SAP HANA For Production Use On VMware vSphere 5.5

To empower customers to innovate, simplify and move toward a software-defined data center architecture, SAP AG  and VMware has announced that the SAP HANA platform on VMware vSphere 5.5 for production use has been released to customers. By combining the power of SAP HANA with VMware vSphere 5.5, a foundational component of VMware vCloud Suite, customers can innovate and simplify their data centers by achieving faster time-to-value, higher service levels and lower total cost of ownership (TCO).

“SAP HANA has led the market as the real-time enterprise platform by driving IT simplicity and by enabling breakthrough innovations for business,” said Bernd Leukert, member of the Executive Board of SAP AG. “Together with VMware, we are enabling customers to operate their SAP HANA-based mission-critical applications in virtual environments with confidence and to accelerate their journey to software-defined data centers and ultimately to the cloud.”

“Our customers are evolving their IT infrastructures from physical environments to a software-defined data center architecture and they are looking for solutions that provide agility, high availability, elasticity, efficiency and control for their most mission-critical and demanding in-production enterprise environments,” said Pat Gelsinger, CEO, VMware. “The SAP and VMware partnership is truly transformative. We are delighted to further extend that partnership and answer those customer needs by certifying SAP HANA for production use on VMware vSphere 5.5.”

“AMG-Mercedes is now live in production with SAP HANA and VMware vSphere 5.5 with a 1TB memory configuration, accelerating our move to a software-defined data center,” said Reinhard Breyer, CIO, AMG. “We believe virtualized SAP HANA with VMware vSphere could be the key to our future, as we move to cut operational costs and simplify our data center operations.”

“SAP HANA on VMware vSphere is in production at EMC to run our next-generation SAP ERP system, and it is delivering tremendous value to our company,” said Bill Reid, senior director, IT, EMC. “We have increased capacity of SAP HANA five times without growing headcount, are experiencing 99.9 percent uptime, can deploy new SAP HANA instances in minutes and are realizing significant OPEX and CAPEX reductions.”

SAP HANA support of VMware vSphere 5.5’s virtualized environment will help further simplify and streamline data center operation for customers implementing a data center virtualization strategy. It will also accelerate provisioning of new SAP HANA instances for production use. SAP HANA customers can benefit from increased infrastructure utilization, agility and productivity with the combined solution.

·* SAP HANA on vSphere has been released to customers on certified SAP HANA appliances or on SAP HANA tailored data center integration application-verified hardware.

*  Up to 1TB and 32 physical cores (64 virtual cores) per VMware vSphere instance are supported

* SAP HANA supports VMware vSphere capabilities for management of customer system landscape, including vMotion, Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and VMware High Availability (HA)

* Additional deployment best-practices and consideration are available via the SAP Notes tool and www.saphana.com.

Avon Global Goes Live With Pitney Bowes Mailstream

Pitney Bowes, a global leader in mailstream and document management solutions, has installed the Pitney Bowes Mailstream Evolution (MSE) automated inserting system at Avon Global Pvt. Ltd. in Chennai. The MSE system is one of the world's most advanced mail finishing lines combining processing speed and document integrity with per-mail piece FileBase tracking. Any BFSI, Telecom, Utilities, Ecommerce or Services organization that sends statements or any other form of communication to its clients, can add much greater efficiencies and unparalleled integrity to its processes by using Pitney Bowes technology. As a new entrant in transactional mail fulfillment and variable data printing, Avon Global is now able to provide more value added services to their clients owing to the MSE’s capabilities.

Rohan Mathur, GM Middle East and Head of Enterprise Sales for India said, “We are very excited with our association with Avon Global. Pitney Bowes MSE system offers operational efficiency along with modular flexibility. Our clients operate in a highly competitive and changing environment, therefore managing multiple jobs on the same machine with the shortest turn-around time is very essential. Through this installation, Chennai gets its first MSE system, taking Avon to new heights of excellence and customer satisfaction.”

“Pitney Bowes runs a direct sales and service organization for the Enterprise Business segment and being the only organization in this space with direct operations in India gave a sense of comfort. As the mailing industry grows, a majority of corporate from BFSI, Telecom and other sectors like Hospitality etc. will begin to outsource their mailing jobs to mailers; We wish to remain focused on attracting these jobs with the world class technology and service.” said, Vasanthakrishnan TRa, Founder, Avon Global Solutions Private Limited.

