New Large Data Centre Comes Up In Electronic City

Netmagic, an NTT Communications Company and India’s only Data center Infrastructure Lifecycle Management (DILM) service provider has announced the launch of its new data center in Electronic City, Bangalore. This 100,000 sq. ft. data center is the first time Netmagic and NTT Communications have collaborated in building an entire facility from the ground up, and thereby, draws from their combined engineering and operations expertise.

“This is a moment of pride for us, as this new data center will give Indian and multi-national enterprises an opportunity to experience the state-of-the-art data centers that NTT Communications operates across the world. The added advantage of Netmagic’s excellence in IT infrastructure management and service delivery in the Indian enterprise space, gives this data center the capability of becoming the new benchmark for data centers in India, said Akira Arima, President and CEO, NTT Communications at the unveiling of the data center. 

He added, “This facility is part of our Global Cloud Vision to become a genuine global ICT partner for enterprises, providing seamless  ICT solutions such as networks, data centers and applications, thereby capitalizing on the trend of enterprises’ migrating their on-premise systems to the cloud.”

"Bangalore offers a strong growth potential and a supply-constrained market, making this the most opportune moment to launch our new data center. Given the large concentration of data intensive activities in Bangalore, our objective is to accommodate enterprises’ demand to house their critical IT infrastructure closer to them, as well as ensure that our data centers have the scalability to meet their growing needs, while offering highly efficient services at the same time,” said Sharad Sanghi, MD & CEO, Netmagic. “The launch of this data center will enhance the confidence of our customers who have been part of our 16 year old journey and strengthen our position as one of India’s leading IT infrastructure management players”, he added.

This new facility also marks the formal launch of the Nexcenter brand of data center services in India. Under this brand, NTT Communications offers leading-edge data center services across the globe. In India, these services are offered through all 8 Netmagic data centers.

The data center will deliver Netmagic’s entire suite of services including managed co-location, dedicated hosting, cloud computing, IT infrastructure monitoring and management and security. It will provide enterprises customizable hosting space with high power and cooling densities and offer not only individual racks, but also highly secure cages and enclosed server rooms to meet the requirements of large global enterprises.

Consistent with Netmagic’s data center standards, connectivity from multiple telecom providers will be available from physically redundant paths allowing customers to architect on any network of their choice. Extending the ‘carrier neutral’ approach to building data centers, this facility is designed with high levels of redundancies and a stringent focus on security - both physical and logical. Enterprises can expect further attention to detail with amenities, such as a highly secure material handling system, based on bar coding and multiple checkpoints, adequate customer office space, dedicated storage space and heavy equipment handling systems.

One of the other strengths of this facility is that its location is one of the least prone to natural calamities and importantly, allows ready access to key resources. This makes it ideal for large enterprises, across India and other geographies to establish their disaster recovery and business continuity sites.

Over 100 Institutions Across India Now Works With SAP University

SAP India, a subsidiary of SAP AG has announced the success of signing 100 universities across the country through the SAP University Alliances programme. The milestone comes with the latest addition of University Visveswaraya College of Engineering, a top Engineering College in Bangalore. Students at 100 top colleges in India now have access to Information Technology training benefiting more than 250000 students from 1500 universities that have already participated in the SAP program across 120 countries worldwide.

Aligned with SAP’s mission to contribute to economic growth, the SAP University Alliances Program supports engineering, business and Information Technologyprograms in universities and colleges in India by providing students and lecturers with access to SAP software and training. It believes in 5 pillars of Learn, Apply, Share, Recruit and pursuing CSR to help the student community to acquire relevant skills to meet the industry requirements. The SAP training courses enables students to pursue SAP certifications and eventual hiring by SAP, partners and customers. This in turn addresses the industry skills shortage by providing a pool of IT graduates who are already trained with hands-on practice of the SAP software.

