Tata Communications Launches ‘Secure Connected Digital Experience’ to Help Enterprises Rebuild

Tata Communications, a global digital ecosystem enabler, today announced the launch of ‘Secure Connected Digital Experience’ (SCDx), a new proposition for enterprises to help them rebuild and adapt their organisations for a post-COVID world.

The COVID-19 pandemic forced businesses around the world to adapt suddenly to survive the huge disruption to everyday life. With many countries now emerging cautiously from lockdown, businesses are looking to redesign and restructure their operations for a transformed landscape.

Tata Communications’ SCDx proposition is intended to meet this growing, worldwide demand for new ways of operating, which includes far higher levels of working from home, rising security risks, a shift to digital commerce and more contactless experiences for employees, customers and supply chain partners. It will help companies currently relying on short-term fixes, such as consumer-grade applications or employees’ home broadband connections, by providing holistic, secure, enterprise-level digital solutions that address current challenges and are fit for the long term.

The SCDx proposition consists of three offerings:

* Tata Communications Secure Connected Digital Workplace enables enterprise employees (those typically working from the office as well as those working in the field), to work seamlessly and securely from anywhere through industrialised, scalable and high performance remote workplace solutions for complete workplace readiness.

* Tata Communications Digital Customer Experience Platform recreates the in-store experience online for B2C companies, with the next generation of enterprise commerce and video collaboration solutions for superior digital customer engagement.

* As supply chains become increasingly digital and transparent, SCDx will enable the supply chain ecosystem with secure access to enterprise core applications and significantly improved performance for third parties.

A.S Lakshminarayanan, MD and CEO, Tata Communications says, “COVID-19 is acting as a catalyst and accelerator of business transformation. In recent months, millions of employees have experienced working from home, consumers have embraced digital shopping and delivery, and businesses have adapted to doing more, virtually. These changes have created a new reality and we are not going back to how things were done before.

As enterprises shift from focusing on business continuity to business recovery and growth, they urgently need to rethink their digital strategies and transform themselves to prosper in this digital-first ecosystem. With Secure Connected Digital Experience, our goal is to enable enterprises to adopt new digital working models, accelerate their time to market and drive agility and resilience, giving them the tools to innovate, invent, and redefine their employee, customer and supply chain experience.”

Within the Tata Communications Secure Connected Digital Workplace offering, Tata Communications will provide a range of services to enterprises looking to enhance and safeguard the employee experience. It will provide secure and high-performance, zero-trust network access (ZTNA) through a partnership with NetFoundry, a subsidiary of Tata Communications. The zero-trust solution provides employees secure access to applications and data in the cloud, regardless of location, device or broadband connectivity, with 3-10X performance acceleration. This is vital for companies who want to digitally transform and embrace higher levels of remote working but need confidence that employees can access documents and apps securely and with an enterprise-grade experience, even on their home broadband connection.

Tata Communications Secure Connected Digital Workplace solution will also offer enterprise-grade collaboration and security solutions, ensuring that dispersed teams can collaborate without compromise, with seamless features like video, voice, messaging, etc. as well as secure access to applications behind enterprise firewalls to boost innovation, productivity and efficiency.

Through its connected employee solution, it will provide IOT-based employee health and safety wearables and SafePassTM smart ID cards, which enable effective social distancing, employee tracing and other safety norms, while enhancing worker wellbeing and minimising workplace risks in an industrial or campus setup.

NetFoundry was a key enabler in the digital transformation of FWD Insurance, one of the leading and fastest growing insurers in the Asia Pacific, providing FWD with a cloud-native, zero trust, software-only platform for FWD's cloud access use cases. When COVID-19 hit, FWD used the same platform to extend the secure access service edge (SASE) architecture for simple, zero trust remote access, while providing a high-quality end user experience for internal users and supply chain partners.

Shilpa Tumma, Business Information Security Officer, FWD said, “NetFoundry’s cloud-native connectivity has been the perfect match to aid FWD on our digital transformation and cloud-native application journey. In the current pandemic situation, although our usage has multiplied, NetFoundry easily scaled to cater to our demands to facilitate work from home in a few simple clicks, for both internal users and external parties. The solution helps us create AppWANs with zero trust micro-segmentation. NetFoundry multiplies the throughput by 3 to 4 times, giving the best user experience even for very huge file transfers.”  

Tata Communications’ Secure Connected Digital Experience builds on the company’s focus towards platforms and solutions for customers. The proposition leverages Tata Communications’ managed service capabilities and infrastructure and aims to drive intelligence across next generation connectivity; collaboration; cloud, edge and security; NetFoundry; voice, and more.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, Tata Communications has been supporting customers to deploy relevant solutions in record time; in many cases, delivering changes and upgrades in less than six hours. Tata Communications has enabled tens of thousands of employees globally for remote working across more than 150 organisations including Tata Consultancy Services, with many more under deployment.

