017.

As security of devices comes under the spotlight, every PC decision is now a security decision.

McAfee launches new MVISION Security Portfolio

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cAfee has announced McAfee MVISION, a first-of-its-kind portfolio featuring new McAfee innovations designed to give customers a comprehensive, flexible defence system that manages their security products as they continue to move to modern device operating systems and to the cloud. MVISION strengthens the device as a control point in security architectures by delivering simplified management,

stronger Windows security for Android and iOS devices. MVISION empowers enterprise security professionals to

proactively and seamlessly manage, optimize, and integrate security controls across any combination of McAfee advanced protection and Windows 10 native capabilities.

www.varindia.com

August 2018

17

ON THE RAMP

Acer releases Helios 500 gaming Notebook

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cer has launched the brand-new Predator Helios 500, the ultimate gaming notebook, in India. The Predator

Helios 500, features up to 8th-Gen Intel Core i98950HK with NVIDIA GTX1070 8GB Graphics or AMD Ryzen 7 2700 with AMD Vega 56 Graphics.

It features VR-ready performance, advanced thermal technologies, and

blazing-fast connectivity.

“The demand for our Predator series has been phenomenal. Hence, we have expanded the Helios gaming notebook line to provide our gamers with extreme performance on the go. With top-of-the-line processors, graphics card and advanced cooling with custom control for ultimate gaming, the Predator Helios 500 represents the epitome of laptop gaming,” says Chandrahas Panigrahi, CMO & Consumer Business Head, Acer India.

Western Digital introduces new dual-port SAS SSD

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estern Digital has introduced the new Ultrastar DC SS530 SAS SSD, the company’s highest-density drive and the fastest dual-port SAS SSD in the market, enabling server and storage array manufacturers to offer customers substantially lower data center TCO for Fast Data applications.

By doubling maximum capacity of the previous generation to 15.36TB within the same 2.5inch 15-mm form factor,

drive storage density also doubles, giving IT managers the potential to reduce the number of drives deployed, consolidate servers and open up valuable rack space.

Developed in partnership with Intel, the Ultrastar DC SS530 is based on a trusted thirdgeneration platform.

It offers consistent performance and reliability to meet the demands of today’s toughest data center workloads.

Oracle introduces Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing

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racle Executive C h a i r m a n & CTO Larry Ellison has marked a major milestone in the company’s autonomous strategy with the availability of the latest Oracle Autonomous Database Cloud Service, and Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing.

Oracle Autonomous Transaction Processing delivers unprecedented cost savings, security, availability, and productivity. Oracle’s new self-driving database cloud service is built to run the world's most demanding finance,

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August 2018

retail, manufacturing, and government applications, supporting a complex mix of high-performance transaction processing and analytic workloads.

“Oracle is by far the best database in the world and it just got a lot better because now it’s autonomous,” said Ellison.

“This delivers a much more reliable, much more secure system—a system that protects against data theft, a system that is up 99.995 per cent of the time, and a system that makes organizations dramatically more productive.”

www.varindia.com

Sify and Cisco launch "SoftwareDefined WAN"

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ify Technologies and Cisco Systems have announced the launch of their Managed and Secure Software-defined Wide Area Network (SDWAN) service, built on the Cisco SD-WAN platform.

Sify’s managed SDWAN service will be the key driver for delivering a “Hybrid WAN” for companies adopting Hybrid IT in the Indian market.

Sify’s SDWAN is offered as a managed service built on robust technology, giving customers the flexibility to smoothly transition from their existing network to a fully functional and secure SDWAN platform with minimal disruption.

Alibaba Cloud to support digital transformation with nine new products across industries

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libaba Cloud has launched a new suite of product offerings for the global market in the areas of cloud architecture, machine learning, Internet of Things (IoT) and security.

These products will meet the needs of the retail industry in the region who are looking to digitize their operations under the New Retail concept that marks the seamless integration of online and offline. Alibaba Cloud is poised to strengthen its collaboration with customers and partners across different industries with these new offerings.

The launch of ASEAN Partner Alliance Programme is another highlight at the Alibaba Cloud Summit – Infinity 2018.

VIVOTEK launches 4K cameras with Ultra HD resolutions

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IVOTEK has released four toptier 4K cameras – FD9391EHTV, IB9391-EHT, IP9191-HP and IP9191HT. These four HD cameras provide 3840 x 2160 resolutions at 30 frames per second and 1920 x 1080 resolutions at 120 frames per second.

Compared to other devices, the video quality in these cameras has seen

significant advancement, delivering images of four times the resolution to viewers. These four

flagship cameras have embedded Trend Micro’s anti-intrusion software to provide users higher levels of network protection.

HPE releases HPE 3PAR with Intelligent Storage Capabilities

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ewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced new features to HPE 3PAR, so that users can focus on unlocking the economic value of their data.

HPE InfoSight is a cloud-based AI platform built on a unique approach to data collection and analysis, predicting and automating resolution to problems and continuously improving to make HPE storage smarter and more reliable.

HPE InfoSight delivers

HPE 3PAR customers a predictive analytics framework to anticipate and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack.

This is in addition to the cross-stack analytics made available to HPE 3PAR customers, which provides IT the ability to resolve performance problems and pinpoint the root cause of issues between the storage and host virtual machines.

HPE InfoSight has already predicted and auto-resolved 85% of more than 1,500 complex.

Sophos launches its Home Premium Ransomware Protection

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ophos has announced Sophos Home Premium with ransomware protection.

Sophos Home Premium features advanced antiransomware capabilities that can quickly detect previously unknown ransomware.

It delivers proactive, realtime protection for consumers from the latest malicious software and hacking attempts, and includes privacy protection features.

It does not only provide advanced protection against ransomware, it can detect a ransomware attack in progress, block it, and automatically roll back files

to an unencrypted state.

Sunil Sharma, MD - Sales, Sophos India & SAARC, says, "More than 100 million people across 100,000 businesses globally rely on Sophos to protect themselves against cyberattacks, and we passionately

believe that home users should enjoy the equal level of protection. Today, consumers also demand the equal quality of protection the world's most discerning organizations require. It's become significant for home users to protect their digital lives and assets.”

Dear Sir, Greetings from VARINDIA …

India has emerged as the fastest growing major economy in the world and the country’s GDP is estimated to have increased 6.6 per cent in 2017-18, which is further expected to grow 7.3 per cent in 2018-19. There is a massive transformation happening in the industry - the digital revenue has grown from 14% to 20%. We expect it to cross 25% by 2020 where software and hardware from different vendors and standards will coexist. As every organisation is talking about their cloud infrastructure, it has measurable impact on its business.

Enterprises and IT departments are migrating to cloud services in order to take advantage of faster time-to-market, reduced operational costs, and reduced IT spending and maintenance costs. The IT services industry in India is forecasted to reach around 14.31 billion U.S. dollars in 2018. We have also seen the trend of the existence of both off-line and on-line business, complementing each other.

It’s a great pleasure to present the "Channel Leadership Survey" (CLS 2018) integrated report which will be published in the September 2018 19th Anniversary special issue. The survey focusses on the emerging technologies and contemporary product evolution (hardware/software/services) by technology vendors for addressing the needs and challenges of today’s customers. Every year VARINDIA conducts its Annual Channel Leadership Survey based on the feedback received from the vendor and their partners in the Indian IT and Telecom Industry. This year the report comes at a time when the government is getting ready for the General Elections 2019 and the country had witnessed the successful implementation of the biggest Tax reforms (GST). With all good things happening, the economy's upward momentum will be very hard to stop.

Growth and change are exponential. The editorial board of Kalinga Digital Media is a diversified one, with the expanded research team doing various research based studies and also implementing AI based voting mechanisms. The team will cross validate with the key vendors and partners to understand the growth and opportunity in their respective segments. To summarize it, the industry will be categorized into three segments - hardware, software and services. These three segments will be further classified into several product segments. For each product segments, three to four main players would be identified.

VARINDIA Anniversary issue will publish the Channel Survey Report (CLS 2018), the annual report is to understand who is ruling the roost. The winners will be felicitated at the Star Nite Awards(SNA) – 2018, SNA is DNA of Channel, which is slated to take place on 23rd November, 2018 in New Delhi.

CMOs in the organisation design various partner programs that target VARs and partners, which is an asset for the growth of the channel eco-system. CMOs are the drivers of successful marketing strategy and are playing an increasingly larger role in making companies transform, not just their marketing function but also in corporate affairs. CMOs are the enablers and are of much importance as even the top heads of organizations take feedback from them about the Industry. The 19th Anniversary issue is also going to deliberate on how CMOs are considered as the role model to anticipation tomorrow. * Channel Leadership Survey (CLS) is the most credible source of information from the Indian IT channel community and the report influences the talents/winners to be choosen in the Star Nite Awards 2018.

For more information, please contact - editor@varindia.com

KALINGA DIGITAL MEDIA PVT LTD

VAR House, A-84A/3 Rose Apartment, Paryavaran Complex, IGNOU Road, New Delhi - 110030 Tel: 011-41656383, 41655458, Fax: 011 - 46061809 Email: info@varindia.com, publisher@varindia.com www.varindia.com website: https://varindia.com/

August 2018

19

VOICE-N-DATA

Netgear introduces GS116LP and A10 Networks GS116PP Gigabit Ethernet switches to deploy ETGEAR has The PoE devices can N introduced new be easily deployed by pilot network 16-port Gigabit Ethernet businesses or offices for unmanaged switches, energy efficiency, as well as for Japanese using flexible Power over space and cost savings.

“We have Mobile Carrier

Ethernet (PoE) integrated technology. Businesses or even home offices needing affordable solutions with a reasonable PoE budget can now easily deploy denser PoE+ devices and high-power PoE+ devices connected to a single switch.

constantly focused on continuous improvement and innovation and this is the reason we have remained a market leader in providing solutions to small businesses. This is why NETGEAR has introduced these flexible, cost-effective solutions to support these businesses,” says Marthesh Nagendra, Country Manager – India & SAARC, NETGEAR.

Spirent launches pX3 400G Ethernet Solution for Network Testing has

S

p i r e n t Communications introduced 8-port

is the highest density QSFP-DD tester, designed to validate the forwarding

A10 Networks has announced a major Japanese mobile carrier has selected the A10 Thunder Convergent Firewall (CFW) Gi/SGi firewall solution for their 5G pilot network, to complement the massive capacity demands of their existing mobile network and help lay the foundation for the mobile carrier’s 5G production network, expected to become commercially available beginning in 2020.

A10’s expanded relationship includes the Thunder CFW Gi/ SGi firewall 5G-GiLAN solution to scale and secure its GiLAN.

BenQ announces to be No. 1 Projector Brand

1U-high rack mountable solution for testing 400/200/100/50 Gigabit Ethernet (GbE). Spirent’s new pX3 400G Appliance

performance and quality of service of ultra-high-scale, next-generation-enabled, multi-terabit routers and switches.

Linksys India announces addition of its Velop Whole Home Mesh Velop Tri-Band offerings, Wi-Fi System including Intelligent Mesh,

L

inksys has a n n o u n c e d availability of its latest addition to the Linksys family of Velop Whole Home Wi-Fi Mesh Systems, the new Velop Dual-Band Mesh Wi-Fi System in the Indian market.

The new Series is a smaller and more affordable Wi-Fi System that is designed and built as the mass-market flexible Wi-Fi System. It also provides all the same award-winning and powerful software features found in the

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August 2018

advanced parental controls, website blocking, Amazon Alexa compatibility, as well as ease of use and set up with the Linksys App but in a smaller form factor with Dual-Band technology at a more affordable price.

Linksys is expanding its Velop family to include a Dual-Band modular mesh Wi-Fi system, (available in 1-pack, 2-pack and 3-pack options) that can be installed in various mesh configurations to support any type of home, floor plan or Wi-Fi footprint.

www.varindia.com

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enQ is yet again the No. 1 projector brand in the fastgrowing India market with a market share of 29% during H1 2018, as per Futuresource Consulting report. Overall projector market in India in H1 2018 has grown by over 30% as compared to H1 2017, as per Futuresource Consulting report registering one of the fastest growth in the AsiaPacific region. Majority of this high growth can be attributed to the increased government spendings to upgrade education infrastructure.

During H1 2018, BenQ has sold more than 50 thousand projectors and has become the first-ever brand to do so.

In the 4K projector market, overall BenQ’s market share in India in H1 2018 has been 43.3%.

DIGISOL introduces DG-GR1321 with 1 PON, 1 GE and 1 FE Port

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IGISOL Systems has announced the release of its new Gepon / Gpon ONU 300Mbps Wi-Fi router with 1 PON, 1GE and 1 FE port, 1FXS port. The DGGR1321 terminal devices are designed for fulfilling FTTH and triple play service demand of fixed network operators or cable operators.

These boxes are based on the mature Gigabit EPON / GPON technology, which have high ratio of performance to price, and the technology of 802.11n Wi-Fi (2T2R),

Layer 2/3 and high-quality VoIP as well. They are highly reliable and easy to maintain, with guaranteed QoS for different service.

And they are fully compliant with technical regulations such as IEEE802.3ah. It works on both GEPON / GPON technology.

Juniper Networks adds 400GbE to its entire portfolio

J

uniper Networks has announced a broad 400GbE refresh to its widearea network, data center and enterprise portfolio with leading routing and switching densities. The new technology will help service provider, cloud and enterprise customers recalibrate network economics as they transition to 400GbE to lower cost-per-bit while keeping up with increasing band width demands from emerging 5G, augmented

and virtual reality, cloud and 4K video production and distribution.

Juniper is executing its scale-out 400GbE WAN strategy with the unveiling of the new 3-RU PTX10003 Packet Transport Router for nextgeneration backbone, peering and data center interconnect applications ready to deploy high density 100GbE and 400GbE.

Vivacom with Ericsson to deploy 4G Voice service and Wi-Fi calling

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ivacom is extending its contract with Ericsson to deploy 4G Voice service and Wi-Fi calling. With the pre-integrated Fast VoLTE Launch solution, the service’s deployment time has been significantly reduced. The agreement builds on Vivacom’s existing Ericsson Evolved Packet Core network and adds virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (vIMS).

Vivacom’s customers will benefit from highquality, simultaneous communication and data services on their devices. The VoLTE

solution opens up further possibilities to enable HD voice+ and music within calls, video communication and IP messaging.

The Fast VoLTE Launch solution, complete pre-integrated virtual IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS), includes network functions such as virtual Multimedia Telephony Application Server (vMTAS), virtual Session Border Controller (vSBC), virtual Call Session Control Function (vCSCF), virtual Message Resource Function (vMRF)and virtual IPWorks.

INDUSTRY EVENT

Hyderabad hosts India’s first International Blockchain Congress Hyderabad hosted India’s first-ever International Blockchain Congress in collaboration with NITI Aayog, Goa government and Nucleus Vision from August 3 to 4. The conference then moved to Goa where the rest of the deliberations took place on August 5.

The speakers at the event were KT Rama Rao, Minister of IT - Government of Telangana; Rohan Khaunte, Minister of IT - Government of Goa; Amitabh Kant, CEO, NITI Aayog; Jayesh Ranjan, IT Secretary -Government of Telangana; Ameya Abhyankar, IT Director, Government Of Goa; Arun Seth, Chairman NASSCOM Foundation; CP Gurnani, CEO - Tech Mahindra; Mohandas Pai, Chairman Manipal Global Education; among a few notable ones.

India has the potential to be the global blockchain leader. With an abundance of young, talented, tech-savvy population, India is rapidly developing and consequently overtaking other technology markets. India boasts of the second largest online market in the world.

India also produces the largest number of engineers in the world and has well entrenched players ready to explore innovative technologies.

But start-up eco-systems, investors, tech giants, talent pool and the government must work in tandem to achieve the potential and this includes knowledge and understanding of Blockchain technologies. For India to move faster and further and fulfil the potential of becoming a global leader in blockchain and its allied services. The technology must be promoted by the Government, and to ease the process more interaction between the Government and the Industry is essential at all levels.

The International Blockchain Congress served as the largest congregation of innovators, businesses, technologists, regulators, start-ups and enthusiasts to pave the way for an open and transparent blockchain powered world. The inaugural edition on the 3rd and 4th of August tookplace in Hyderabad, Telangana’s Thriving Tech hub and one of the fastest growing markets for blockchain technology.

The first edition of the International Blockchain Congress hosted over 2500 participants with keynotes, panel discussions, and deep dives across 20 sessions conducted by over 50 speakers. The exhibition was open to over 50 companies displaying new technology, products, and services in the expo hall. Along with the start-up pitch competition, there were over 30 additional pitching zones for new technology companies to pitch to potential investors.

In another development, the Telangana State Information Technology, Electronics and Communication Department (ITE&C) signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the global digital transformation provider, Tech Mahindra to launch India’s first

Blockchain District in the state of Telangana.

The Blockchain District will be a Centre of Excellence for Blockchain, an incubator for technology and process development with innovative infrastructure and facilities to foster growth of Indian blockchain start-ups and companies. Tech Mahindra as a founding

member of the Blockchain district will provide platform and technology assistance to all the incubators in the Blockchain District.

Tech Mahindra will also empower accelerators to develop and solve market problems across its global customer ecosystem.

Further, The Telangana ITE&C Department will provide regulatory and policy support to enable and promote Blockchain growth both in India and globally.

IT Minister K.T. Rama Rao says, "Telangana government is proud to pioneer the first of its kind Blockchain District in India. With support from Tech Mahindra, we envision to set a global benchmark in providing cutting-edge Blockchain technology solutions and platforms across industries. It is not just a proud moment for Telangana but India as a global leader in the Digital Era.” C.P. Gurnani, CEO & MD, Tech Mahindra, says, “The launch of the Blockchain District is a moment in history, a global talent hub which can unlock the value of blockchain technology in democratizing data and solving big scale world problems. It is also a huge step in reskilling and right skilling the workforce of the future.