“Talent has become the de facto requirement in the technology industry today and SAP sees merit in contributing to talent enhancement efforts and help meet the growing skill demand of the industry,” said Crispian Tan, Director SAP University Alliances Program for the Asia Pacific & Japan region. “This landmark achievement reflects our commitment of ensuring that the next generations of graduates are ready and able to make an immediate impact in the job market and support  SAP’s Global focus of Inspiring Millennials to See SAP as the Employer of Choice or Dream Big to become Entrepreneurs”,  he added.

Mindtree Celebrates 10th Edition Of Osmosis 2014

Mindtree, a global technology services company, today celebrated the grand finale of Osmosis 2014 – its annual technology festival.  With ‘Expert Thinking’ as the theme, Osmosis 2014 engaged not just Mindtree Minds, but went beyond to connect with clients, students, IT professionals, partners and entrepreneurs.

Osmosis is a month-long celebration of technology at Mindtree, with various events and tracks crafted to showcase Mindtree’s technological depth. This year, Osmosis 2014 has five unique tracks – Techathlon, Value-Add Jam, Expert Speak–Webinars and K-Safari.

“We take pride in our diversity, technical expertise and strong values that create the foundation for delivering breakthrough solutions for our clients. As we continue to focus on the fundamental pillars that make a difference to our business, our greatest asset - our people, play a pivotal role in defining our success,” said Krishnakumar Natarajan, CEO and MD, Mindtree.

Techathlon, the technology derivative of the sports event ‘Decathlon’ required participants to take up challenges on coding, optimizing, and blogging. The Value-Add Jam was an event that sparked innovation and brought out a multitude of business and technology ideas that can add value to Mindtree’s clients.

The other events created a highly interactive platform for self-learning by collaboration among the audience and the SMEs. Expert Speak-Webinars provided an opportunity for the experts within Mindtree to share their knowledge both within and outside the organization.

Knowledge Safari culminated the month-long festivities in Osmosis, by taking Mindtree Minds through a ‘technology safari’. The Mindtree facilities transformed into a busy hub, with vibrant stalls put up all over. The stalls feature Mindtree’s technology implementations, partners and invited entrepreneurs. Osmosis 2014 finally concluded with a glittering awards ceremony.

Osmosis 2014 brought together more than 10,000 Mindtree Minds across 14 countries, to collaborate, share knowledge, challenge themselves and celebrate technology through Osmosis – helping knowledge flow spontaneously, across the organization.

SAP Labs India To Host Barcamp On March 29, 2014

SAP Labs India will be hosting the seventh edition of Barcamp Bangalore Spring Edition 2014 (#barcampblr) on the 29th of March at the Whitefield campus. #Barcampblr is an open to public, participatory, workshop focused event around people, ideas and collaboration.  

The unconference has no fixed agenda and will cover a variety of  topics including technology, design, entrepreneurship, business and management, photography and many more. Registered sessions for the Spring Edition include “7 Ultimate techniques for designing great User Experience”, “Wonderful world of Android userland customization”, “Engineering Virality: How to design a purple cow” and “How to make Non-Geeks understand Geek”, to name a few. In addition to these sessions, #barcampblr will also feature “Techlash”, a tech rapid-fire round where speakers present their ideas or demo creations through a series of five minute time slots. In its previous edition, Barcamp Bangalore witnessed over 250 participants in attendance and had over 60 sessions.

Is Education The Only Way To Make A Better World?

Giving doesn’t anymore remain just a charitable act, at least, for the corporate India. The new Companies Act, 2013 mandates that companies spend 2 percent of their net profit on the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR).

While this will lead to an estimated CSR spending in India running over a whopping US$2000 million annually, what is more crucial to bringing a meaningful result-oriented change in this philanthropy paradigm is a sincere sense of responsibility towards human development.

Fortunately, for this country- which otherwise is besieged with a diverse set of problems plaguing the prospects of social inclusion- a few corporates have already been showing the way, the rest must emulate.

While much knowledge of the large-hearted CSR activities of  global companies, headquarted in India,  which is already in public domain, for helping the  noble practice  prosper, it’s time India finds out, acknowledges and encourages the other lesser known  but sincere ‘Givers’.