Vedantu Assists the Government of Karnataka to Train Doctors Online on COVID-19

Train Doctors

* Karnataka Ministry of Health reinvents its training and communication channel

* Goes online using Vedantu’s W.A.V.E platform to train the doctors to battle COVID 19

Vedantu, a pioneer in LIVE online learning platform in India, is assisting the Ministry of Health (Govt of Karnataka) to impart COVID  training and communication to doctors across  the State. 

To assist the Karnataka State Government & Doctors in the ongoing battle against Covid-19, Vedantu has volunteered to offer its WAVE platform. This initiative is helping the ministry to reach out to 250+ doctors across Karnataka and train them LIVE using Vedantu’s platform to improve their understanding on the following - 

* How to diagnose a Covid-19 patient

* What precautions are to be taken while treating a Covid-19 patient

* Which are the nearest hospitals that are available for testing

* How to attend to numerous queries of individuals about Covid-19 

* Daily preventive measures to be taken to prevent the Covid-19 

* This training is led by senior officials - Dr. Ravi Kumar, Senior Regional Director at Ministry of Health & FW, Govt of India and Dr Mahamood Shariff, Research officer, NVBDCP, Directorate of H&FW, Govt of Karnataka.

Speaking on the partnership, Dr. PC Jaffer (IAS), Secretary to Govt (Expenditure), Finance Department, Karnataka Govt Secretariat, said, “In the current times, taking the risk of face to face training was out of question for us. It was imperative to find a solution that mirrors, but also has the same impact as the face to face training. Hence, we decided to choose Vedantu’s platform, given its rich and interactive platform capabilities, to train and converse online with our COVID warriors across the state. We are glad as our training sessions are happening smoothly now and we continue our fight against COVID.

“It is Vedantu’s great honour to support doctors who are in the front line of the fight against the pandemic. We are happy to extend our support to the Government of Karnataka through our W.A.V.E platform to deliver their training sessions to doctors LIVE and Online " said Shivani Suri, Chief Marketing Officer, Vedantu.

Will Cisco layoff 6,600 employees?

Is it pinkslips time at Cisco? Predicting a significant drop in revenue for the fourth quarter, a JP Morgan analyst has reported that Cisco Systems Inc "could" soon announce a workforce reduction of 10 percent (this could be equal to about 6,600 employees).

In his 49-page first-quarter 2009 preview of communications equipment and networking companies, analyst, Ehud Gelblum, of JP Morgan wrote, "We expect Cisco to guide fourth fiscal quarter revenue down 17-22%, year over year, as demand continues to deteriorate, in-line with our estimate for a 21 per cent year over year decline," "We believe Cisco could also announce a 10% headcount reduction, which we calculate could save $900M annually," he wrote.

The recent lowering of sales projections by two of Cisco's competitor's Juniper Network and F5 Network has led to a similar speculation about the company.

Cisco spokesman reportedly refused to comment on JP Morgan report directly. However, in a statement he said that on our fiscal second quarter 2009 earnings call in February we discussed a limited restructuring where we could in the near term see a total reduction of between 1500 and 2000 jobs company wide. This does not represent a broad-scale layoff in our workforce.

The spokesman added that this limited restructuring is part of our ongoing, targeted realignment of resources. While Cisco constantly manages its business priorities, resources and overall employee alignment as part of our overall business management process, we are sensitive to the impact these decisions have on employees during this challenging economic environment. We are doing everything possible to minimize the impact on employees affected by the limited restructuring.

Indiatimes

AT&T Looks for Customers for Center in India

AT&T Inc., a US-based company offering advanced IP-based business communications services, is set to acquire customers from IT, ITES, manufacturing and finance service companies for its newly launched data center in India.

AT&T set up its India data center in Bangalore last December. Since then the company is looking at the growing demand from multinational customers in India for online data centers with highly resilient facilities and a wide range of IT infrastructure management services.

Talking to CXOtoday, Gopi Gopinath, chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T Global Network Services India, said, "Since the data center has just become operational, we have not got any customers in India so far, but the data center has been build to 'Green' specifications laid down by the parent company across all data centers."

The Whitefield center has a 5,000 sq ft of capacity and can expand unlimitedly. It is part of a $1 billion planned AT&T global network and portfolio investment for 2009. Data center customers will have access to a wide range of fully integrated managed hosting, application and networking services to support their data and e-commerce needs. Connectivity to the centre can be supported with AT&T's existing suite of managed data services in India.