Blockchain experts will be our crowning jewels as together we work towards making India the Blockchain capital of the world.”

The Blockchain District will provide an opportunity for the Blockchain ecosystem in India to collaborate and work towards building a Blockchain District in the State of Telangana and transforming India as the Blockchain capital of the world. n

www.varindia.com

August 2018

21

CHANNEL BUZZ

Compuage and Vertiv organize Partner Connect Programs in Kolkata and Ahmedabad

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ompuage Infocom and Vertiv have recently organized Joint Partner Connect meets in Kolkata and Ahmedabad.

The meets are aimed to showcase complete basket of Vertiv products and demonstrate how partners can benefit with the cuttingedge technology of Vertiv which is empowering the channel partners to help businesses maximize their return on IT investments.

Atul H. Mehta, Chairman & MD, Compuage, says, “These Partner Connect programs focus on our strategy to increase Vertiv’s presence in the Indian Enterprise Segment. This initiative will

empower our channel community to explore business opportunities and at the same time help us in partner recruitment and brand building.”

Senior Members from Vertiv as well as Compuage together made the events engaging and solved one-on-one queries of the partners.

A total of 120+ partners attended the meets making it a successful one.

TAIT organizes Knowledge Series Session on how to add value to business The Trade Association of Information Technology (TAIT) organized a Knowledge Series Session on Friday, 4th August 2018 at the Krishna Palace, Mumbai. The Session was a mix of innovative business opportunities and a motivational talk on innovative entrepreneurship.

The Knowledge series began with an exciting presentation

by Mohit Motwani of S.K. Robotics who demonstrated their unique product line of Virtual Presence Robots (VPR) to the amused audiences. Highlighting the unique properties of the product, Motwani shared the various applications of the Virtual Presence Robot that primarily facilitates a person to be virtually ‘present’ at one place of choice, despite being miles away, physically. In today’s tech-enabled world, travelling for long hours to be physically present, can not only be tiring but also counter-productive. The Virtual Presence Robot addresses this issue by facilitating virtual presence meetings, interactions, and experiences. Among the many attributes of the VPR, the robots come with features like

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anti-collision, self-charging and motion sensors etc.

S.K. Robotics LLP has also created award-winning, specialised Robots for cleaning, as part of the ‘Swatch Bharat Campaign’ and humanoids and robots for information display and receptionist roles, especially for the specialised applications in Hospitality, Corporate and many other segments.

Next on the agenda was a presentation by Ajay Parekh of Shree Maat Computers, who, in association with Wishtel, presented a range of budgetfriendly tablets and Thin Book Products.

The event then moved on to the coveted talk of the evening, “Let’s Work It Out – Business Beyond IT”, a motivational talk by Sohel Kazani on exploring newer business horizons for growth.

Kazani is a passionate innovator who believes in thinking out of the box and transforming businesses, and through his talk, he shared his learnings from his professional ventures, from being a C.A Finals student to an employee of a company in crisis, to managing his family business.

www.varindia.com

Rashi Peripherals conducts “Partner Connect” program for business expansion

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ashi Peripherals has in association with SanDisk, conducted the “Partner Connect” program to penetrate into the high potential upcountry market. The objective of the multi-city event organized in Jammu, Ludhiana, Udaipur, Bhilwara and others was to increase brand awareness and facilitate relationship building with tier-3 and tier-4 IT and mobility channel partners.

The company showcased its latest products in the category of USB, MicroSD, Camera Cards and Card Readers to prospective North channel partners.

Apart from product display, partners were also given a hands-on product training to enhance their technical knowledge and educate them on product positioning in the market.

Commenting on the event, Amit Jain, Business Manager, Rashi Peripherals, said, “Partner Connect is an excellent platform to increase

brand visibility in tier-3 and tier-4 cities. We displayed several latest product offerings from SanDisk and also provided training to channel partners. We educated them on sales and marketing plans, which will definitely help them earn maximum RoI. We will continue to

leverage Partner Connect program to strengthen our presence in the upcountry market.”

The four-city event received an overwhelming response from channel partners. More than 150 partners attended the training program and gained new insights.

ASIRT announces its new Board Members for next year

T

he Association of System Integrators and Retailers in Technology has announced its new Board Members after the Annual General Meeting, held on their Techday in Mumbai. The event with a two-part agenda also hosted Nitin Nayak from DIGISOL as a guest speaker for the evening.

The evening began with a detailed presentation from Nitin Nayak, National Head, Enterprise Solution Business, DIGISOL Systems, who shared the various Active Networking, Passive Networking and FTTH solutions provided by DIGISOL. These solutions included a range of wireless and broadband routers, 3G and switching solutions, specialized fiber and copper cabling solutions as well as integrated IP & CCTV surveillance solutions.

Speaking about his presence at

ASIRT, Nayak said, “As an end to end networking solutions provider, we work very closely with the System Integrators. Most of our products, including the ones we presented today, are relevant to the SI’s who give WiFi solutions to their clientele. This was our first

presentation with ASIRT and it is a perfect audience for us as we get to connect directly to the decision makers and SI Entrepreneurs. The response today has been good and we look forward to returning to this platform again.”

FACE TO FACE

NetApp sees Commercial Segment as an Opportunity for its Partners NetApp considers India as an important market as the country holds a lot of opportunities with the ongoing digital transformation. So the company looks forward to grow with its partners as they play a critical role in NetApp’s go-to-market strategy. In a chat with VARINDIA, Wendy Koh, Vice-President, Pathways, Alliances and Strategy, Asia-Pacific, NetApp discusses about digital transformation as an opportunity, focus on channel partners and importance of a channel program For NetApp, India is a critical market in the Asia-Pacific region.

The company is growing in India at a faster pace and this indicates that channel partners will continue to play an important role in its go-tomarket strategy. The company also makes sure about the profitability of its partners so that they continue their alliance with NetApp. “India is certainly the fastest-growing market and it is very important for us in Asia-Pacific. Across the organization, we are growing. In India, we are growing faster than the market growth and this means that the whole channel engagement will continue to be very important equation of our go-to-market strategy. You will see us to continue to leverage on our partners, the channel program called the Unified Partner Program which includes sales, marketing, services and support as well as incentive programs to make sure that we fundamentally ensure that we address the profitability of our partners and we train and enable them so that they could continue to ally with our strategy, product line and continue to grow with us,” says Wendy Koh, Vice-President, Pathways, Alliances and Strategy, Asia- Pacific, NetApp. Digital Transformation To keep pace with digitization, people are adopting digital transformation in a major way to reach to new customers, offer new services and leverage new technologies.

“The world is fundamentally changing and our customers are going through digital transformation to provide value so they are focusing on leveraging the digital transformation to help them to reach out to new customers, to create new innovation, to offer new services and to leverage all the new technologies to simplify and optimize their whole operations. It transacts to the three key IT imperatives. The first is to inspire innovation on cloud, to build cloud, to accelerate services offering and to modernize the IT infrastructure,” explains Wendy.

Focus on Channel Partners NetApp always ensures that its channel partners are empowered with skillset, trained and confident to position the company in the market. As go-to-market strategy, the company focuses on Flash Storage, HCI and Cloud Data Services.

“NetApp is very well positioned to address the three IT imperatives.

We are the leaders in hybrid cloud data services. We help our customers to address the three IT imperatives. The go-to-market and channel partners are critical piece of our go-to-market strategy. We want to make sure that our channel partners are enabled from skillset and capabilities perspective, they are well trained to represent us in the marketplace and to be very confident in positioning and having a conversation with the customers to sell the solutions. So from a go-to-market strategy perspective, we focus on three key areas – Flash Storage, HCI (Hyperconverged Infrastructure) and Cloud Data Services,” elaborates Wendy.

Wendy Koh

VP, Pathways, Alliances and Strategy, Asia-Pacific NetApp

NetApp is targeting the commercial segment for growth along with its channel partners. It wants to leverage partner skillset and their relationship with customers to expand its reach and tap new customers.

“The second important piece is we want to deliberately leverage our channel partners to grow in the commercial segment. There is a space where we see a continuous opportunity for us to jointly grow.

The intention is very clear, we want to leverage our partner skillset and capabilities, their relationship with the customers, their coverage to help us to address and acquire new customers, to have presence in the market or cities where we may not have presence today and to leverage the solutions, new technologies, IT imperative to help the customers to address their business requirements,” discloses Wendy.

Importance of Channel Program NetApp is concerned about its partner’s profitability and also how they can increase their top and bottom line. So to help them differentiate in the marketplace, NetApp has comprehensive partner programs that help its partners to reach out to new customers or markets.

“The channel program is very important. We started looking from the lens of partners and understand their perspective. We get feedback that profitability, service and support and ecosystem solutions will help them to differentiate in the marketplace. We have very rich and comprehensive partner programs which will help our partners to invest in sales and marketing related activities so that they could further reach out to new customers, new space or cities or markets where we have not been before.

Through this partnership, we can not only win together but the partners can also meet the top line as well as the bottom line requirements. It is also important for us to garner My Share of the partners. To get the My Share and commitment of the partners, we want to make sure that the salesforce is confident and comfortable to represent NetApp. And that is what we want to achieve through the enablement program,” concludes Wendy. n

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VAR ANALYSIS

E-Commerce:

The Best Is Yet To Come

Ecomm Players' Market Share 32% 31% 5.60% The Government’s focus towards digitization, financial inclusion, fintech, Aadhaar5% based identification and GST-based simplified taxation are going to be some of 2.50% the key drivers 2.20% of growth.

Investment banking2% firm Morgan Stanley, in are contributing to this growth are growth in 481 million in December 2017, an increase of a recent report, predicts that India’s e-commerce digital payments, ease of making a purchase, 11.34% over December 2016, said the report 1.80% market for gross merchandise value (GMV) CoDs and e-commerce mobile apps. titled, “Internet in India 2017”. The ongoing 1.50% will reach $200 billion by 2026, growing at a digital transformation in the country is expected 16% CAGR of 30%. This growth, if it happens, Market Trends to increase India’s total internet user base to 829

the firm says, will help grow the overall market penetration to 12% in the next nine years, as Forresteragainst 2% today. The phenomenal growth of internet users, the firm says, is primarily driving the e-commerce market. The other factors that

t)

According to an Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) and Kantar IMRB study, the number of internet users in India is expected to reach 500 million by June 2018. The number of Internet users stood at

Top E-Comm Apps in India (No of Downloads) Rank App Category Flipkart General Merchandise 1 Amazon India General Merchandise 2 Flipkart General Merchandise 3 Snapdeal General Merchandise 4 Myntra Fashion 5 Limeroad Fashion 6 Voonik Fashion 7 Shopclues General Merchandise 8 Jabong Fashion 9 Ajio Fashion 10 Source : Morgan Stanley Research 24

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million by 2021 (59% of total population), from 481 million (39% of population) in 2017, while the total number of networked devices in the country is expected to grow to 2 billion by 2021, from 1.4 billion in 2016.

Another important factor for this growth has been the growth in the digital payments sector, which has surged post-government’s move to demonetize high-value currency notes in late 2016, which 2016 led to increase in digital transactions. More 2020 than 800 million bank accounts are digitally linked, increasing the number of people to 2026 have access to internet and digital cash to make e-commerce market surge.

However, still 55-60% of total e-commerce transactions continue to be through cash on delivery mode.

Implementation of GST also opened the doors for the e-commerce markets like UP, Bihar and West Bengal, where due to waybill formalities goods above a certain price were not being sold. GST has also changed the warehousing requirements which have moved from being taxation and logistics issue to pure logistics consideration. Implementation of GST will push down the cost logistics, warehousing

and will also lead to lower inventory level requirement, positively impacting the industr

Market Size

In India, total online spending, inclusive of domestic and cross-border shopping, is expected to increase by 31% year-on-year to Rs.8.76 trillion (US$135.8 billion) by 2018.

India’s e-commerce revenue is expected to jump from $39 billion in 2017 to $120 billion in 2020, growing at annual rate of 51%, highest in the world.

Online travel agents account for the largest market share (70%) in the internet consumer market, while the remaining 30% is occupied by horizontal e-tailing, fashion, furniture, grocery, hotel, food tech, cab aggregators, education technology, and alternative lending, among others.

The internet industry in India is likely to double to reach US$250 billion by 2020, growing to 7.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with the number of mobile internet education technology, and alternative lending, among others. users growing to about 650 million and that of The internet industry in India is likely to double to reach US$250 billion high-speed internet users reaching 550 million. by 2020, growing to 7.5% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), with the number of mobile internet users growing to about 650 million and that of high-speed internet users reaching 550 million.

However, India had only 60 million online However, India only 60 million onlinewas shoppers in F2017, shoppers inhadF2017, which 14% of which the was 14% of the total internet population, versus 64% in China. AlphaWise survey in 2014 probably has the right answer to this stats. totaldone internet population, versus 64% in According China. to this survey, Individuals with Over Five Years of Use on the Internet Were AlphaWise survey in less 2014 probably has More Likely to Transact Online,done users with than two years of activity onthe the internet were less susceptible to transacting and According primarily indulgedto in right answer to this stats. emails, messaging and search. Good news is that a large chunk of the internet this survey, Individuals Over base in India has emerged only in the lastwith few years and willFive mature Years by 2019 and beyond and that could possibly be when online shopping sees a massive of Use on the Internet Were More Likely to inflection.

Transact Online, users with less than two years Biggest Players Indian e-commerce is primarily by two players ofTheactivity on themarket internet weredominated less susceptible – the Indian unicorn Flipkart and Seattle-based Amazon. While Flipkart has to transacting and primarily indulged in emails, been in the market since 2009, American giant entered the market in 2013.

Amazon has so farand invested $2 billion in India news and has aiscommitment of $5 messaging search.

Good that a large billion, Flipkart has $4 billion war chest and is in talks with WalMart for an chunk ofof$7 the internet base in India has emerged investment billion. only in the lastable few yearsupand will mature 2019 Amazon has been to shake the market and alreadyby commands 31% sharebeyond in the Indianand marketthat compared with Flipkart’s 32%, be according to a and could possibly when report by Forrester. But the gap widens when Flipkart Group-owned fashion online shopping a massive inflection. retailers Myntra and Jabongsees are accounted for. India’s largest e-commerce

company’s total share then goes up to 39.5%. With addition of eBay. in to its kitty, Flipkart has further cemented its position. With the entry of Alibaba supported Paytm with its Paytm mall into picture, a very formidable challenger has emerged.

Biggest Players

The Indian e-commerce market is primarily In less than a year of its launch, Paytm Mall has garnered a market share dominated by two players – the Indian unicorn of 5.6% and is negotiating a funding round of Rs.3,000 crore from SoftBank and another Rs.1,000 from other investors.Amazon.

This round of funding Flipkart andcroreSeattle-based Whileis expected to take the valuation of Paytm Mall to $2 billion level.

Flipkart has been in the market since 2009, While smartphone is theentered biggest segment online market players American giant the for market in 2013. accounting for more than half the sales, followed by fashion, one of the fastest-growing segments grocery, which currently accountsin for India a small Amazon has so isfar invested $2 billion fraction of overall sales for these giants. Given that grocery accounts for andthanhas ofin India, $5 billion, Flipkart has more halfaofcommitment overall retail market it is a matter of time before the starts reflecting in the online well. with WalMart $4trend billion war chest andspace is inas talks for an investment of $7grocery billion.

According to Forrester, Amazon’s sales hit a $180-$200-million mark and are the market leader in the segment.

Amazon has been able to shake up the market and already commands 31% share in the Indian market compared with Flipkart’s 32%, according to a report

by Forrester. But the gap widens when Flipkart Group-owned fashion retailers Myntra and Jabong are accounted for. India’s largest e-commerce company’s total share then goes up to 39.5%.

With addition of eBay. in to its kitty, Flipkart has further cemented its position. With the entry of Alibaba supported Paytm with its Paytm mall into picture, a very formidable challenger has emerged.

In less than a year of its launch, Paytm Mall has garnered a market share of 5.6% and is negotiating a funding round of Rs.3,000 crore from SoftBank and another Rs.1,000 crore from other investors. This round of funding is expected to take the valuation of Paytm Mall to $2 billion level.

While smartphone is the biggest segment for online market players accounting for more than half the sales, followed by fashion, one of the fastest-growing segments is grocery, which currently accounts for a small fraction of features in the top 10 players in terms of market share with 1.5%. To stay ahead and fend off Amazon and Flipkart, it hasGiven recently announced a move overall sales for these giants. that grocery to open offline kiosks that will stock daily groceries and is also planning to accounts for more than half of overall retail start its own subscription service for items such as milk and bread. The move comes soon after BigBasketitraised million fundingbefore led by China’s market in India, is a $300 matter ofin time the Alibaba. The company currently has Rs.200 crore monthly revenue and is aiming for starts Rs.500 crore

by March 2019. trend reflecting in the online space as well.

Grofers, which is the second-largest standalone grocery player, has grown four-fold in the last one year with monthly sales in excess of Rs.100 crore.

It has secured Rs.400 crore in a fresh funding round, led by existing investor and Japanese internet conglomerate SoftBank Group. With this, Grofers’s total funds raised to date have touched US$226.5 million.

According to Forrester, Amazon’s grocery sales hit a $180-$200-million mark and are the market leader in the segment.

Snapdeal which was once touted to be a straight rival to India’s largest e-commerce player Flipkart, now is just a company with a meagre 2.5% market share in the Indian e-commerce space. After its debacle last year, the company saved itself from being sold to Flipkart and was relaunched as Snapdeal 2.0 in mid-2017. To push its sales, Snapdeal has struck a new deal with as many as twelve banks and a bunch of digital wallets to offer discounts of worth up to Rs.100 crore in the next twelve months.