Meet one of them, working silently from the last many years, without blowing any trumpets to the external world. The silent but mighty- WNS Cares Foundation. For Shamini Murugesh, the Honorary Chief Mentor of WNS Cares Foundation, the philanthropic arm of the business process management giant WNS (Holdings) Limited, spending on community development is not forced but spontaneous.

A scribe-turned –writer-model – turned humanitarian, who contributed for Business Standard and several other publications, Shamini has been able to turn some great tides impacting the social deficit, not just within India but globally.

Within a span of just couple of years, WNS Cares Foundation has impacted the education of close to 40,000 underprivileged children living in communities across the globe around its campuses through effective CSR activities.

Wife of Keshav Murugesh, the group CEO of WNS is jointly responsible for creating a sustainable organisation where employees could interact with each other outside the work environment. Her high-point, however, lies in the fact that she had been naturally inclined towards doing her bit for ‘inclusion’ ever since she was a child.

She realised in the very beginning that education is a common requirement across the globe and with WNS’ global presence, it could be the universal denominator that can be leveraged for the foundation’s objectives.

She also realized early that empowering underprivileged children’s education through libraries, computer centres, volunteering to be role models and teaching them the real life skills will expand their horizons and was a replicable model universally.

In fact, when the idea of creating a concerted CSR program for WCF came up, an employee poll was undertaken at the company. The poll feedback reflected clearly that education was the most important cause that could be supported. “I have always been clear that we are not here to do charity but we just help children help themselves,” she says.  

WCF’s long time focus on education is also in sync with the government’s emphasis as under one of the revised schedule on CSR under the new Companies Act, ‘education’ figures as one of the prominent issues alongside healthcare, gender equality, environmental sustainability and rural development that are critical for inclusive growth. WCF also laid emphasis on the qualitative man-hours that could be extracted from the volunteers and not funds.

“To a lot of donors of money to WCF, some of whom were my friends, I asked to become a volunteer and help the cause through their time. It’s easy to contribute money but any CSR activity can be sustained only if along with money, volunteers join you and stick to their stated commitments towards the community,” she underlines.

Shamini, who holds an M Phil in economics from Madras University moved from Kolkata with husband Keshav to Mumbai in 2002 when he had just left his job at ITC and joined Syntel Ltd. 

At Syntel (again as a chief mentor) she helped create S’Prayas, an organisation that worked with children providing education solutions. She effectively used S’Prayas to motivate Syntel employees to interact outside the office and also impact positively many young children.

World's Largest Global Intercloud From Cisco & Partners

As businesses increasingly embrace private, public, and hybrid clouds to cost-effectively and quickly deliver business applications and services, Cisco today announced plans to build the world’s largest global Intercloud – a network of clouds – together with a set of partners.  The Cisco global Intercloud is being architected for the Internet of Everything, with a distributed network and security architecture designed for high-value application workloads, real-time analytics, “near infinite” scalability and full compliance with local data sovereignty laws. The first-of-its-kind open Intercloud, which will feature APIs for rapid application development, will deliver a new enterprise-class portfolio of cloud IT services for businesses, service providers and resellers.

Cisco expects to invest over $1 billion to build its expanded cloud business over the next two years.  Its partner-centric business model, which enables partner capabilities and investments, is expected to generate a rapid acceleration of additional investment to drive the global scale and breadth of services that Cisco plans to deliver to its customers. 

The company plans to deliver Cisco Cloud Services with and through Cisco partners.  The following organizations, which are either planning to deliver Cisco Cloud Services or have endorsed Cisco’s global Intercloud initiative, represent a sampling of the kinds of global partners Cisco expects to work with to build its cloud business: leading Australian service provider Telstra; Canadian business communications provider Allstream; European cloud company Canopy, an Atos company; cloud services aggregator, provider and wholesale technology distributor Ingram Micro Inc.; global IT and managed services provider Logicalis Group; global provider of enterprise software platforms for business intelligence, mobile intelligence, and network applications MicroStrategy, Inc.; enterprise data center IT solutions provider OnX Managed Services; information availability services provider SunGard Availability Services; and leading global IT, consulting and outsourcing company Wipro Ltd.