The data center is built to the same rigid specifications consistent with AT&T's other 37 global data centers and are enabled with services that proactively manage customers' hosting solutions for predictable application performance. They are protected from intrusion and failure with the same multi-layered security, failsafe redundancy, diversity measures, and rapid response recovery measures built into each data center.

"We will be able to support multinational customers in India who turn to AT&T for integrated hosting and network solutions, allowing them to focus on running their businesses," said Gopinath.

The center is directly connected to AT&T's global MPLS backbone to offer a portfolio of hosting solutions with network performance and features. Among them are greater agility when making real-time changes to IT environments, more control to extend applications to the customer's premises or to other data centers, and the ability to include 'on network' capabilities in a customer solution.

CXotoday

Will global tech spending decline in 2009?

Technology companies face a bumpy ride in 2009. Global business and government spending on computer, software and communications products and consulting services is expected to decline 3 percent this year, Forrester Research said in a report due out Tuesday.

This would mark the first decline since 2002, when information-technology spending dropped 6 percent after falling the same amount in 2001.

However, this downturn is not expected to last as long. Forrester projects tech spending to recover next year, rising as much as 9 percent in 2010.

In addition to the recession, the strengthening dollar is also to blame for the drop-off Forrester sees this year. Just as the weak U.S. currency boosted the growth rate of technology purchases made in dollars in 2008, the now-stronger dollar will hurt it in 2009, according to Forrester. Western Europe's technology spending rate is a good illustration of the currency discrepancy: measured in dollars, tech purchases in the region will be down 7 percent in 2009. Tech purchases in euros will be up 1 percent.

To neutralize the effect of currency changes, Forrester also projected the global technology market using a ``basket'' of local currencies, weighed for how big a share of the market each region holds. Using this measure, technology purchases are expected to have grown by 4 percent in 2008 and post growth of 3 percent in 2009, and 6 percent in 2010.

Certain aspects of technology will fare better. For example, Forrester expects software purchases to total $388 billion this year, the same as in 2008. But computer equipment purchases, which includes personal computers, servers and storage devices _ are expected to decline 4 percent, to $434 billion. That's because businesses often see software as a moneysaving tool, while buying new computer equipment is something that can be put off until more prosperous times.

There are other trends at play, too, such as an ongoing decline in the server market, independent of the economy, said Forrester analyst Andrew Bartels. More companies are embracing server virtualization, a technology that allows one server to function as multiple machines, saving companies money and energy. Businesses are also realizing that their employees can use BlackBerrys, iPhones and small laptops known as netbooks for work. So, the analyst said, rather than issuing workers both a PC and a BlackBerry, companies might stick with just a BlackBerry.

A decline in demand for personal computers and other electronics weighed on the semiconductor industry for much of 2008. Intel Corp., the company behind the bulk of microprocessors that serve as the brains of PCs, lowered its fourth quarter revenue guidance for the second time last week amid weaker than expected demand.

While 2009 does not look good when it comes to tech spending, things aren't as dismal for the sector as they were in 2001 and 2002, after the bursting of the 1990s Internet bubble. In each of those two years, Bartels noted, technology spending declined 6 percent _ and that would have been true regardless of currency fluctuations.

Since then, technology has become so interwoven into how a company operates that it's no longer considered discretionary spending.

``It is the muscle of companies,'' Bartels said. ``It allows them to do what they want to do.''

Agencies

3G auction in India on January 09

A one-time fee would be levied on GSM operators holding 2G frequencies beyond 6.2 MHz The Government of India decided on Tuesday to hold the auction of the spectrum for third generation (3G) mobile phone services in January 2009, as scheduled.

The decision was taken at a meeting Prime Minister Manmohan Singh held with Finance Minister P. Chidambaram and Communications and Information Technology Minister A. Raja in New Delhi.

In the closed-door meeting, it was also decided to increase spectrum user charges for all existing telecom operators, both using CDMA and GSM technologies. A one-time fee would be levied on GSM operators who hold second generation (2G) radio frequencies beyond the 6.2 MHz mark.
Vodafone had recently written to the government seeking a delay in auctions to early 2009, whereas Bharti Airtel wanted the 3G auctions to be held in time.

Earlier the government had told that the auction would be held by December 31, 2008. The revenue from the AGR (Adjusted Gross Revenue) route would go up. The meeting decided to hike the AGR by one per cent for those operators who hold up to 8 MHz frequency. For those with more than 8 MHz, the AGR has been hiked by two per cent.

The meeting also discussed the issue of offloading of stocks by Swan and Unitech.