BigBasket, an online supermarket, which is an early mover in the segment, features in the top 10 players in terms of market share with 1.5%. To stay ahead and fend off Amazon and SopClues, which has always remained out of limelight, is also amongst Flipkart, it has recently announced a move to the top 10 players with 2.1% market share. E-commerce platform SopClues has reported 60% growth in 2017-18 It alsodaily reported trimming of open offline kiosks thatfiscal willyear. stock groceries losses by 40%. Growth came from categories like fashion and strengthening is inalso planning start its own subscription ofand position the tier-III cities andto beyond. service for items such as milk and bread. The The Gurgaon-based company claims to be confident of hitting profits in the next 12-18 months. soon after BigBasket raised $300 move comes

BigBasket, an online supermarket, which is an early mover in the segment,

Market Size 250

$200 bn 200

CAGR 30.1% 150

$64 bn

100

$15bn 50

2016

2020

2026

Source: KPMG

million in funding led by China’s Alibaba. The company currently has Rs.200 crore monthly revenue and is aiming for Rs.500 crore by March 2019.

Grofers, which is the second-largest standalone grocery player, has grown four-fold in the last one year with monthly sales in excess of Rs.100 crore. It has secured Rs.400 crore in a fresh funding round, led by existing investor and Japanese internet conglomerate SoftBank Group. With this, Grofers’s total funds raised to date have touched US$226.5 million.

Snapdeal which was once touted to be a straight rival to India’s largest e-commerce player Flipkart, now is just a company with a meagre 2.5% market share in the Indian e-commerce space. After its debacle last year, the company saved itself from being sold to Flipkart and was relaunched as Snapdeal 2.0 in mid-2017. To push its sales, Snapdeal has struck a new deal with as many as twelve banks and a bunch of digital wallets to offer discounts of worth up to Rs.100 crore in the next twelve months.

ShopClues, which has always remained out of limelight, is also amongst the top 10 players with 2.1% market share. E-commerce platform SopClues has reported 60% growth in 2017-18 fiscal year. It also reported trimming of losses by 40%. Growth came from categories like fashion and strengthening of position in the tier-III cities and beyond.

The Gurgaon-based company claims to be confident of hitting profits in the next 12-18 months.

Furniture and home products marketplace, Pepperfry.com also features in the top 10 players based on market share with 1.8% of the pie.

Like grocery segment, even in this segment there is a movement towards brick-and-mortar experience centres with the option of offline sales to augument online sales. Pepperfry.com has recently announced that it has raised Rs.250 crore in a fresh round of funding from State Street Global Advisors. The fresh funds will be deployed to expand Pepperfry’s Experience Centres in Tier-II towns, invest in developing AR/VR technology for virtual touch and feel, and enhance the Private Brand franchise.

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VAR ANALYSIS Userbase

Most of the e-commerce happens through mobile apps. If we consider the number of mobile apps downloaded, the stack looks different. Paytm which is the third-largest player in terms of revenue leads the pack here, followed by Amazon and Flipkart. Snapdeal seems to have managed to regenerate industry from consumers and ranks fourth in terms of downloads. Myntra which focuses on fashion/ apparel segment and is part of Flipkart is in the fifth place. Fifth place onwards, all the players except SopClues is in the fashion/apparel segment. LimeRoad which is a sixth place is a Gurgaon-based startup, which offers curated fashion, and claims to have grown at over 250%, while the online fashion industry has grown at 5% to 10%. It also expects to be profitable in the next 18 months. LimeRoad started in 2012 as a social discovery platform for e-commerce and has raised $50 million in three rounds of funding from Tiger Global, Matrix Partners and Lightspeed Venture Partners, among other investors.

Voonik, another fashion e-tailer, is at the seventh spot. Launched in 2013, Voonik is a personal shopping app for women, which allows them to buy apparels from multiple stores, according to their body type, lifestyle and budget.

Digital payments company Paytm launched its e-commerce arm Paytm Mall in February 2017. Backed by Alibaba’s $200-million investment, Paytm Mall reportedly invested Rs.1,000 crore for advertising and marketing during the festive shopping period, and even claims to have hit their annual target of $4 billion during the Diwali sale.

In what could be the biggest shakeup in the market, Reliance Retail plans to raise Rs.4,000 crore through rights issue to help fund expansion, which, experts believe, would be in the online space. With a network of 3,800 brickand-mortar stores across the country, entry of reliance in the online space could have a similar impact as to what happened in the telecom space with Reliance Jio. Amazon made some headway in the nonperishable grocery category through Amazon Pantry, now available in around 30 cities. Through Amazon Now, the company does in-two-hours delivery of groceries, including perishables, in Bengaluru, Delhi-NCR, Mumbai and Hyderabad through partnerships with BigBazaar, Spar, Hypercity and other supermarkets.

Between 2013 and 2016, the fashion retailer raised close-to $27 million funding from investors like Sequoia Capital, Times Internet, Seedfund, Beenos, BEENEXT, Parkwood Bespin, Tancom Investments, and Kunal Shah.

SopClues and Jabong are at eighth and ninth spots, while Reliance Industries Ajio, which again in fashion space, is at tenth spot

Investments/ Developments

According to an EY report, investments in the Indian e-commerce industry touched an all-time high of $11.2 billion in the first half of 2017, a 41% rise over last year.

Flipkart also started grocery segment for customers in Bengaluru as part of its soft launch. The company also took over eBay.in in the year 2017. In exchange of an equity stake in Flipkart, eBay had made a cash investment of $500 million and sold its eBay.in business to Flipkart. Flipkart and eBay will also partner to leverage opportunities in cross-border trade.

In a fierce competitive Indian market space, Flipkart, in the year 2017, managed to show its supremacy over its closest competitor Amazon.

The Bansals-founded firm raised around $4 billion this year from multiple investors including eBay, Microsoft, Tencent and SoftBank. In the same year, the Singapore-based parent of Flipkart has invested Rs.4,472 crore in its wholesale arm.

WalMart Inc., the world’s largest retailer, is looking to double down on investments in its e-commerce business, hire more top tech talent from countries like India, and invest in or acquire Indian tech startups, amid a bruising global battle against Amazon.com Inc. According to reports, WalMart is looking to buy majority stake in 2-3 Indian eComm startups.

The American retail behemoth Amazon had already invested $5 billion in India, in addition to the $260 million earlier this year. In October, Amazon Inc. invested another $250 million (Rs.1,620 crore) into Amazon India.

BankBazaar, a financial marketplace startup in India, raised US$30 million in a funding round led by Experian Plc, a credit rating agency based in UK, taking the company’s total funding to US$110 million.

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Gozefo.com, a Bengaluru-based used furniture and appliances platform, has raised Rs.60 crore (US$9 million) in Series B funding from Sequoia Capital India, Helion Venture Partners and Beenext Pte. Ltd. Online furniture retailer Urban Ladder has raised $12 million in a fresh round of funding led by the existing investors Sequoia Capital, SAIF Partners and Kalaari Capital.

Government initiatives

Since 2014, the Government of India has announced various initiatives namely, Digital India, Make in India, Startup India, Skill India and Innovation Fund. The timely and effective implementation of such programmes will likely support the e-commerce growth in the country.

Some of the major initiatives taken by the government to promote the e-commerce sector in India are as follows: • Reserve Bank of India (RBI) has decided to allow “interoperability” among Prepaid Payment Instruments (PPIs) such as digital wallets, prepaid cash coupons and prepaid telephone top-up cards.

• Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has proposed various measures to quicken India’s transition to a cashless economy, including a ban on cash transactions over Rs.300,000 (US$4,655.1), tax incentives for creation of a cashless infrastructure, promoting greater usage of non-cash modes of payments, and making Aadhaar-based payments more widespread.

Conclusion India is still a nascent Source: KPMG market in terms of e-commerce with just 2.5% of overall retail market coming from online retailers. India is also a vastly different market compared to any other developed market with vast diversities culturally, financially and between urban and rural, and will require local solutions to be evolved both by domestic and international players.

While the current market space is dominated by Amazon and Flipkart, the Indian market at this stage can, and will, see a lot of new players coming into the fray and consolidation in this space is still far away. Indian giants have so far not entered the space which is currently startup driven.

However, Reliance Industries is planning its foray into the space and promises to shake up the market. Other players like Aditya Birla group and Future Group might also enter and are likely to enter the space sooner than later.

India is a fast-growing economy which is likely to grow at 7% or faster annually, pushing millions in the middle income category and thereby increasing the customer base faster than just the age factor would entail. n

OPEN YOUR EYES

Eye Connect 2018 closes on a positive note

OEM vendors and customers come together for an insightful discourse technological enhancements in the physical network security area The three-day event – “Eye Connect 2018” brought industry leaders and customers on the same platform to interact, share knowledge and best practices and showcase solutions in the PSIM space.Organized by Axis Communications and its Alliance Partners, the objective of the event, now in its fourth edition was to showcase the latest tech innovation in Physical Security Information Management solutions, where members from the Physical and Network security community come together for a vibrant exchange of ideas for product enhancements and improvements. The theme this year was “Integrated Security Solution – From Myth to Reality” and focused on solutions to address end-customer’s requirements.

The event saw participation of eight OEM vendors namely Axis Communications, Allied Telesis, Milestone Systems, Solus, Veracity Pivot3/Lenovo and Herta besides eighty end- customers.

The OEM partners showcased and imparted information about the latest designs and technology.

Some of the latest innovations showcased within the Physical Security Information Management (PSIM) segments included retail, hospitality, education, critical infrastructure, manufacturing, oil & gas, transportation and smart cities.

‘An integrated approach to security is the need of the hour’ On the sideline of the event, VARINDIA met up with Sudhindra Holla, Sales Director, India & SAARC - Axis Communications to understand the current physical security scenario in the country and its evolution -

How has the outlook towards security changed over the years?

When we look at security from a holistic viewpoint, what has changed is that the systems are getting more and more open and integrated. If you see historically, they all existed as separate systems – access control was separate, CCTV cameras were separate and above all they were proprietary in nature. But now they all are getting integrated, with the need of the customer changing from having separate systems to an integrated solution. For instance, when an incident occurs, the investigating team can’t keep going to separate systems to analyze the situation and then take an action. If they spot something unusual in the CC camera, they have to automate the announcement and actions immediately.So an integrated approach is the need of the hour.

Also, systems are getting intelligent and so they can be used for business intelligence as well.

If you look at the smart city deployments, different systems involving surveillance integrate with each other and they use the information available to arrive at intelligent decisions. Such is the power of physical security systems today.

Over time, cameras are also learning or are trained in certain patterns, like it is understanding what and when it needs to take an action on.

What technological enhancements has Axis made into its products over time?

Axis has the lineage of 25 years in the camera firmware. We have one of the most robust firmware and have built intelligence on top of that.

We are the first to come out with the network camera, we helped people move from the analogue systems to network video systems. We have brought in a lot of innovations in network CCTV cameras, like they are more powerful now and can run lot of analytics at the edge like video motion detection, face recognition. So these devices are becoming intelligent sensors based on which some actions can be taken. They also have edge storage, the capacity for which is also increasing. Another way in which we have improved the camera is how they perform in difficult light conditions; even in very poor lighting conditions you can get very good quality video footages which can be used as evidences.

Also, cameras are capable of compressing more and more now, thus bringing down the storage cost.

Next we also have thermal cameras that can be used for manufacturing or perimeter applications and can provide surveillance in no light conditions. Their use is not to recognize anybody’s face but to detect or identify any kind of intrusions taking place inside the compound.

We have also launched our audio systems or public announcement systems. Since the audio system remained separate from the video earlier, we are trying to integrate both together so that the system can be used more intelligently. In a similar manner, we are trying to integrate different devices in the system, resulting in the ease of operations getting enhanced from an end-user perspective. So we are trying to bring a lot of systems around the video and are heading towards newer types of equipments.

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VAR ANALYSIS

Indian Telecom Services:

Disruption Like Never Before Within just a matter of 12 months, the country that appeared crowded with 12 telecom operators, suddenly shrunk to four, and the deck was reshuffled to make place for the new operators The year 2017 was a monumental year for the Indian telecom industry. No industry in history was ever disrupted at a faster pace and shorter time as was the Indian telecom services industry last year. Mountains fell, earth trembled and giants that roamed a year back went to extinction when a new baby was born on this soil.

Reliance Jio, the world’s biggest startup, and India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani’s telecom baby, was born in late 2016. With the launch of Jio services, India’s telecom story was rewritten. The country’s incumbent and

biggest operators – Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular – were caught unawares, and they were yet to fathom what was there in store for them in the coming times.

Within just a matter of 12 months, the country that appeared crowded with 12 telecom operators, suddenly shrunk to four, and the deck was reshuffled to make place for the new operator. Many vanished from the market, and the others who survived, started counting days and staring at the same path, unless they do something new, different and absurd. They are forced to revisit their

strategies, and, in most cases, follow the newcomer.

The Disrupter And The Disruption

Reliance Jio was launched in September 2016 and in less than 3 months, the company was able to acquire 50 million customers. The numbers doubled to 100 million within 170 days of it started offering services. And, the average subscriber addition per day was more than 6 lakh.

These are astounding numbers, by any measure, to disrupt any industry. When Jio launched Bharti Airtel, country’s largest operator, had a user base of 250 million. At the end of 2017, Airtel’s total subscriber base in India was 280 million and Jio has reached 160 million.

What Reliance Jio did in India has never happened anywhere in the world. The operator offered voice calls free for life to its subscribers. This was one master stroke to grab as much customers as possible at a shorter period, and, at the same time, break the ribs of its competitors – by weakening their revenue inflow. The incumbents were still getting 75% of their revenue from voice calls! This was the first disruption.

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The second disruption was crystal-clear tariff plans. Jio designed its tariff plans that are easy to comprehend and at the same time offer a fixed ARPU to the service provider.

For example, by paying Rs.309, Jio offered free voice calls, unlimited SMS and free roaming.

This made life easier for customers as users of both type – prepaid as well as postpaid – did not worry calculating their talk-time, cost of SMS or roaming charges – everything was free. On top of that, Jio offered 1 GB of highspeed 4G data per day for the entire month.

However, the biggest disruption was offering data services the way and the price that was hitherto unheard of. When Jio launched its services, data cost in India, be it 3G or 4G, was around Rs.250 per 1 GB. Jio, in a single stroke, brought down this price to 30 GB for Rs.300, or around Rs.10 per 1 GB. Indian internet users, till then, were not used to this attitude. Data use was a luxury and a risky affair. You were set for a bill shock if you used data, without fully calculating how much you are consuming, with the prevailing data packages offered by the incumbent operators. That was the reason mobile data, despite having a huge demand, never took off in this country. India’s global ranking in terms of data consumption rose up from 150 a year back to the world’s highest data consuming nation within a year. All because of Reliance Jio.

Source: TRAI

at Rs.1,500, which, again, will be refunded to the buyer after three years of use. The phone is capable of offering almost all the datarelated services. Jio offered all its services – free calls, SMS, roaming, etc – with a recharge of Rs.153, which was subsequently brought down to Rs.49. And as a hallmark, Jio offered 1 GB of 4G data per month to users within this tariff plan.

With this, Jio offered the complete package – free call and SMS services, enough data and an affordable smartphone. Customers did not find a reason why not to switch to the new operator. And when they did, it impacted the performance of the incumbent operators that they never expected.

And, Jio just did not disrupt the telecom services, it did the same to mobile phones as well. Despite India being the world’s secondlargest smartphone market, there are around 500 million people who are yet to use a smartphone – a phone that can be used for data services. Affordability was the biggest hurdle for these half a billion people to own a smartphone and they were content with a feature phone. Jio wanted to disrupt that as well.

Few quarters into Jio’s launch, the incumbents started feeling the heat. India’s largest operator’s net profit went down by 75%, Vodafone’s by over 60% and Idea Cellular posted loss for the first time in its history. Smaller firms, however, could not survive the blow and preferred to shut their business. Others, who did survive, decided to merge their businesses.

In the mid-2017, the firm launched its own 4G feature phone, JioPhone – a phone that looks like a feature phone, with physical key pad and a small display. The phone was priced

The firms that closed their operations in 2017 include Videocon, Quadrant, Reliance Communications and Aircel. Reliance Communications or RCom and Aircel, in fact,

Mergers & Acquisitions

wanted to merge their businesses. However, all did not go well with their M&A plans. As both these firms were reeling under heavy debt – collectively over Rs.60,000 crore – they, individually, decided to call it a day and closed down operations.

The operators that treaded the M&A path include MTS, Augere Wireless, Vodafone, Idea Cellular, Telenor and Tikona. Bharti Airtel became the biggest player to take part in the merger and acquisition activity with acquiring 5 other operators. The firms it acquired include Tikona, Augere, Telenor, Videocon and Tata Teleservices.

But the biggest merger was yet to happen.

India’s No. 2 and No. 3 operators – Vodafone and Idea Cellular, respectively, also decided to merge their businesses to wade through the tough competition in the market, created because of Jio’s entry. In January 2017, both the firms announced they are in discussions for a possible merger and by the end of the year, almost all formalities were accomplished including acquiring the required the approvals.

The only thing pending is the nod from the Department of Telecommunication, and the closure of the deal can be announced in a quarter or so.

India, the second-biggest telecom market in the world, with more than one billion subscribers, will now have 3 major private operators – Bharti Airtel, Vodafone-Idea and Reliance Jio – and one PSU operator – BSNL. The other PSU telco, MTNL, operates only in two circles – Delhi and Mumbai.