“Customers, providers and channel partners alike are turning to Cisco to create open and highly secure hybrid cloud environments, and they want to rapidly deploy valuable enterprise-class cloud experiences for key customers – all while mitigating the risk of capital investment,” said Robert Lloyd, president of development and sales, Cisco. “The timing is right for Cisco and its partners to invest in a groundbreaking, application-centric global Intercloud to provide broader reach and faster time to market. Together, we have the capability to enable a seamless world of many clouds in which our customers have the choice to enable the right, highly secure cloud for the right workload, while creating strategic advantages for rapid innovation, and ultimately, business growth.”

Accelerating the Internet of Everything

Hosted across a global network of Cisco and partner data centers, the Cisco global Intercloud will offer an expanded suite of value-added application- and network-centric cloud services to accelerate the Internet of Everything.

The networked connection of people, data, processes and things, dubbed the Internet of Everything, is expected to be a $19 trillion economic opportunity in the coming decade.  The Internet of Everything movement, which is creating an entirely new set of requirements for globally distributed and highly secure clouds, has empowered Cisco and its partners to initiate the development of a massively scalable, flexible and highly secure Intercloud to deliver the mobile, collaborative and rich video cloud services that enable today’s new connected experiences.

The Cisco OpenStack-enabled Intercloud is designed to allow organizations and users to combine and move workloads – including data and applications – across different public or private clouds as needed, easily and securely, while maintaining associated network and security policies. It will also utilize Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) to optimize application performance and to make rolling out new services much faster. Cisco will improve application security, compliance, auditing and mobility by using ACI’s centralized, programmable security policy to enable fine-grained control and isolation at scale; suitable for private and public cloud environments.

Tips To Migrate Windows XP To Windows 7

Microsoft’s support for Windows XP systems is going to end on April 8, 2014 and it is estimated that 16 percent of the 4 million units of Microsoft PC install base for large enterprises in India are yet to migrate to Windows 7.  The cause of concern for many XP users remain that once Microsoft stops releasing XP updates and support, the operating system will become vulnerable to malware, viruses and hackers. Moreover, migration of Windows XP require a good amount of time and money.

But there is a cost-effective, time saving solution that Novell promises to the end users.

With Novell ZENworks, one can migrate quickly and easily to Windows 7—without disrupting user productivity or breaking the IT bank. It includes products that span the entire migration lifecycle—Assess, Optimize, Migrate, Patch and Maintain—and facilitates smooth, "near-zero touch" migrations. Make Novell ZENworks your preferred Windows 7 migration tool, and see how easy we make it, every step of the way.

* OPTIMIZE

One of the key issues you'll face during a Windows XP to Windows 7 migration is making sure that your users have the applications they need before, during and after the migration. By virtualizing all your Windows applications with Novell ZENworks Application Virtualization, you can keep your workforce productive at all times. Deploy new apps with no conflicts and zero installation times, and let users take them wherever they go!

* MIGRATE

Once you have identified your Windows 7 opportunities, how do you make the move quickly, automatically and cost-effectively? Loaded with powerful imaging and personality migration capabilities, Novell ZENworks Configuration Management facilitates Windows 7 migrations while preserving desktop and application settings and minimizing the business disruptions that normally accompany major OS upgrades. If you're still using ZENworks 7, make the move to Windows 7 with Novell ZENworks 11.

* PATCH

Once you have successfully migrated to Windows 7, Novell ZENworks Patch Management defends your endpoints from the devastating cost of viruses without burdening your IT staff. It offers efficient security patch management that keeps your endpoints safe without all the overhead.

* MAINTAIN

Finally, improve the quality and efficiency of your IT services with Novell Service Desk. It'll keep your IT ecosystem humming while maintaining SLAs and facilitating ITIL best practices throughout the migration process.