Industry Snapshot

Source: TRAI

By the end of 2017, India had a total telecom subscriber base of 1.19 billion or 1,190 million. This includes 1,167 million wireless subscribers and 23 million wireline or fixed subscribers. Urban subscribers comprised of 688 million, whereas the same for rural areas stood at 502 million. Overall teledensity of the country touched 92% by the end of the year with urban teledensity at 168% and that of rural was at 57%. India’s total broadband subscriber base reached 363 million by the end of December 2017, of which 345 million

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were on mobile broadband and 18 million were on fixed broadband network.

At the end of December 2017, Bharti Airtel was commanding a market share of 24.85% in terms of total wireless subscriber base, whereas Vodafone was having a share of 18.2%. Idea Cellular and Reliance Jio are placed at third and fourth position, respectively with market shares of 16.83% and 13.71%. BSNL, the only pan-India PSU operator, had a market share of 9.24%.

In terms of wireless broadband, Jio holds the highest market share of 44% with 161 million subscribers, whereas Bharti airtel has a market share of 20% with 69 million users, Vodafone with 52 million subscribers hold a market share of 14% and Idea Cellular with a total subscriber base of 35 million has a market share of 10%. BSNL is the fifth operator with a market share of 6%.

Financials

The financial health of the industry has become a matter of great concern since the entry of Jio to the business. Jio offered something free that used to account for 75% of the industry’s revenue a year back – voice calls. The ARPU (average revenue per user) has come down to Rs.80 in December 2017 from Rs.117 a year back. The Gross Revenue (GR) and Adjusted Gross Revenue (AGR) of

the industry have been on a steady decline since last September. For the December quarter itself, the GR and AGR declined by 8%. Overall, the Indian telecom industry is sitting on a debt pile of Rs.4 lakh crore by the end of December 2017.

The impact of Jio’s entry was such that all these incumbent operators – Bharti Airtel, Vodafone India and Idea Cellular – have reported losses in their latest financial results.

Ironically, Jio, in its third quarter, has reported profit of Rs.504 crore and is expected to better its financial performance in the fourth

quarter.

Outlook

Going forward, in terms of financials, the picture does not seem to look any better in 2018, as Jio will continue to offer free calls and SMS services. The worrisome fact is that other operators have also followed suit and started offering free call services, meaning, revenue from voice calls would be down drastically or, may be nill, in the coming quarters. Competition in data pricing is getting tougher and tougher each day with operators bringing out new tariff plans to outsmart each other. And every time they bring out a new tariff plan, in most cases, it is cheaper than before – and the happiest in the world are the customers.

2018 will also see the final number of operators that would serve the country, most probably four – Airtel, Voda-Idea, Jio and BSNL. Less number of operators, and saturation in customer acquisition, also mean price of services would go up and ARPU might stabilize in the coming times.

This year is also going to be significant as the government is planning to bring out the New Telecom Policy (NTP), 2018 any time during the second or third quarter. The NTP 2018 is expected to define how India should deal with the telecom business in the age of IoT, M2M, Artificial Intelligence and 5G. n

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VAR ANALYSIS

Mobile Phones:

The Chinese Dominance

In a matter of two years, a handful of Chinese phone makers, with their innovative products, affordable pricing and aggressive go-to-market strategy, have captured the majority share in the Indian mobile phone market The Indian smartphone market has been seeing unprecedented traction for the last couple of years. The industry is being driven by multiple factors including decrease in handset prices – both of smartphones and feature phones, ultra-low cost of data, plethora of choices and varied drivers of data consumption.

And 2017 was no different. India bought a total of 287 million mobile phones during the

year, including 164 million feature phones and 124 million smartphones showing a growth of 57% and 43%, respectively in each category.

Market Trends

In 2017, the market witnessed a boom with mobile companies making a kill in the thirdlargest smartphone market of the world. The plate was full for all the serious players – from domestic manufacturers like Reliance Jio to global giants like Samsung and Xiaomi. In 2017 alone, the country’s overall smartphone market registered 14% annual growth with a total shipment of 124 million units, the International Data Corporation’s (IDC) Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker says. The current growth numbers make India one of the fastest- growing

markets amongst the top 20 smartphone markets globally.

In in the third quarter of 2017, smartphone market grew 37% (quarter-on-quarter) and 18% (year-on-year), temporarily surpassing the US for the first time ever. According to the latest research from Counterpoint’s “Market Monitor Service”, India’s handset shipments reached an all-time high of over 84 million for the first time ever, driven by the strong sale of both feature phones and smartphones.

IDC report says a slowdown was witnessed in the market in late 2016, partly due to demonetization initiative launched by the Modi government and the scarcity of mobile phone components. However, the market regained momentum and achieved double-digit growth in 2017 with a record 56 million feature phone units shipped in the last quarter of 2017 alone. On the global front, the world’s largest smartphone market, China saw its first decline this year, while the USA was relatively flat, says the IDC report.

In the third quarter of 2017, Chinese brands performance remained strong and contributed to more than half of the total smartphone shipments. It is the third consecutive quarter when their market share is well over 50% after they took over local players in the second half of

2016.

However, local brands like Micromax and Lava grew 41% and 24% (QoQ), respectively, in the smartphone segment recovering from their all-time low during demonetization last year.

The smartphone market in India has changed dramatically in the past 6–7 quarters, if you look at the table attached, except for Samsung none of the top brands that featured in the top 5 till the third quarter of 2016 feature in the list anymore. In fact, most of these brands are not even in the top 10 reckoning anymore.

Recent entrants like Xiaomi, Oppo, Vivo and the re-entry of Motorola have taken the wind out of their sails.

Is there a slowdown in the offing?

According to a recent report by Gartner Inc, the number of feature phone users moving to smartphones has slowed. Also, people are extending the life of their smartphones by owning them for longer durations.

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VAR ANALYSIS According to data generated by Gartner Inc., global sales of smartphones to end-users totalled nearly 408 million units in the fourth quarter of 2017, a 5.6% decline over the fourth quarter of 2016. This is the first year-on-year decline since Gartner started tracking the global smartphone market in 2004.

While this is a worldwide data, Indian market situation is very different. India is expected to continue to grow at a fast pace in the near future as people will continue to migrate to smartphone, primarily to take advantage of 4G network, which is not just faster but also cheaper. While the smartphone trend is expected to remain the same for the next fiscal year, feature phones with 4G connectivity might steal the thunder.

“Two factors led to the fall in the fourth

quarter of 2017,” said Anshul Gupta, Research Director, Gartner. First, upgrades from feature phones to smartphones have slowed down due to a lack of quality in “ultra-low-cost” smartphones and users preferring to buy quality feature phones. Second, replacement smartphone users are choosing quality models and are keeping them longer, lengthening the replacement cycle of smartphones. Moreover, while demand for high-quality, 4G connectivity and better camera features remained strong, high expectations and few incremental benefits during replacement weakened smartphone sales.”

Chinese makers solidify position

Jio Phone

China-based vendors having presence in India have further strengthened their positions in 2017. In the smartphone category, the collective share of China-based vendors reached 53% in 2017 from 34% a year ago.

The rest is shared between global big players like Samsung, Apple, Asus and Indian players like Micromax, Lava, Intex, Karbonn and all others.

“The untapped demand in the lower-tier cities remains the key attraction for China-based brands to explore the growth trajectory in India.

Their strength in their home market of China and weakening position of local players have helped some of these China-based players to solidify their operations in India,” says Jaipal Singh, Senior Market Analyst, IDC India.

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Samsung, which has been the market leader for four-and-a-half straight years, lost the top spot to Xiaomi in the smartphone space.

According to CMR, Samsung had 23% market share, with Xiaomi leading the pack with 25% market share. However, Samsung contests that and claims to be No. 1 in the smartphone segment. It claims to have takers. According to actual sales figure as per GfK, it has 42% in the overall smartphone segment and 55% in the premium segment.

In the premium segment, the South Korean conglomerate trailed at No. 3 with 22% share in the Rs.30,000-plus segment in the quarter to December 2017, compared to leader Apple’s 44% and No. 2 OnePlus’s 27%, as per data from Counterpoint Research.

To arrest the decline in the market share, the South Korean tech giant is gearing up the expansion of smartphones range. In January, it launched two back-to-back handsets — Galaxy A8+ and Galaxy On7 Prime.

The company will launch six to eight smartphones this year to continue the same legacy as introduced in 2017 with reasonable prices.

Samsung has wider distribution network and product portfolio, which will come in handy for it to fight back. However, Samsung does need to do a lot more in the entry-level segment of smartphones and also needs to refresh its entire lineup with reasonable pricing to fend off competition.

The company garnered revenues of Rs 34,000 crore in FY2016-17 showing a growth of 27% over the fiscal year. The firm is hopeful to do better in the current financial year and maintain its leadership position in the country.

The huge acceptance of its latest wares - Galaxy S9 and S9+ - in the market, the company believes is a testimony to that.

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million a year ago. In 2017 Q4, vendors shipped a total of 56 million units, making it the highestever shipments in a single quarter. The category registered a huge 67% year-over-year (YoY) growth and 33% growth from the previous quarter.

“The JioPhone disrupted the feature phone market, with a unique device handset that blurred the distinction between feature and smartphones. Priced like a feature phone, the Jio Phone offered 4G mobile data to customers.

Shortly after its introduction, Jio Phone became the market leader in feature phones. While Jio’s entry caught the incumbents by surprise and awe, it soon led to the revival of feature phones, giving a second lease of life to some brands,” says Prabhu Ram, Head – Industry Intelligence Group, CMR.

Nokia

HMD Global, the Finnish maker of Nokiabranded handsets, has been able to get a lot of buzz in the market with its relaunch of old Nokia phones with updated software and also with their new smartphone range. Within a short span of time, they have managed to garner close to 3% market share in India. It is shortly going to launch Android Go (which is special Android version of entry-level smartphones)-powered smartphone and 4G feature phone in the market and hopes to increase its market share to 5% in India. It has already launched Nokia 1 with Android Go Edition for under-Rs.5,500, and plans to launch Nokia 8110 4G feature phone in May. The company is also looking at partnering with telecom operators to offer bundled services as a means to push sales.

Indian Players

The last one year has been particularly tough for Indian brands like Micromax, Lava, Karbonn and Intex with having mere 12.5% market share.

And there seems to be no concrete strategy from any of these brands, except Micromax which at least seems to be trying.

It recently tied with Shopx, which is a digital offline player for its expansion in tier-II cities. Shopx is a online platform which delivers through a network 49,000 small retailers (who sell their stock through Shopx) in 230 towns across 10 states in the South and West of India. Micromax also launched Bharat series of affordable smartphones with which it tasted some success and sold more than 3 million devices in about 6 months’ time during 2017.

India is the world’s biggest feature phone market. The year 2017 witnessed a 17% annual growth in the feature phone market after declining for three consecutive years. While feature phones remain relevant to a Indian Mobile Phone Market Share (2017) Oppo large consumer base Intex Karbonn 3.50% in India, the Indian 3.70% 3.50% Samsung telecom operator Vivo 21.10% Reliance Jio shipped 4.40% huge shipments of Lava 4G-enabled feature 5.10% phones taking the Micromax leadership position 6.70% on its maiden quarter in this category. This LYF resulted in a total of Xiaomi 6.70% 164 million feature 8.50% Samsung itel Xiaomi LYF Micromax phone shipments Lava Vivo Intex Karbonn Oppo in 2017 from 140

itel 8.80%

Xiaomi Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi registered an incredible performance in 2017, and its market share grew by nearly two-fold in Q3 2017. The company grabbed the top spot from Samsung in the Q4 of 2017.

Commenting on the key trends of 2017Q4, Upasana Joshi, Senior Market Analyst, IDC India, said, “Xiaomi taking a lead over Samsung in the smartphone market and Reliance Jio emerging as the leading feature phone company in India were the two key highlights of the last quarter of 2017.” She added, “The growth of both the vendors was propelled by their aggressive pricing. Xiaomi’s offline expansion and higher marketing spends were other key factors for the vendor’s high shipments in the seasonally low quarter.”

Xiaomi, whose market share in Q4 2017 grew to 26.8%, tripled its shipments on a YoY basis and sold more than 2 million units from its offline channel. Xiaomi has expanded itself by foraying into offline Mi stores. Samsung, which slipped to second position in the smartphone ranking in the last quarter of the year, retains the top spot in the overall year.

To further cement its position in India, Xiaomi has announced that it will invest Rs.7,000 crore in the Indian startup ecosystem to create a local ecosystem for itself and also to gain better local insights.

Vivo Vivo, which is another Chinese brand, is currently positioned at the third spot in terms of market share in the Indian smartphone market with different market research firms giving it anything between 6% and 8% market share in their reports. Vivo in Q4 2017 has a 10% market share and is followed by Oppo with 8% and Lenovo with 7% market share.

This growth in its market share has been mainly due to the sales of its phones in the below- Rs.15,000 market.

However Vivo is now in the process of lifting its brand image – from a mid-segment smartphone player to a premium one, which is reflected in the products that they are trying to push in the market, distribution strategy, etc. It tasted success in the Vivo V7+ smartphone launched last year which was positioned in the below-Rs.20,000-Rs.25,000 price segment. It has recently appointed Amir Khan as its brand ambassador replacing Ranveer Singh which experts believe is an indication that the brand will target slightly premium segment with slightly older audience in mind. The recent launch of Vivo V9 and the expected launch of phones are based on the APEX concept that it showcased during MWC. Lenovo Lenovo follows dual brand strategy in India with phones selling under both Motorola and Lenovo brands. Jointly, these brands control 6% to 8% market in India and the major chunk of sales comes from the Motorola brand.

Motorola is continuing to strengthen its offline retail presence in India with the launch of 100 new Moto Hub outlets in the state of Karnataka and 50 Hubs in the city of Mumbai and multiple outlets in Delhi NCR and KolKata. It is targeting a third of its sales from its organized outlets. Besides, large-format stores and mall hubs, the handset giant has plans to open 1,000 such stores across 100 cities by this year.

Motorola has been very successful in its online sales and not with offline retail network getting strengthened, it can look at faster sales growth in the coming quarters, since 70% of smartphone sales still happen through offline channels.

Oppo Oppo is the sister brand of Vivo and is the fifth-biggest smartphone seller in India at end-December with 5% market share. It sells the bulk of its phones via company-owned and partner retail outlets of the company.

But of late it has started to cut down heavily on its retail network and is now working on an online strategy as well. It has already announced that it is looking for a partnership with Amazon and Flipkart for online sales. It is also working on Flash sales (where limited stocks are put on online sales for a limited period of time for new launches) strategy to create a buzz around the brand.

Oppo, which currently assembles phones at two plants in north India and is building a third facility, is also considering designing its devices in India.

However, if there is an Indian technology firm that had made its mark in 2017, it has to be Smartron. This Hyderabad based firm that claims to be an integrated IoT firm has got its backing from cricket ace Sachin Tendulkar. The cricketer is strategic investor in the firm. The one and half year old firm has launched three smartphones and one hybrid notebook so far, and all of its products have got quite number of eyeballs.

Unlike other Indian mobile phone vendors that primarily get there phones from China and sell them in India and have very little or no R&D focus, this firm seems to be focused more on research and development than sells.

Its first phone t.Phone is design marvel and doesn’t resemble smartphones made by any of the Indian players. Besides smartphones and notebooks, the firm has also launched

few IoT devices in 2017 that included t.Band - a health and fitness wearable and an electric and connected bicycle.

Premium Segment

Apple and Samsung have been dominating the premium segment of the Indian smartphone market for the past three years.

The two brands have been under spotlight, with over 90% of the share under their belt.

But a late entrant, OnePlus, is changing the dynamics of the above-Rs.30,000 price segment. OnePlus, which started in 2014 and had less than 10% market share till mid-2017, and according to data from Counterpoint Research, its volume share stood at 27% of the premium smartphones shipped to India in January while Apple held 44% and Samsung’s 22%.

Outlook

The year 2018 would see more disruptions in the market as compared to 2017. From a market perspective, one can expect a mass-scale consolidation in the Indian handset space. Many of the homegrown companies would shut shop or merge with each other. Unable to survive in the market owing to multiple factors like lack of innovation, “nothing-new-in-the-product”, lack of quality after-sales services, and disruptions from Jio, would force many to look for other business.

4G feature phones, like that of JioPhone, would play a substantial role in 2018. There are more than 500 million people in India who do not have a smartphone phone and are deprived of data services. While these people will throng to own a 4G feature phone, many of the current phone manufacturers would shift their focus to build a phone like JioPhone, or to better it.

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Can a Data Protection law soon become a Reality for India?

THOUGH NOT DEVOID OF LOOPHOLES, THE DRAFT DATA PROTECTION AS WELL AS THE PERSONAL DATA PROTECTION BILL, 2018 WILL FORM THE FRAMEWORK FOR INDIA’S DATA PROTECTION LAWS, PRESCRIBING HOW ORGANISATIONS SHOULD COLLECT, PROCESS, AND STORE CITIZENS’ DATA -

Now that the justice BN Srikrishna committee has submitted a draft Data Protection as well as the Personal Data Protection bill, 2018 (pdf) to the Narendra Modi government, the wait for comprehensive data protection rights may soon be over.Though it is not devoid of loopholes, this bill will form the framework for India’s data protection laws, prescribing how organisations should collect, process, and store citizens’ data.

The committee’s report recommends that the law should be applicable to processing of personal data if such data has been used, shared, disclosed, collected or otherwise processed in India. However, it asserts that in respect of processing by fiduciariesthat are not present in India, the law shall apply to those carrying on business in India or other activities such as profiling which could cause privacy harms to data principals in India.

Additionally, personal data collected, used, shared, disclosed or otherwise processed by companies incorporated under Indian law will be covered, irrespective of where it is actually processed in India. However, it empowers the Centre to exempt companies which only process the personal data of foreign nationals not present in India.

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The Data Protection Bill if acceptedwill mandate companies to store one copy of all personal data within the country. The committee however has left it to the government to define which kind of personal data can be qualified as “critical” which will have to be stored only in India.

The Bill that will be subject to further review once it is introduced in parliament, showcases India’s growing concern for data privacy.The government has also sought comments from the general public on the draft Data Protection Bill which can be submitted by September 10.

An August 14 notification on its The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology website reads, "MeitY solicits comments from general public on the Draft Personal Data Protection Bill by 10th September 2018."

Experts have said that the Bill has been modelled partly on the European Union's General Data Protection legislation and India’s Information Technology Act, 2000. It runs into a total of 112 sections.

Data Protection in current scenario…

If looked into the internet, data protection is the process of protecting data and involves the relationship between the collection and dissemination of data and technology, the public

Ramesh Mamgain

Area Vice President, India and SAARC Region, Commvault perception and expectation of privacy and the political and legal underpinnings surrounding that data. It aims to strike a balance between individual privacy rights while still allowing data to be used for business purposes.

According to experts, data protection should always be applied to all forms of data, whether it be personal or corporate. It deals with both the integrity of the data, protection from corruption

or errors, and privacy of data, it being accessible to only those that have access privilege to it.

Data protection today is the need of the hour for global citizens as well as enterprises and governments. Data protection has generally been weak on the priority list of organisations for far too long,but the scenario is slowly changing for many of them. The EU's GDPR guidelines that came into effect in May this year may have been the guiding force behind initiating a debate on this matter.

In the era of internet, anyone sitting anywhere in the world can access the data assets residing anywhere in the world.However there has been a discussion going on around the fact of whether there is any threat if the data resides outside the country.

“If the concern is around the data protection then data localization without appropriate data protection regime wouldn’t serve any purpose,” asserts Rana Gupta, Vice President – APAC Sales, Identity and Data Protection, Gemalto.

“However if the concern is around company sharing the data to foreign government under the local judgment/directions, then it helps mandating companies to keep data locally.”

He continues, “But considering that in many cases, the interaction data being generated (say for example on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp etc) will involve interactions between individuals from multiple nationalities, then it is perceivable that the same data will be available in multiple geographies. Especially in cases where the localization is being sought, there do will be a foreign/MNC entity involved unless it is just intended to force Indian companies to not use the foreign CSP.” Considering most organizations today allow for reasonable use of company issued computers and other IT assets for personal use, it is likely that a significant amount of personal data resides on these assets. This may pose a challenge while seeking assets for investigations or other proactive fraud detection measures undertaken by the organization. In line with these new guidelines, organizations may need to relook at their internal IT policy and their fraud response policy and ensure that employee approvals are obtained prior to accessing personal data.

What industry expects from the Bill?

As a security company, Rana seeks to have this bill do following things – • Mandatory breach notification so that we all start to understand the severity of problem.

One cannot address a problem if one doesn’t understand the extent of the problem itself.

• Categorization in terms of penalties to be imposed on different kinds of organizations.

The biggest burden should be put on the Government Departments, Defense Organizations and PSUs as any breaches into those organizations will likely have the biggest dent on India as a society.

• It is hoped that this bill raises the importance

of data centric security and seeks to have the organizations apply the concept of privacy by design (encryption) and by default (processing the minimum amount of sensitive data).

Once the Data Privacy Bill mandates certain requirement, it is bound to shake up the existing ecosystem and customers will ask of simpler ways to implement the security requirements as asked for by the Data Privacy Bill. It is expected that in longer term it shall simplify the adoption of security practices by nudging the organizations to build privacy by design rather than thinking of it as an after-thought.

Says Jayant Saran, Partner, Forensic – Financial Advisory, Deloitte India, “The Bill covers diverse aspects of data protection including collection, processing and analysing of personal data. It also lays emphasis on protection of personal and sensitive data of children. The bill has placed emphasis on defining various stakeholders and participants such as fiduciary (entity requesting processing of personal data), processor (analyser of said personal data), and principal (individual to whom the personal data belongs). This is a welcome move considering several other developed economies already have stringent data protection laws.

Jayant Saran

Partner, Forensic – Financial Advisory, Deloitte India

The Bill also proposes significant financial penalties for noncompliance which will compel organisations to relook at how they treat personal data and take appropriate measures to remain compliant. Specifically, in the context of corporate fraud investigation and related scrutiny of transactions, the Bill covers the rights of data principals even during allegations of fraud and subsequent investigations. For example, • In order for the data fiduciary (the client) to forensically preserve data of the company issued IT assets (laptops/desktops/ mobile phones etc.) of the data principal (suspect/target/custodian) to conduct the investigation, consent and prior intimation for collecting the data of said data principal will be required as these devices may contain personal information relating to the data principal.

• The data fiduciary will also have to disclose the reason for collecting the data and the proposed retention period of the collected data to a competent Authority as defined by the bill.

Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy Country Manager India, BSA |The Software Alliance

Further, data fiduciaries and data processors alike may be liable for damages in case there is a violation of the terms of the bill such as • During a personal data security breach • If the data processor acts outside the instructions of the data fiduciary, • If either the data processor or the data fiduciary is negligent or does not incorporate adequate safeguards while analysing the data.”

“The committee’s recommendation for setting up a Data Protection Authority (DPA)

Farrhad Acidwalla

media entrepreneur and founder - CYBERNETIV

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Amba Kak

Policy Advisor in India which will be responsible for monitoring, enforcement, standard setting, awareness creation and grievance handling is a reflection of a comprehensive approach towards data management in India. With several instances of data leaks on both individual as well as organizational level that have taken place in the past had created an alarming situation across the country. With the regulation taking form, citizens of the country can now be assured of the safety of their sensitive data. Similar to EU’s GDPR, the Data Protection Law in India is a much needed regulation which will institutionalize processes for organizations across all sectors to better manage both primary and secondary,” says Ramesh Mamgain, Area Vice President, India and SAARC Region, Commvault.

“Our member companies are at the forefront of data-driven innovation and recognize the importance of fostering trust and confidence in the online environment. We therefore support the effort to create a comprehensive legislation to protect the personal information of citizens in India,” says Venkatesh Krishnamoorthy, Country Manager India, BSA | The Software Alliance. “However, including data localisation requirements in such legislation is contrary to the goals of promoting a Digital India, as global data transfers are critical to cloud computing, data analytics, and other modern and emerging technologies and services that underpin global economic growth. BSA recommends that India’s Personal Data Protection Bill avoid imposing undue restrictions on the ability to securely transfer personal data outside of India.”

“The Srikrishna panel report has laid down numerous vital points when it comes to protecting the data of Indian citizens- the most crucial being the creation of DPAI - the intended watchdog for data protection in India. Privacy advocates across the country will be hoping that DPAI's powers are not thinned when finally executed. The panel has also included provisions to prohibit organizations from using privacy as a veil to stall transparency. The penalities proposed by the panel report, if administered as is, will be a great deterrent and effectively ensure data assurance for Indian citizens,” comments Farrhad Acidwalla, media entrepreneur and founder of CYBERNETIV. However the Bill is not without loopholes,

Rana Gupta

Vice President – APAC Sales, Identity and Data Protection, Gemalto as pointed out by Amba Kak, Policy Advisor in India. The panel is facing criticism for being too lenient and lacking in clarity on key issues and many has emphasised that the Bill in its current form should not be introduced in Parliament and further consultations must take place.

“This bill provides a strong foundation of protection for Indians’ privacy, but it is not without defects - in particular, the requirement to store a copy of all personal data within India, creating broad permissions for government use of data, and the independence of the regulator’s adjudicatory authority. We welcome the Government’s commitment to a public consultation process, which we hope will rectify the cracks in this foundation,”Amba says. n

Company Executives to face 5 years of jail if found stealing data According to the BN Srikrishna committee draft bill on data protection, executives in companies should take extra care of protecting internal organisation-related data. If the company executives are found to have engaged in stealing or processing sensitive data, the person can be jailed for five years. While this seems to be a wake-up call for such executives, it is a much-needed measure.

The draft proposal suggests that violations of the data protection law should be treated as a criminal and non-bailable offence, adding that such investigations must be conducted by an official with the rank of an officer or above.

Considering the amount of data processed by companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter, it remains to be seen if such a policy would come into effect. All the members of the committee have not agreed with the idea as they feel it is “excessive” and will have negative impact.

It is also mentioned that if a company executive is found guilty of leaking large amounts of sensitive personal information of an individual, he/she will be jailed for five years and/or a fine of Rs 3 lakh. The information can range from personal details such as passwords, sexual preferences, caste, religion, and Aadhaar number or tax details. Many experts on data protection also suggested that the proposed move is a tad too hard on company executives. If a company executive has been found leaking or tampering personal data of individuals working under him, the punishment recommended is three years in jail and a penalty of Rs two lakh.

The bill also considers offences by central or state governments. This means that the head of the department of any concerned authority will be held guilty if any such tampering is found. Other than that, the panel also suggests civil penalties for companies that have been found breaching data and personal information of individuals.

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INDUSTRY EVENT

Zoho ONE completes ONE year

New capabilities like AI, Analytics and Search Highlight power the flagship suite One year after its launch, Zoho has announced major updates to its flagship suite of applications, Zoho One, designed to put businesses completely in the cloud. Zoho One is enabling a new set of capabilities that bridge the gap between different departments and roles within an organization.

In the first year itself more than 12,000 business worldwide have become Zoho One customers, out of which 36% of Zoho One users are from India. The average Zoho One customer enables 16 applications for their business, often replacing software from different vendors, preferring instead to run their business from a single cloud platform. The company has added five new apps to Zoho One in the past year—Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage—at no additional cost.

"The adoption of Zoho One has exceeded our expectations, and we hope to continue this momentum into its second year. The stats clearly show that customers will use multiple apps from a single suite, if those apps work together more deeply than a patchwork of products from different vendors," said Sridhar Vembu, CEO of Zoho Corp. "We see customers combining data from different Zoho and third-party apps—like email campaigns, CRM, customer support, and accounting—to generate new insights and make better decisions. Zoho One has already replaced more than 650 different products, and that number will only grow as we release even more new apps."

Zoho also launched Backstage, an end-to-end event management tool that allows organizers, corporations, and non-profit agencies to plan, promote, and run enterprise events ranging from large-scale meetings to conferences and trade shows.

New Capabilities Added to Zoho One Analytics: The new Zoho One Analytics tab provides analytics across Zoho's suite of business apps. Business owners, CXOs and managers can now track KPIs and trends from one tab, helping them to make more informed decisions. Users can create their own custom reports and dashboards to blend data from different business apps and do cross-functional analytics. Currently, there are over 500 prebuilt reports and dashboards available across applications. Users can also import data stored in third-party applications and analyze it along with the data from Zoho's internal apps.

Zia for Zoho One: Zia, the AI-powered assistant first introduced by Zoho CRM in 2016, will be extended to Zoho One. Zia for Zoho One functions across various applications, pulling data from different departments to provide the right contextual information. Using simple commands, Zia can handle complex queries. Drawing information from Zoho CRM and Zoho Desk, Zia can tell users how many customers in the sales pipeline have an open support ticket. Similarly, Zia can generate a chart that displays revenue-per-employee trends for the last five years by fetching figures from Zoho Books and Zoho People. Zia for Zoho One will be made available in phases starting this year.

Zoho also plans to open up the Zia Platform for Zoho One users, allowing them to extend Zia with custom skill sets built to address their

specific needs.

Zia Search: The new Zia Search lets users search across all their Zoho apps instantly, dramatically improving information access within an organization. Zia Search was built from the ground up with an understanding of each application's domain, design and authorization rules, making it possible to display a more relevant, richer set of results.

Zia Search also offers a results preview as well as contextual actions so users can utilize their results without having to leave the search window.

Mobile app: The Zoho One mobile app allows organization administrators and service

administrators to on-board new employees, provision applications, manage permissions, set security policies, create groups and more, all from their mobile devices. With this app, admins can even take care of time-sensitive requests, like resetting a password, when they are away from their computers.

Zoho Concierge: Launched last year along with Zoho One, the Zoho Concierge is a free service available exclusively to Zoho One customers. Since its inception, this dedicated team has helped more than 6,500 customers by mapping their business processes and advising them on how best to optimize Zoho One for their particular needs.

Customer Statements Jay Krishnan, CEO, T-Hub "For an ecosystem player like us, managing tens of projects for hundreds of business requirements to meet the expectations of our stakeholders runs into thousands of requirements that could potentially take as many hours of operating bandwidth and spend. An integrated product suite like Zoho One has truly helped ease our ever-changing requirement list. It has been an enterprise-class product from a world-class player. A big thank you on behalf of the 300+ start-ups that make up our community."

Shayak Mazumder, CEO - Eunimart "When we started Eunimart, just like any other early stage business, we searched the entire market for any software that could help tie all my different customer facing and internal functions into one seamless flow. Zoho was a lifesaver as our business processes were becoming unmanageable with the growing number of customers. The easily manageable workflows, ability to build custom models and create custom solutions was exactly what we needed. Our internal team, with the help of a Zoho partner, has managed to automate almost all of our business, enabling us to achieve 30% increase in productivity and largely increased customer satisfaction.

I am grateful to Zoho One for the large suite of solutions that are built just for start-ups such www.varindia.com August 37 as ours. I have recommended a lot of different start-ups on how to implement Zoho2018 and scale their businesses in a more efficient manner." n

COVER STORY

RPA: A Groundbreaking Technology India is undergoing a digital revolution which is helping the country in its renaissance. Adoption of technology is at its peak in recent days which is being triggered by better connectivity, rapid smartphone adaptation, increasing usage of mobile internet etc. Adoption of innovative technologies makes work easy and fast, increases efficiency of the workforce, takes less time in completing a task etc. Technology has always made human life smooth and easy.

In this wake of time, a ground breaking technology, Robotics Process Automation better known as RPA is emerging and touching almost every vertical. Though in a nascent state, it has already started spreading its effects in segments like banking, manufacturing, automation, micro finance, healthcare etc. The Institute for Robotics Process Automation describes RPA as an application of technology that allows employees in a company to configure computer software or a "robot" to capture and understand the existing applications for processing a transaction, manipulating data, triggering responses, and communicating with other digital systems.

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IDC defines RPA as a software code that helps automates and assigns standardized, rules-based, repetitive, and high-volume processes involving several interoperable systems — which were traditionally executed by humans — to a robot.

Organizations & Latest Technology To move ahead of the competition, adopting latest and innovative technologies are a thumb rule for any organization, which gives an edge to remain competitive. But before adopting any technology a thorough review of it is a mandate.

“Any firm should apt to the latest innovations and technologies if it has to compete in the current market environment, the technologies if industry specific can do wonders but if it is adaptive in a fast run without doing proper R & D works out to be more troublesome. We in

Dheeraj Chawla

Vijay Anand

CIO, Shib Dass & Sons Pvt. Ltd.

VP, IT & Compliance, Visionary RCM Infotech India Pvt Ltd.

August 2018

www.varindia.com

Meheriar Patel

Sumit Singh

Group Chief Information Officer, Consultant, Jeena & Company

VP & CIO, Wockhardt Hospitals Ltd

our firm believe in the thought process of viewing it in four parameters of Need, Cost, Scalability and R.O.I (Return On Investment) factor.

RPA is a vast unexplored and a big buzz for the coming century. Robots and Robotics will be dominating the man and machines if are adopted well into the need based environment that is good and need of an hour,” says Dheeraj Chawla, CIO, Shib Dass & Sons Pvt. Ltd. The latest technologies or Industry 4.0 is considered as new age industrial revolution which has the ability to transform economies, jobs and even society. For the growth of the business it is an imperative these days to adopt new technologies as the new wave of digitization is going on across the nation.

“India, with its numerous challenges and limited means, is blessed with a vast talent pool. There is hardly a technology company that does not have some form of presence in the country. Many have large development centre or technical team in India involved in some real innovative work. Many individuals have gone all over the world, made name for themselves and achieved great technical success. Further, India has become a big hub for Start Ups and Innovation Centre now and is second only to the Silicon Valley. What this means is that the general awareness of latest technology advancement is well known within Indian organizations and the IT professionals. With regards to fast adoption,

“Industry 4.0 signifies the fourth in a series of industrial revolutions, which are characterized by the ability to transform economies, jobs and even society itself through the introduction of new technologies and processes.

Exploring new technologies is a key factor to determine the growth and future of the business. The failure to transform in this age of digital transformation, the takeaway is very clear: adopt or be disrupted.

We constantly do evaluations in digital technologies such as analytics, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies. As an organization we are moving towards using technology that provides a value or serves an important role in business process improvement,” explains Vijay Anand, VP, IT & Compliance, Visionary RCM Infotech India Pvt Ltd. As latest technologies are a necessity these days for a business so pilot run is also crucial before large scale adoption. The adoption of new technologies makes the internal process easy and also scale up the external operations.

“New Age Digital Technologies are good to have and must to test on pilot for large scale adoption. We at Jeena are open to adopt Digital Technologies which would help us in our internal process and scale up our external operations. Aligned Technologies are a gaining new direction and the way each industries do business. There will be a paradigm shift in the way we transact today and how we would be adopting collaborative approaches,” views Meheriar Patel, Group Chief Information Officer, Consultant, Jeena & Company.

Fast adoption of technologies by Indian companies

India has become another hub of technological innovations and start ups after Silicon Valley. All the major technology companies have their presence in India as the Indian organizations are also adopting new technologies rapidly to remain ahead of the race in their respective verticals.

Sanjay Mahajan Chief Information Officer, Satin Creditcare Network Ltd.

most Indian companies, in my opinion and quite rightly so, have shied away from the bleeding edge technology instead opting for maturation of the offering, allowing all kinks to settle down and for the price point to entry becoming more acceptable. This value for money is essential for a very competitive and open environment and a non-bleeding edge technology hardly leaves the entity competitively lagging behind their peers, domestic or international. It also further allows reduced risks that early adopters take. The pace of change in the technology solutions along with associated products has also grown hence making a patient choice quite an important factor,” opines Sumit Singh, VP & CIO, Wockhardt Hospitals Ltd. At present India is poised with better connectivity, increasing adoption of smartphones and mobile internet. So to keep up with the pace there is no other option other than adoption of technology. The

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COVER STORY

Nirvan Biswas

Virender Jeet

CTO, National Bulk Handling Corporation Pvt. Ltd.

Senior VP, (Sales & Marketing / Products), Newgen Software

banking sectors is widely embracing technology to bring more efficiency and pushing India towards cashless economy.

Robotics Process Automation (RPA) is gradually gaining grounds from banking to manufacturing and turning out to be an integral part of digital transformation.

“In today’s dynamic environment, there is no alternative other than adapting to technology, there is no better time than now in India considering the positive ecosystem is driven by better connectivity, increased penetration of smartphones and mobile internet usage. India’s banking sector has used technology to digitize business operations and to create new delivery models and services. Technologies now offer an opportunity to address persistent challenges such as lack of financial inclusion. Technology applications such as EKYC’s, mobile payments, Wallets etc. are bringing greater efficiencies in the way we operate and are going to facilitate in building the cashless ecosystem in the country,” states Sanjay Mahajan, Chief Information Officer, Satin Creditcare Network Ltd..

“RPA is revolutionizing industries from banking to manufacturing.

It is speeding up routine processes and freeing up employees to deliver smarter results. It has now become a core part of the digital transformation. Businesses are leveraging benefits of RPA with BPM by achieving end-to-end automation, higher efficiency, lower costs, higher employee engagement and an overall better customer experience,” feels Virender Jeet, Senior Vice President, (Sales & Marketing / Products), Newgen Software.

The major benefit of implementing RPA is cost savings. It also helps in automating repetitive tasks and also improves efficiency and accuracy.

RPA in the field of Micro Finance may take some time to flourish but can be initiated in the backend process.

“Robotic Process Automation would surely drive cost savings by automating repetitive tasks and improve the accuracy and efficiency of the process execution and reduce or eliminate human intervention.

However, I feel that the Micro Finance sector will take some time to mature to be able to adopt RPA considering that this business strives on creating personal connections with customers in Tier 4 / Tier 5 rural areas. But organizations could start by identifying the backend processes and analyze specific activities that would benefit from RPA. RPA is an expensive proposition hence organizations should have a strong business case with realistic expectations and should build dedicated RPA team to support such initiatives,” explains Sanjay Mahajan.

Kamal Sharma CIO, Jay Kuling Group

According to Nirvan Biswas, Chief Technology Officer, National Bulk Handling Corporation Pvt. Ltd., “I feel that Indian companies are fast adopters of technology that is relevant to solving the problems defined by business. Therefore, there is a difference in what I am trying to say, we just will not adopt a technology unless there is a clear proven benefit overall.”

Robotics Process Automation (RPA): An upcoming technology

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In the automation industry RPA plays a critical role and the market is expected to be more than USD 1 billion in 2021. For successful implementation of RPA a thorough strategy is required.

“In my current sector, RPA is a powerful subject of powering operational efficiency, accuracy, capability, capacity and cost reduction.

It already has been considered as a revolutionary technology in the automation industry and this market is predicted to be over 1 billion USD by Gartner in 2021. Adaption of bots is paving the glorifying way towards intelligent automation and it is opening up newer yet innovative capabilities for organizations. I would also like to emphasize that RPA implementation is a complex change, it requires a systematic and wellthought strategy for successful implementations. In my experience what has given us success in implementation is Making RPA part of your overall strategy of digitization, Strong project management, Deeper and from scratch business and technology team's involvement and strong focus on design and change journey,” reveals Kamal Sharma, CIO, Jay Kuling Group.

Apart from Micro banking, manufacturing, automation, micro

Anil Ranjan

Sachin Lokhande

Head-IT, Macawber Beekay Pvt Ltd.

VP-Information Technology, Pay Point India Network Pvt. Ltd.

finance, RPA has a wide opportunity in healthcare segment. Delving deep into it Sumit Singh highlights, “Healthcare in India is in process of significant changes with lot of interest by private entities entering this space along with the Government led initiatives like Ayushman Bharat to provide coverage for millions of underprivileged members of the society, DISHA Act which will set policies and guidelines for Healthcare Data Exchange, Privacy, security & Confidentiality standards and digital Health records access & ownership to name a few and along with trying to control costs by limiting certain kind of costs. These changes will throw up many challenges and opportunities to the Healthcare sector, which will drive each of the entities to improve efficiency to control costs without compromising quality. The sector provides a lot of scope for automation of tasks from admission, billing to data collection & dissemination, procurement to discharge. RPA has been in play at the care providers in some form or another in few of these areas for a while but large scale usage in the provider space is yet to hit mainstream adoption.

Varied reasons including lack of standard practices and supporting ERP or HMIS solution in the sector are the primary roadblocks at his time.”

50% can be achieved over the output of productivity. Software robots also cost less than a full time employee.

Benefits of RPA Anil Ranjan, Head-IT, Macawber Beekay Pvt Ltd. brings forward the benefits of RPA and says, “RPA (Robotics Process Automation) is very beneficial for industries. Few of the many benefits RPA are as below:

Better customer experience: Deploying RPA frees up your highvalue resources for them to be put back on the front line defining your customer experience.

Lower operational risk: By eliminating human errors such as tiredness or lack of knowledge, RPA reduces the rate of errors thereby providing a lower level of operational risk.

Improved internal processes: In order to leverage AI and RPA, companies are forced to define clear governance procedures. This in turn, allows for faster internal reporting, on-boarding and other internal activities.

Does not replace existing IT systems: One of the biggest advantages of using a virtual workforce or RPA bot is that it does not require replacement of existing systems. Instead, RPA can leverage existing systems, the same way a human employee can.”

Further more on the benefits of RPA, it enhances the efficiency of legacy applications and it is compatible with a lot of software applications.

Cost Savings: When work is automated, not only is it completed faster, but it also can be performed at a much lower rate. So, we can get greater output for less, which results in cost saving.

“RPA can greatly boost the efficiency of the legacy applications.

One of the benefits of most of the RPA products on the market is that they are quite heterogeneous across lots of other software applications,” mentions Vijay Anand.

Quality: With RPA, the work is error-free. Better quality means higher satisfaction rates and good for company’s profitability.

Going forward...

Less completion time: A robot could shave time may be just a few seconds/Tasks and if it’s multiplied by number of tasks and staff members, this savings will be huge.

Less or No Man power required Quick returns: Automating tasks and workflows through RPA does not require coding or scripting so complex processes can be transferred from human to machine with little effort and industry can start getting benefits immediately or sooner.”

Sachin Lokhande, VP-Information Technology, Pay Point India Network Pvt. Ltd. highlights top five benefits of RPA. He says, “We are already on Robotic Process Automation on our Call Center Department where in customer itself does chat with robot. Here, we list top-5 benefits of implementing RPA at our place.

Reduced costs: By automating tasks, cost savings of nearly 30% to

RPA is indeed a revolutionary technology with multiple benefits that will benefit human lives. Implementing a robot will be profitable to industries but on the flip side we should also need to keep this in mind that it will lead to unemployment. On this note Anil Ranjan concludes, “We are thinking and going to implement robot which will be very profitable to industries and will get many benefits as mentioned in above column but after replacing the human with robot, what our people will do? There will not be requirement for huge man power and in India we are already facing un-employment due to high population, less employable skill and other reason. Impact is visible, more crime, more un-social people, increased gap between rich and poor.

We should find the solution based on our country’s requirement. We can make our people more efficient to give better output as robot do in less populated country. It’s possible.” n Aparna Mullick aparna@varindia.com

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EVENT

New-age CIOs come out as the showstoppers at

9th VARINDIA EIITF 2018

(From L to R): Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA; Dr Tinku Acharya, Fellow IEEE, Founder & MD- Videonetics Technology; Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI; V K Bhandari, CMD - Supertron Electronics Pvt. Ltd.; Sandeep Sengupta, MD – ISOAH; Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software; Prateek Singh, Director- Orva Networks Pvt. Ltd. and Anil Kr. Sahu, Regional Manager - West, VARINDIA Kolkata recently witnessed the successful conclusion of the 9th EIITF (Eastern India Information Technology Fair – 2018) that was hosted

by VARINDIA. Amidst speeches and presentations from corporate houses, the event served as a common platform for the corporates to share ideas, discuss issues and challenges targeting the growth of the ICT sector in the region in particular and the country in general. All in all, the event saw the coming together of 200 senior officials from the IT Department, dignitaries from Central and state government departments and spokespeople from IT Corporates.

The special guests who attended the event were V K Bhandari, CMD Supertron Electronics Pvt. Ltd.; Dr Tinku Acharya, Fellow IEEE, Founder & MD- Videonetics Technology; Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI; P L Suhasaria, President- COMPASS; Mansi Saha, Regional Secretary (East)- ISODA; Sandeep Sengupta, M.D.- ISOAH; Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software and Ardaman Singh Kapoor, Channel Manager East India and Bhutan- Fortinet Inc., besides the presence of other big-wigs from the industry.

Giving his opening remark, Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA spoke about how Digital transformation is on top of the mind of the CXOs in 2018 and that digital technology helps to open new doors to innovation. “A recent survey on the 300 CIOs from across the country reveals that newer technologies are bringing newer opportunities in business and investment into certain emerging technologies, offering both quantitative and qualitative insights.”

He also highlighted another survey, which says that the era of new market is going to emerge and the future of retailing is going to merge the online with offline model of business.

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V K Bhandari, CMD- Supertron Electronics addressed the audience on the role the channel has been playing in the Indian ICT industry, while speaker Dr. Tinku Acharya, Fellow IEEE, Founder & MD - Videonetics Technology Pvt. Ltd. took to the stage to present his views on how Videonetics looks at the current market from an opportunity perspective.

During the corporate presentations, Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software told the audience of how ESDS is focusing the market in West Bengal. Ardaman Singh Kapoor, Channel Manager East India and Bhutan- Fortinet Inc. on the other hand spoke on Digital Transformation and Security.

The panel discussion on the topic –‘5 Biggest Challenges for Modern CIOs For Digital Transformation’ was moderated by Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA. The panel included speakers like Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI; Sandeep Sengupta, MD - ISOAH; P L Suhasaria, President- COMPASS; Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software and Adrish Mukherjee, Sr. Manager( ERP)- Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd.spoke about the rise of challenges in the role of CIO while also becoming vibrant at the same time.

Towards the end of the event, the Best VARs from the Eastern region of India were awarded in the categories ofBest Retailer, Best Reseller, Best VAR, Best Solution Provider, Emerging Brand, Best System Integrator, Best National Distributor, Best Sub-distributor, Best Security Partner and Best IT Services Partner. The awardees were Supreme Technologies Pvt. Ltd., Lalani Infotech Ltd., Technocrat Infotech Pvt. Ltd., Embee Software Pvt. Ltd., Balaji Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (For the brand FOXIN), Wizertech Informatics Pvt. Ltd., Supertron Electronics Pvt. Ltd., Comnet Resources Pvt. Ltd., Macaws Infotech and Techniche Consulting Services.

V K Bhandari

Dr Tinku Acharya Fellow IEEE

“Technology is changing very fast, and with it everything is changing really very fast – the buying pattern is changing, the distribution model is changing, presentation is changing.

On the other hand, we the channel community is always complaining about the absence of growth and profitability.

So what is the reason behind that?

Reason is the constant change we are witnessing every day. But the sad part is that we do not want to groom ourselves with that change. This is why we have been unable to grow. There are big opportunities today in the IT business – cloud, digitization, IoT, but it is upon how we grab all of them. If we take the example of Nokia brand which used to be a leading brand globally. But today with the rise in competition, the brand has slowly lost its turf. Similar examples are HMT, Ambassador car that no longer enjoys the huge market share it used to enjoy at some point of time.

With time, people have also started forgetting these brands; reason being they have not changed with time. So my message is - only one thing is constant in life and that is the change.”

“We have to build Indian technology that has been designed, conceptualised, intellectual property protected, manufactured in the country. In my case, I left an illustrious career in US and came back to India to start a company with a few boys and girls. I knew that visual computing is going to be the future. I can proudly say that we managed to create the first AI, deep learning based visual computing platform in the world that has been patented in the United States. The patent has been granted in US, UK, Canada, Singapore and Israel.

These boys and girls sitting in Kolkata created more than 2 dozen intellectual property. Today we are an international Indian multi-national company. We just opened our office in UK, is in the offing in the US and already started in the UAE. Share of the word GDP in 1840 was 16% by India under British occupation while USA contributed merely 2% and rest of the world 82%.

After that the golden age of innovation happened and while the world kept up with the pace of innovating new technologies, we Indians lost the race because we were too busy solving our own problems.”

CMD - Supertron Electronics

Founder & MD- Videonetics Technology

Ranjit Metrani

VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software “Our job is to enable businesses using technology. We all know that digital transformation is going to help each one of us in terms of our journey towards enhancing our businesses. But there is always this confusion of what is exactly digital transformation. I found this to be the best – digital transformation is the change associated with the application of digital technology in all aspects of human society. Today digital is a part of everything today. The size of the digital economy is supposedly a trillion dollars. Some of the large companies are responsible for disrupting this digital technology and used it to enhance their business - like Uber does not own a taxi but is today one of the largest aggregator of taxis in the world, Netflix does not own or produce any movie but it is one of the largest providers of movies in the world. When Flipkart started its business in 2007, they first distributed books. The biggest reason why Flipkart is what it is today is they disrupted that business using the technology platform.”

Ardaman Singh Kapoor

Channel Manager East India and Bhutan- Fortinet Inc. “Digital transformation, according to me, is today adding more and more devices and users into the network and day to day life. Going forward, with respect to digital transformation, there will be a change in the security space. Predominant security things that we were doing will be transformed because of this digital transformation. I am not asking you to change the entire security arena as a result of this digital transformation, but there will be slight changes with respect to the access, with new devices coming in into the network. The attack surface on the devices and the users have broadened. Earlier we used to secure our LAN and devices, but today security has to be borderless. People have smartphones & smart devices and there are wi-fi and roaming users. So we have to secure our users whether they are inside or outside the organization. With the increase in these attack surfaces, we are trying to include more and more products to secure the entire network. With respect to that you will see that in an organization there will a number of OEMs to offer security products and protect the network. The challenge that comes up is manageability of so many OEMs, whether their devices are talking to each other, and whether the organization is getting a full-proof solution or not. So these are some of the challenges that come out of the security transformation.”

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EVENT

Panel Discussion:

5 Biggest Challenges for Modern CIOs For Digital Transformation Moderated by Dr. Deepak Kumar Sahu, Chief Editor – VARINDIA

(From L to R): Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software; P L Suhasaria, President- COMPASS; Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI; Sandeep Sengupta, MD – ISOAH and Adrish Mukherjee, Sr. Manager (ERP) - Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd. The discussion highlighted the point that IT has become more influential and more proactive, and is driving an increasingly enterprise wide culture. With new technologies emerging almost every day, businesses are becoming complex and with it the role of a CIO has also been changing.

Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software agreed that the typical role of a CIO has changed today. A CIO earlier was more or less managing infrastructure and IT but today he/she is responsible for businesses too. “IT has to enable businesses and that is where I believe that technology platforms for CIOs are acting as enablers for their businesses. So more and more CIOs will be seen engaging in business decisions than IT decisions going forward,” he commented.

According to P L Suhasaria, President- COMPASS, a CIO is one who has to manage things and technology while still keeping his business costs as low as possible. “With the help of new technologies that the company is adopting, a CIO’s major role is to see that business goals are met with lesser expenditures,” he said.

Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI said, “A CIO has to be updated and upgraded first as per the modern trends and technologies because they keep on changing very frequently and unless he does that, it will become difficult to manage things efficiently.”

Sandeep Sengupta, MD – ISOAH said that data is spreading very fast, sometimes into the cloud and sometime into somewhere which no one knows. At the same time, privacy regulations are getting tougher too. “So that becomes a big challenge for the CIO,” he said. “In the security industry we always say PPT – People, Process, and Technology. All the tools and hardware that are in use today are becoming people focussed and they are starting to talk about trends. Previously when I bought a box, I used to learn more about it, but now with Machine Learning the box is learning my pattern. This will what the future will behold us and a CIO has to keep this thing into perspective.”

Adrish Mukherjee, Sr. Manager (ERP) - Garden Reach Shipbuilders & Engineers Ltd. defines the role of a CIO as that of cost competitiveness and building a strategic position for his organization in terms of speed of delivery.

The growth of the ICT industry in the country is also highly becoming dependent upon SMEs, because of their rapid growth and proliferation.

However there are several challenges that these SMBs face when it comes to technology adoption. One of the biggest challenges in the SMB space is the knowledge of technology as far as cloud is concerned, in terms of what and which cloud model they can adopt. The second piece is the security aspect that every SMB is worried about – of where their data resides and the third is the cost benefit. Some of the large players have disrupted the industry by using technology, but the truth is that an SMB today does not want to invest in technology; he would rather invest in his business than in technology. Very clearly if the SMB has to change the way they address the market going forward, they don’t have a choice but to adopt to new technologies and get away from the comfort zone that they are in now.

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August 2018

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AWARD WINNERS Best Retailer, Eastern Region Best Reseller, Eastern Region Best VAR, Eastern Region Best Solution Provider, Eastern Region Emerging Brand, Eastern Region Best System Integrator, Eastern Region Best National Distributor, Eastern Region Best Sub-distributor, Eastern Region Best Security Partner, Eastern Region Best IT Services Partner for Eastern Region

Supreme Technologies Pvt. Ltd. Lalani Infotech Ltd. Technocrat Infotech Pvt. Ltd Embee Software Pvt. Ltd Balaji Solutions Pvt. Ltd. (For the brand FOXIN) Wizertech Informatics Pvt. Ltd. Supertron Electronics Pvt. Ltd. Comnet Resources Pvt. Ltd. Macaws Infotech Techniche Consulting Services

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LEAD STORY

Dark Web: The World beneath the Internet!

In the mid-1990s, US military researchers created a technology which they called it ‘Tor’ standing for ‘The Onion Router’ that allowed intelligence operatives to exchange information completely anonymously.

As part of their strategy, they released Tor into the public domain with the simple reason that the more the people use the system, the harder it would be to separate the government's own messages from the general noise.

The resultant effect: Tor has spread such wide that today it has become a critical part of the so-called 'dark web': a network of untraceable online activity and hidden websites, of which Tor hosts approximately 30,000.

And this anonymity has attracted a huge range of people who want to keep their activities hidden.

It is said that (and even researches point to the fact) only 4% of the internet is visible to the general public, while the remaining 96% of the internet is made up of “The Dark Web”.

So what is Dark Web? Dark Web or Dark Net can be defined as a digital marketplace and is a subset of the Deep Web that runs sites that sell drugs, hacking software, counterfeit money and many more. It plainly refers to the 96 percent of the Internet that is not indexed by search enginesand therefore not available for public access.

Though historically dark web was not necessarily illegal, it has over time become one because of the kind of products that they allow vendors to sell.

Silk Road was one of the first dark market on the web that was created

by Ross Ulbricht.It was a digital marketplace that connected vendors of illegal drugs with potential buyers. Vendors would advertise their wares on listings maintained by Silk Road, which was similar to the kinds of listings you might find on any legitimate e-commerce marketplace.

The anonymity it offers is something that even the US’s NSA could not unmask. There are millions of dark web sites run by as many volunteers but all hidden faces and it also becomes difficult to track precisely who is viewing what website.

“As a concept, the deep/dark web is not new at all. Wherever there is an interest in discussing or trading in a non-public setting, people will find a way, whether it is a conventional black market or a restricted forum on the web. Furthermore, these restricted sites have existed even before the World Wide Web; restricted access bulletin boards were used to trade pirated software (such as illegal software, games, media et cetera) already way before the web.As such, the dark web is just one way the underground scene and black markets are accessible to people who wish to access them,” says Antti Tuomi, Principal Security Consultant - F-Secure.

Where Dark web was created by online activists to avoid surveillance, it has become a pet peeve for regulators, because they know that dark web is here to stay and that they can do very little about it.

There has been an increase of late in international sources of illegal drugs through the use of marketplaces on the Dark Web, and there have been arrests for these activities. Illegal dark web sites are often hosted by individuals or organizations that want to do business in illegal materials, such as drugs, firearms, stolen identities, credit card numbers and so on.

For example, the Silk Road dark web drug market was hosted under the nickname of “Dread Pirate Roberts”, and operated by taking a commission of all sales performed through the site.

Of course, the most likely motivation for running a site is monetary benefit, or access to the goods traded on it, as well as the connections to vendors visiting the site.Operating these sites comes at a risk though and few people have both the technical and the opsec (operational security) skills to remain unidentified.

There are evidences that show that media and the Internet can be controlled and manipulated to great effect. This has created a void and a lot of misgivings. Dark web is rising fast to fill that void, to become a sort of Fifth Estate that gives voice to the unwanted. “For example, Facebook recently announced a version of its website that can be accessed over the Tor network, which will make it easier to access the site from countries that restrict the service, such as China and Iran,” Rahul says.

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Rahul Kumar

Country Manager – WinMagic

So is addressing dark web/deep web on the agenda of security vendors today?

“Addressing the threats emanating from dark web or deep web is very much on the agenda of most security vendors. However, you must first understand that the dark web is a subaltern movement that is constantly evolving and cannot be supressed. If an organization is under attack from inside or outside, there is a possibility of the attackers using the dark web for cover and as a launchpad. Monitoring the dark web does boost your security and identify breaches and vulnerabilities. It is prudent to keep an eye on the dark web for mentions of your organization, names, email addresses, and sensitive assets,” says Rahul Kumar, Country Manager – WinMagic.

“In general, security vendors are interested in monitoring what goes on in the dark web, especially when it concerns underground markets that trade in vulnerabilities, exploits, malware, hijacked servers and accounts.

This information is valuable for picking up possible threats and attacks quickly, meaning protection can be rolled out to customers as soon as possible,” Antti explains.

Other unlawful aspects, such as trading in narcotics, pirated media and so on, are of more interest to the police. When the police want to take a site down, they may ask security vendors for information to help them with do this. In the corporate context, security companies protect their customer by detecting and blocking access to suspicious sites.

In an incident of clampdown on Darknet that took place in September, Europol and the US Department of Justice jointly announced the success of a sting operation against the dark web's black markets, including the seizure of AlphaBay. According to Europol, the market is estimated to have generated more than a billion dollars in sale of drugs, stolen data, and other illegal goods over its three years online. While AlphaBay’s closure had previously been reported as an FBI operation, the agency confirmed that takedown, while Europol also revealed details of its tightly coordinated Hansa takeover.

Dark Web in India…

CRAWLERS CRAWLERS DON’T DON’T SEE SEE EVERYTHING EVERYTHING Search engines use crawlers to discover content on webpages

Contents of Searchable Databases

Password Protected Site

Sites Programmed to Keep Them Out

THE THE SILKROAD SILKROAD A suprisingly legit drug market place shutdown by the FBI in 2013 Dangerous Drugs For Sale

98%

PAGES PAGES PEOPLE PEOPLE HIDE HIDE WEAPONS FOR SALE

CHILD PORN

CRIMINAL NETWORKS

THE THE WHITE WHITE WOLVES WOLVES PROGRAM PROGRAM People sell criminal services

$25,000

to assasinate an

AVERAGE PERSON

$15,000,000

to assasinate a

CEO

DARKWEB DARKWEB TOOLKIT TOOLKIT TOR

An anonymous web browser

The agency sets up TOR routers to TRACK TRAFFIC

BITCOIN

An encrypted virtual currency

Takes advantage of FLAWS IN THE BROWSER

USES ADS to track Deep Web users

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LEAD STORY In September last year, cyber security solutions company Seqrite, along with its partner seQtree detected and notified the Indian government about a possible breach of India’s National Internet Registry – IRINN (Indian Registry for Internet Names and Numbers). Apparently, the hackermanaged to gain access to National Internet Registry and as a result posted thousands of credentials for sale on a Darknet platform.

The size of the deep or dark web traffic from any region, leave alone India, is difficult to estimate. One does come across news reports of raids by authorities, who often point to the role played by deep or dark web. In any case, one cannot assign a value to or quantify this secretive market: In fact, there is a belief that this murky world of business is yet to rise in stature to give serious trouble to the industry at large.

According to Antti, in India, using the dark web is not illegal unless doing so with criminal intent. Reports claim that in India a majority of the people are still unaware about its existence; and even those are aware about its presence, indulge in it passively. There have been numerous arrests, closures, exits, and seizures by international authorities over the past four years. As a result, the darknet market activity has decentralized even further, creating a market for escrow accounts and exchanges and diversify.

Dark web however can be used for both good and bad purposes and can involve a lot of people from journalists to drug peddlers.“Since the basis of the technologies used for the dark web is to make the traffic as anonymous and hard-to-track as possible, the most significant good uses for them are human rights, journalism, and privacy.For example, the Reporters without Borders organization advocates using Tor as a part of an attempt to be able ‘to communicate in a safe and anonymous manner with sources, whistle-blowers and dissidents’. As for country-wide self-defence, the military and police forces likely already have their own methods and environments for cooperating, and likely do not have a similar need for anonymity,” discusses Antti.

However, as in any country, it gets very difficult to stop this kind of online activity without making access of the Dark Web illegally. in doing so, you run the risk of shutting down some very legitimate uses, such as utilizing ToR to maintain one's privacy for any legal activity as well. For example, journalists working under oppressive governments might use Tor to keep themselves and their sources safe. According to the ToR project, even law enforcement might use ToR.

Antti Tuomi

Principal Security Consultant - F-Secure (https://www.torproject.org/about/torusers.html.en#journalist) “One significant way in which legislation could be improved is the international cooperation for taking down sites and services that do clearly act illegally. Being able to locate, confiscate, and take down services across country borders is often difficult – especially if the services are hosted in so-called “bulletproof hosting” environments, and in countries or locations that are notoriously reluctant to co-operate with the authorities,” says Antti. n Samrita Baruah samrita@varindia.com

Thinvent expands its Micro range with Micro 3 and Micro 5 Thinvent is India’s leading manufacturer of thin clients. It’s Micro 1 and Micro 4 devices have long been best sellers on Amazon. The company has now released the Micro 3 and Micro 5 devices to expand its Micro range.

Thinvent’s rugged hardware and secure firmware, coupled with its cloud based software solutions, benefit governmental organizations, academic institutions and corporates alike.

Thinvent is now looking for channel partners to expand from online to offline sales.

Features Processor WiFi onboard 4K resolution, HDMI support Compact and rugged No moving parts Smart looking, tiny footprint RAM/Flash USB Ports Product Dimensions High temp version on order (Metal body)

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Micro 3 Quad Core ARM Cortex A53 @2GHz Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes 1GB/8GB 2 8 x 8 x 2 cm Yes

(From Left to Right): Micro 1, Micro 3, Micro 4 and Micro 5 Micro 5 ARM Cortex A53, Quad Core, 1.2 GHz Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes 1GB/16GB 4 11.7 x 11.7 x 2.6 cm Yes

FACE TO FACE

For Vertiv, datacenter market is a growing opportunity Vertiv has rolled out its multi-city ‘Vertiv Xpress’ to expand and connect with its customer base in India, showcasing Vertiv’s capalibilities and innovations in the datacenter business.

Sunil Khanna, MD & President, Vertiv India explains to VARINDIA of how such initiatives help the company in focusing on new growth areas Vertiv commits to new technologies and continues to design and develop them, demonstrating clearly their interests in customers. In a move to connect and expand with its customers better and also display the latest products and technologies, Vertiv has recently rolled out its multicity ‘Vertiv Xpress’.

“Vertiv Express is a Truck where we are displaying our products & solutions, the latest trends in technology and we are taking it across India in the next 7-8 months’ time to close to 15-16 cities, closer to our customers in IT Parks, manufacturing units and large customer sites. It is starting from Delhi first and then we will be taking it to other cities where we have our presence and where we feel we have the opportunities. Cities like Hyderabad, Bengaluru, Chennai, Kolkata, Bhopal, Indore, Lucknow, and Chandigarh are in the pipeline for the trip,” explains Sunil Khanna, MD & President, Vertiv India.

“Seeing is believing, as they say and so we want our customers to see and feel our products. For instance, customers are looking for smaller footprints of the products so that they can utilize the balanced space effectively. We have products that fit into these requirements and only when they experience them will they understand how they work,” he says.

Channel partners are also a big part of the Vertiv Express. “They are an integral part of our company and so they are very much part of it,” says Sunil.

Vertiv is working in a big way to expand its channel in the country, so that it can capture the opportunities and identify the areas where its penetration is still low, especially markets and cities. Also it is not cost effective to have its sales person in every market and so Vertiv is focusing big on the channel.

Earlier Vertiv had only a few products that were routed through the channel, making the breakup as 15% through channel and 85% direct. But now it is opening all its products through the channel.

So currently 40% of the business happens through channel, which will continue to expand. What requires is hand holding the partners for some time, since they have their own limitations of not having the technical expertise in every area.

Opportunities in the market…

The Indian economy is growing, with GDP growing at 7-7.5%. The focus of the government and the industry are on digital India, e-commerce and Smart city. The government’s guideline that any critical data that is of importance to the government has to reside within the country is propelling the growth of the datacenter market. The datacenter market is growing at the rate of 35-40% and Vertiv sees this as a big opportunity.

“Many datacenter players are coming into the country now and that is another scope for us to grow. We have come out with products and solutions by keeping theneeds of the customers in mind that help them to improve or become more competent. Players like Amazon, Microsoft, Google have datacenters in India but they are

only renting datacenter space. So while the Banking, financial sector is expanding, they would like to keep their critical data within their premises.

So that requires having your own server or datacenter. We came out with a very innovative product called ‘Datacenter in a Box’, which is a smart solution. We provide the complete datacenter in a box, which you just have to install it in any part of your office. And that has been a great success across all sectors,” says Sunil.

Vertiv also finds new opportunities in ITITeS, Telecom, Automobile, BFSI, healthcare, eCommerce as they continue to grow. “If these verticals are growing then it surely means that data is also growing, the cashless economy is getting a boost. They also need 24x7 power, and we are trying to capture all these sectors,” he says.

He further continues, “In the last 2 years, the government is spending a lot on different growth initiatives whereas the private investment is down.

So our focus has shifted to the government sector like the smart city initiative, the Digital India and we have been successful in many of these.”

The SME vertical will however take some time to grow for Vertiv because of their purchasing power, and like Sunil says that the demand of this market for technologies is still low. “We are looking at the sector but today our share from it is quite low,” he says.

Vertiv has its global R&D centres in which it continues to develop technologies, meeting the requirements of its customers. It also has three state-of-art Manufacturing Plants at Ambernath and Pune in Maharashtra, with latest machineries and production technology. n Samrita Baruah samrita@varindia.com

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Connected Devices most vulnerable to Cyber threats: A10 Networks From April 2017 to January 2018, in India 22,207 Indian websites including 114 government websites were compromised, according to CERT-India. Cyberattacks are getting more and more sophisticated and it is becoming harder to identify for the existing defence mechanism. Identifying cyberthreats is a task that requires considerable exposure to the threat, and notable computing and extensive personnel resources to analyze correctly.

Moreover, the trend of connected devices is even more complicating the security landscape, making the entire network vulnerable.

Connected Networks and Threats As the trend of connected devices is increasing every day, the risk of cyberthreats for these devices is also increasing. Internet of Things (IoT) attacks can be launched in both within and outside the network of the connected devices.

“Internet of Things has changed the technology landscape drastically. Not just people, machines are also connected now. But there are grave security concerns connected with these connected devices, because IoT attacks can now be launched by infected devices both within and outside of the network. One should also consider the unique performance requirements and profile compositions that these devices have. IoT devices are widely being enslaved to mount increasingly devastating attacks. There is a flood of connected devices making their way into our homes and businesses. Every new device announcement adds more weapons to an already stocked arsenal of connected gadgets which hackers have at their disposal that they can weaponize and leverage to launch DDoS attacks. Hence, connected networks have a wider chance of being attacked through the multiple entry points for a malware. IoT attacks range much broader and can impact millions of connected devices in one go, including security controllers, resulting in scaling up of DDoS attacks,” explains Sanjai Gangadharan, Regional Director, SAARC, A10 Networks.

One infected device can put the rest of the devices on hold, resulting in the network being crushed down. The outcome of an attack targeted at the connected device is huge and can spread rapidly.

“With IoT-powered connected networks, the attack on one of the devices will trigger malfunction of the rest and will lead to the whole network being knocked down. When connected networks are attacked, the consequences are massive. The repercussions would spread across

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everything that’s required for our daily lives,” adds Sanjai.

Analytics in Cybersecurity For a proactive defence strategy, analysis of the data generated during an attempted attack can give deeper insight. Granular analytics and visibility provides transparency to develop enhanced cybersecurity solution.

“A massive amount of data is being generated during attempted attacks every day.

This raw data can be utilized to draw insights and develop a proactively improved DDoS defences.

Granular analytics and visibility also strengthen transparency and security measures to make the cybersecurity solution more robust,” says Sanjai.

“A10 has created the DDoS Threat Intelligence Map which helps visualize the DDoS threat landscape and prepare for the potential DDoS attacks against the organization’s infrastructure. The existing threat maps are only indicative of the attacks that have already happened. A10’s DDoS map provides insights into where the next DDoS attacks will come from. Our Threat Intelligence Map gathers information from the attack attempts and previous attacks on the network and utilizes analytics tools to predict the potential attacks that may happen in the future.

However, like I said before, “Threat Intelligence Map is not a sole panacea to prevent DDoS attacks. If we have intelligence but cannot act on it, it is as good as useless.

The effort from organizations should be to combine threat intelligence with modern DDoS mitigation solutions, like the A10 Thunder TPS, for a proactive DDoS defence strategy.

DDoS mitigation solutions like these must be precise, automation-friendly and have scalability properties,” adds Sanjai.

A10 Networks Securing Customers Talking about how A10 Networks is helping organizations protect themselves from cyberthreats, Sanjai elaborates, “The A10 Networks Advanced Core Operating System (ACOS) is the cornerstone for all our solutions.

It is one of our most superior switching software helping us deliver futuristic security solution that provides the agility and efficiency to protect and deliver applications. With our open Application Program Interfaces (APIs), our products become compatible to be deployed with any standardsbased infrastructure. ACOS also features sharedmemory architecture to accelerate and secure today’s universal applications.

With increased cyberthreats of immense

In a chat with VARINDIA, Sanjai Gangadharan, Regional Director, SAARC, A10 Networks, speaks about the risks associated with connected devices, data analytics helping to understand the cyberattack, and how A10 Networks is securing its customers data power, from WannaCry to Mirai to the latest Memcached, organizations are under constant threat from hackers. We have solutions that can defend networks against modern cyberthreats with DDoS protection, SSL decryption and firewalls. We also offer solutions that can optimize application security and performance with automation and actionable per-app analytics.

At A10, we provide automation across our portfolio of secure application solutions services.

We strive to enable intelligent automation with deep machine learning to ensure businesscritical applications are protected, reliable and always available.” n

FACE TO FACE

Schneider Electric addressing the global energy crisis through sustainable solutions While giving an overview of the energy dilemma that India along with the rest of the world is facing, Dan Wall, VP Power Solutions - Software, Systems & Services Marketing, Schneider Electric explains to VARINDIA about its EcoStruxure platform and how it is impacting the industry in particular There are two big megatrends seen in the world today -Digitization and Energy. As this whole digitization process unfolds, it puts a stronger demand on energy resources in the world.Both these phenomena intersect as companies are looking to become more energy efficient and implementing more energy efficiency initiatives. They are doing that with digital assets like new age fact systems, LEDs and these new technologies that they are deploying are creating power reliability issues.

Schneider Electric provides the products that can detect these issues and can also correct them.Says Dan Wall, VP Power Solutions - Software, Systems & Services Marketing, Schneider Electric.“So while we are trying to become more energy efficient and making investments for that, if we don’t do it with the right partners and the right expertise we end up having power reliability issues that can wipe out the savings from the energy efficiency initiatives that we expected in the first place.”

Schneider Electrics is thus working through partners, training them at the same time about this connection and the dependency that energy management and power reliability have.

“We are providing products and solutions in this new IoT world to all our partners to solve these problems customers have for all their partners,” says Dan.

Schneider EcoStruxure Platform Schneider’s EcoStruxure poweris its platform to deliver the energy management and power management systems. It works similar like Industry 4.0 and can be applied to electrical distribution. At the very base there are the IoT devices. These devices can be things like smart circuit breakers, meters, UPS and any sort of electrical assets that are running a facility like a datacenter or a hospital. “This is a very active space for us and our partners in terms of implementation,” Dan says.

The first layer all of these IoT devices create a lot of data, which need to be collected into a place where it can be monitored and set up for reporting for learning the kind of applications in use. This then moves to the 2ndlayer whichis called the edge control. An edge control is typically a software system like a building management system or a power management system. Schneider has power management software and gateways that collect all of the data from these IoT devices and allows the on premise staff to understand and thereby respond to some reactive

situations, diagnose it and resolve that. It also helps to understand the energy consumption of the facility and plan some strategy to reduce that energy consumption.

“One very basic example of that is with an industrial customer- when they start off the process they need to start off these very big motors that draw a lot of current from the circuits.We can really bring down the peak demand, the peak energy consumption for that site, thereby reducing the overall energy build. This strategy is one which can be applied with the edge software, helping the facility team to identify these peak demand situations and then build a medications strategy,” explains Dan.

Schneider in India Schneider Electric India is the market leader in energy management solutions. It has deployed these solutions at very large multinational manufacturing facilities and is also working closely with very large multinational companies in the F&B industry and other manufacturing related industries in India. It targets hospitality, healthcare, data centres and buildings and manufacturing and has solutions for all these segments.

“Schneider is a pioneer in working in the smart city project. PM Modi just inaugurated the Naya Raipur smart city venture and Schneider built that smart city project as well. So we are working with a lot of smart city projects along with our partners and sometimes direct as well,” says Dan. He continues further, “We are also launching the world’s most advanced meter in India in the month of August which is called the ION 9000. This is an IoT based advanced configurable meter and is the first of its kind that is going to be launched in India as well.”

Schneider has the eco expert partner programme where it identifies the key partners, trains them, enables them and also sharesopportunities with them that it generates. Almost 80-90% of its business is through its partners and it works with the partners to address the customer opportunities.

“Schneider runs the eco expert partner programme for its partner community in India as well as across the globe. This is an award winning programme where we have got recognition from all over the world. This program allows the partner to use our technologies to ensure that he bring value to his customers,” Dan concludes. n

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BT considers digital transformation as empowering customers, businesses and employees Customer experience is the core element for a business, and to provide personalized and convenient services to the customers a business needs to undergo digital transformation. British Telecom (BT) helps its clients to adopt this transformation and evolve. Sudhir Narang, Managing Director India and VP Network & Services Integration Practice – AMEA, BT, discusses about digital customer experience, transformation of work process, etc Customer experience plays a pivotal role when a customer selects a brand. The experience with a brand becomes the yardstick and it also plays a deciding factor while choosing among brands. Customers these days always look for feasibility in interacting with the companies. To address the customer’s needs, a business needs to go through digital transformation so that it can server in a better way.

“Customer experience is changing.

Customers see the experience they get with a business as a benchmark when they’re choosing between brands. They expect to be able to interact in more ways – by phone, mobile, internet, video, social, email and in person. And for businesses to give customers the kind of service they demand means they need to be ready for digital transformation.

It’s time that businesses need to embrace new channels of communication, transforming all the touch points of their customer journey,” says Sudhir Narang, Managing Director India and VP Network & Services Integration Practice – AMEA, BT. Digital Customer Experience Digital innovations provide personal and convenient experiences which a customer expects. Digital Consumer solutions help a business to create a digital customer experience across the global network. BT helps a business in their journey of transformation and helps to recreate in real life all the engagement, personalization, information, etc which a customer enjoys online.

“Today’s digital consumers increasingly expect to find in real life all the convenience and personalization they enjoy online. Digital innovations help to create personal and convenient experience, and make a visit more entertaining, more theatrical and appealing

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People, productivity and the digital workplace — 2017 Report The research, The Digital Customer 2017 – Chat, Tap, Talk: Eight Key Trends to transform Digital Customer Experience – is based on an independent survey of 5,000 consumers across Belgium, China, Germany, the Netherlands, India, Singapore, South Africa, Spain, the UK and the US. The findings suggest that a growing number of consumers internationally find it easier to deal with organizations via messaging and social media, a trend driven by a surge in their personal use of apps such as WhatsApp.

Sudhir Narang

MD India and VP Network & Services Integration Practice – AMEA, BT

to the customer. Digital Consumer solutions are designed to help customers overcome these obstacles and confidently create a digital customer experience that can then be introduced across their whole network, including globally.

It combines core building blocks for managing digital content, merchandise and sales people, underpinned by infrastructure that makes it easier to share data, make digital solutions work with existing enterprise applications and all in a secure cloud-based wrap. We, at BT, help businesses to recreate in real life all the engagement, personalization, information and choice that the consumer is used to online,” explains Sudhir Narang.

BT transforming work process With digital transformation, BT strengthens its customers and helps them to take their businesses to the next level. Elaborating on the same, Sudhir Narang says, “Here at BT, we consider digital transformation as empowering customers, businesses and employees to do some commendable things. BT takes its customers through the digital transformation, and engage them with innovative, collaborative and exciting presentations, that ultimately help drive business results. With BT cloud-based contact solutions, digital customers are now diving deeper and having richer interactions with their end-customers.” n Aparna Mullick aparna@varindia.com

• Consumers want to use messaging to communicate with organizations. The report found that 65% want to use webchat, up from 45% in 2015.

• Organizations need to integrate social media into their omnichannel strategies.

Reliance on social media among both young and Asian consumers is strengthening. 70% would like to start a customer service conversation on social media and, if needed, transfer to a voice conversation.

• Consumers want to use video for product and service search and support. 42% of consumers are now more likely to use YouTube than a search engine to research new products.

• Organizations need to revisit and invest in their phone services. The phone remains the first choice channel for customer support. As over 80% of consumers report problems with organizations’ websites and apps, it is not surprising that the research found four in five consumers said they would like a telephone number on every webpage and app. When questioned about frustrations and fears, 70% would like voice biometrics for identification and 60% want technology which keeps their money safe and ensures secure card payments over the phone.

• Consumers reward organizations that are simple to use across both talk and type channels. The channel mix is increasingly complex as new media emerges. 81% of consumers say they want organizations always to offer different channels to meet their demands and 62% would like the ability to switch from a web-chat with an agent to a voice or video call.

VAR MOBILITY

HUAWEI announces nova 3 & 3i in India

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U A W E I C o n s u m e r Business Group (CBG) has unveiled the HUAWEI nova series – nova 3 and nova 3i in India. Featuring advanced AI capabilities

and a powerful AI quadcamera, the devices are well placed to deliver the greatest experience to the youth.

HUAWEI nova 3 and nova 3i come with a trendy design that puts the devices at the forefront of craftsmanship. The series combines elegance and

innovative AI to usher in a new era of intelligent devices, offering not only a distinctive user experience but also enhancing the way consumers connect with each other. With unique features like “Huawei AI Shopping” and “AI auto scene recognition”, the products will enable users to seamlessly embrace the AIenhanced life.

When the devices are used to take a selfie, the front-facing cameras can utilize its AI to optimize eight different categories of 200+ scenarios ranging from Blue Sky and Plant, to Beach and Night. HUAWEI nova 3 and nova 3i support dual front-facing cameras with a 24MP primary camera and 2MP secondary camera.

Optiemus Infracom launches BlackBerry Evolve and BlackBerry EvolveX

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ptiemus Infracom has announced the launch of its latest devices – the BlackBerry Evolve and BlackBerry EvolveX. The devices bring together the power

of Android and the trusted security of BlackBerry and reinforce Optiemus Infracom's commitment to deliver innovative and powerful smartphones to Indian consumers. It also

underlines the company’s commitment to “Make in India”, as the smartphones are designed and manufactured at Optiemus’ world-class facility at Noida.

BlackBerry Evolve and B l a c k B e r r y EvolveX fortify Optiemus’ focus on delivering powerful smartphones with stunning yet ergonomic design at competitive price points. The devices are developed with today’s tech-savvy, design-oriented and productivity-driven users in mind. These sport full view 18:9 display, Dolby Surround Sound, dual cameras, enterprisegrade security and privacy, and quick wireless charging technology.

LG launches G7+ThinQ in India at Rs.39, 990

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G Electronics India has announced the launch of latest premium smartphone the LG G7+ThinQ in India.

The LG G7+ThinQ is the perfect smartphone for people who love to live in each moment.

Being an amalgamation of unique features like 1000 nit Super Bright FullVision Display, IP68 for dust and water resistance, BoomBoxSpeakers and Dual 16+16MP AI (Artificial Intelligence) Camera, LG G7+ThinQ are set to redefine the smartphone experience of the consumers by helping them live the important moments like a true companion.

Powered by the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 845 Mobile Platform, the LG G7+ThinQ offers 6GB of RAM and 128 GB of internal storage to run even the most demanding tasks and apps with ease.

The all new LG G7+ThinQ comes deeply integrated with Artificial Intelligence that has a dedicated button which triggers AI tools like Google Assistant and Google Lens.

With Super Far Field Voice Recognition and highly sensitive microphone, it can recognize voice commands from up to five metres. LG has also added new features that make photography on the LG G7ThinQ even more enjoyable than ever.

By using either the standard or AI-enabled Super Wide Camera, it gives the shutterbugs even more creative options to live the moment.

The LG G7+ThinQ sports a new design aesthetic in the G-series.

Carrying on the heritage of LG’s focus on great Smartphone sound, the LG G7+ThinQ is equipped with DTS:X and Hi-Fi Quad DAC for incredibly rich sound.

LAVA launches LAVA Z61 with sharp click camera

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AVA International has announced the launch of LAVA Z61. Z61 carries forward the legacy of LAVA’s Z series smartphones with its stylish design and flagship camera features.

The new Z61 offers “Sharp Click” technology, allowing users to capture even the smallest details, providing unprecedented photography experience.

Powered with an 8MP autofocus rear camera, 5MP front camera (with Screen and LED flash) and an improved Bokeh Mode, Z61 provides a high-end camera experience to its proud owners.

Targeted at consumers looking for a complete smartphone, Z61 is an 18:9 full-screen smartphone with best-in-class design, 1GB RAM, 16GB ROM, 3,000mAh battery priced at Rs.5,750/-. This phone will be available in more than 80,000 retail outlets

in Black and Gold colour options. Z61 variant with 2GB RAM will be launched in August 2018.

Z61design and technology elevates the smartphone experience, with 5.45” HD+ Full Lamination screen along with Corning Gorilla Glass on a 2.5D Curve. It is one of the sleekest smartphones in its category with 8.65mm thickness.

Xiaomi releases Mi A2 in India at Rs.16, 999

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iaomi has expanded its Android One line-up with the introduction of Mi A2, which features powerful photography capabilities and a host of notable upgrades from the previous generation. Mi A2 is now set to take the Android One series to a whole new level, with its wide repertoire of low-light f e a t u r e s, including portrait selfies in low light.

Mi A2 is a photography powerhouse, sporting a 12MP + 20MP rear AI dual camera and a 20MP front camera. It is powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 660 SoC with the powerful Qualcomm Artificial Intelligence Engine (AIE). As a benefit

of the Android One partnership, Mi A2 will have unlimited high-quality photo storage with Google Photos to ensure users will never have to worry about running out of photo

storage.

Mi A2 features a stunning 5.99-inch 18:9 Full Screen Display, protected by a 2.5D Corning Gorilla Glass 5 panel. Measuring just 7.3mm thick, Mi A2 offers great aesthetics and ergonomics.

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Movers & Shakers

IndraNooyi to step down as PepsiCo CEO

CTOs of Jio and Bharti Airtel resign

PepsiCo has confirmed that IndraNooyi will step down as Chief Executive Officer of the company. Her departure is scheduled for October. Nooyi is going to hand over the reins of the multinational conglomerate to Ramon Laguarta, a 22-year veteran of the company who was elected unanimously by PepsiCo's Board of Directors.

Nooyi has remained as one of the most powerful and influential business leaders in the world, being regularly featured on the power lists compiled by Forbes and Fortune magazines. She was also among the few female executives to lead global corporate giants.

Jagbir Singh and ShyamPrabhakarMardikar, the chief technology officers (CTOs) of Reliance Jio and Bharti Airtel have resigned from their respective companies. Reliance Jio Group’s Chief Technology Officer Jagbir Singh had joined the company before the soft launch of its 4G services. Prior to this assignment, Singh was working with Samsung, and had previously worked with Airtel for about a decade.

According to a source, he is moving back to Delhi but did not disclose any further details.

Bharti Airtel's Chief Technology Officer for mobile networks, ShyamPrabhakarMardikar has also put in his papers. He was serving as the CTO of Airtel's mobile network since January 2017.

Rajeev Mittal quits Oracle

IndiaTech names Rameesh Kailasam as its CEO

Rajeev Mittal has joined UiPath as the Managing Director, India after quitting his position as the Vice President Systems with Oracle India. Rajeev has more than 28 years of experience in the IT industry and has has been recognized as leader with deep understanding of emerging markets, building businesses with high performing teams and nurturing talent in the technology world.

Rajeev has the ability to manage complexity, ambiguity, drive for results and his relentless focus on execution has led to many successes in growing businesses. He grew the business 15x in 7 years to multi hundred million USD. Before Microsoft, Rajeev has worked with Avaya as the Managing Director, India & SAARC. He took a short break for two years, to work towards his entrepreneurship dream and had founded Amur Search.

Pegasystems appoints Adriana BokelHerde as Chief People Officer

Pegasystems has appointed Adriana BokelHerde as Chief People Officer and Senior Vice- President. BokelHerde will be responsible for Pega’s global people strategy and operations, reporting to Alan Trefler, Pega’s founder and CEO. She will be based out of the company’s Cambridge, Mass. Headquarters, succeeding Jeff Yanagi who will be retiring from Pega.

For more than 20 years, BokelHerde has held leadership positions in fast-growing companies and is recognized as an innovative, highperforming leader with the ability to architect, execute, and drive business growth.

Sanjeev Chhabra is Director at Brightstar Telecommunications

Brightstar Corp. has appointed Sanjeev Chhabra as the new Director for India business.

Sanjeev, who was responsible for B2B Enterprise Business at Brightstar, has taken over the role from Deval Parikh. He will be responsible for Brightstar’s business across the India market. Sanjeev brings management experience to the position from his 22 years of career in the ICT industry, out of which the last 10 years have been with Brightstar. He has undertaken various roles, including Direct Partner engagement and Vendor relationships. Most recently, he has been the Sr Vice-President – B2B Enterprise Business responsible for profitable growth of the Business Unit.

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IndiaTech.Org, a non-profit, voluntary industry association established with the objective of creating a strong and vibrant internet-based tech and innovation ecosystem in India, has appointed Rameesh Kailasam as its CEO. Rameesh Kailasam is a highly experienced and well-regarded technology, innovation, governance and policy expert.

He brings in significant business experience and expertise in internet, technology and innovation policy space. He comes with a strong history of having worked with government and industry and has authored, conceptualised, and contributed to several thought leadership driven strategic government policies.

Infor appoints Jonathan Wood as its General Manager

Infor has announced the appointment of Jonathan Wood as General Manager, India, Middle East, and Africa (IMEA). Wood has led Infor’s Consulting Services team for Europe since joining in 2016.

Reporting to Cormac Watters, Executive Vice-President & General Manager EMEA, Wood will lead the IMEA business unit from Infor's office in Dubai. Wood will be responsible for reinvigorating the channel, expanding direct customer relationships and forming new strategic alliances.Wood will lead Infor’s customer-centric strategy which will leverage a new Digital Transformation hub within Infor’s Dubai office, where customers and partners will collaborate to imagine and realize their Digital potential.

Hitachi Vantara names Hemant Tiwari as GM for India

Hitachi Vantara has announced the appointment of Hemant Tiwari as vice-president & general manager for India. Tiwari will lead Hitachi Vantara’s business and operations in India with a focus on growing the overall business, building up the partner ecosystem, and accelerating expansion of the company's revenue and market share in India.

With over 36 years of IT industry experience, Tiwari has led highperforming teams and achieved exceptional results in driving business growth, employee engagement, partner relationships and customer loyalty.

Tiwari also worked at Hewlett Packard for over two decades in various senior management positions across Asia and India.

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RNI - NO 72399/1999

Reg. No: DL-SW-01/4030/18-20

Printing Date 18 & 19

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56 pages including cover

Date of Posting 20 & 21 every month