“Standard trends in the market are short print and finishing runs, faster turn-around times and increasing customer SLA expectations. Due to our global and local experience, Pitney Bowes is well positioned to address these trends and more importantly, back these trends with adequate services and solutions, given the critical nature of reaching customers.” said Rohan Mathur.

The Mailstream Evolution Inserting System is the successor to the highly reliable Pitney Bowes FPS Split Drive Inserting System. The Mailstream Evolution Inserting System incorporates several upgrades that provide greater flexibility, productivity and integrity. The Mailstream Evolution Inserting System processes up to 14,000 mail pieces in one hour for regular-size letters, 12,000 pieces per hour for 6x9 envelopes; and 9,000 pieces per hour of flats mail. The system can be customized through a range of flexible features and capabilities that can help mass mailers achieve both current and future business needs.

“With Pitney Bowes as our technology partner, it gives us the sense of comfort that we have the required back up and support in place. We wanted to partner with a company that has solutions right from pre-print document enhancement to per piece tracking and has the service excellence and reach.” said Vasanthakrishnan T Ra.

Gemalto Accelerates M2M Services In ADLink

Gemalto, a leading digital security company, announces that its Machine-to-Machine (M2M) Software as a Service (SaaS) solution is providing remote PC monitoring and real-time maintenance for ADLink, a global provider of embedded industrial computing products and services. ADLink industrial PCs are used to manage and control business processes and assets such as medical equipment, digital signage, communications infrastructure and industrial automation.
  Gemalto's SensorLogic Agent and Application Enablement Platform tighten and simplify ADLink control and monitoring solution deployments, and greatly accelerate new project timelines by six months to a year. This device-to-cloud offer allows all ADLink customers to continuously monitor their devices and respond immediately to critical situations. Data collected by the monitoring software agent - including CPU speed, system restart reason, and total operation hours - is then transferred to the cloud. A web-based dashboard can be securely accessed from anywhere at any time, allowing users to immediately assess performance levels.

"The flexible Gemalto solution is ideally equipped to serve our wide range of embedded solution customers across many different vertical markets without the need for a dedicated software stack for each application," said Dirk Finstel, CEO EMEA at ADLink. "Gemalto's strong technical support helped us quickly port SEMA Cloud to ADLink devices for an accelerated launch along with the ability to scale up as business and technology needs expand." 

"ADLink's device-to-cloud strategy is a new model for all critical industrial businesses, demonstrating the impact and benefits of M2M on both instant data collection and management," said Laetitia Jay, Vice President of M2M Solutions and Services at Gemalto. "The solution sets a benchmark for easy to deploy M2M services offering new revenue streams for service providers, added value for customers and optimizing operations with improved Edge-to-Enterprise communications." 

Xerox Holds Innovative XRCI Open 2014 Symposium

Xerox Research Centre India (XRCI), Xerox’s latest global research location that captures innovation opportunities for Xerox in emerging markets to advance Xerox’s position as the leading global provider of document and business process services conducted XRCI Open 2014 - Xerox India’s 1^st Open Innovation Symposium in Bangalore. The event saw the participation of eminent institutes namely IISc, IIT Bombay, IIT Madras, IIT Kharagpur, IIIT Hyderabad, IIIT Delhi, IIM Indore, Singapore Management University among others as a part of panel discussions, keynotes, and poster presentations. 

Traditionally, Xerox has been actively engaged in productive collaborations with academia through a number of initiatives such as research grants and open innovation projects. The goal of XRCI Open was to further strengthen ties with the academic research community in India and to encourage researchers to work on key problems across different technical domains, such as data analytics, machine learning and optimizations, mobile and distributed computing, human computation, game theory, ethnography and design.

“We are proud of our rich history of innovations, and the same innovative spirit and passion continues to drive us”, said Manish Gupta, Vice President, Xerox Corp and Director of Xerox Research Centre in India during his welcome address. Manish spoke about innovations from Xerox Innovation Group in industry verticals like transportation, healthcare, education and banking, and referred to exciting opportunities to leverage technology to make a difference in the world at large, and especially, emerging markets like India.

Highlights of the events included keynote talks, poster presentation from students and panel discussions on two emerging technology topics.  The first keynote address was by Professor Rishikesha T. Krishnan, Director and Professor of Strategic Management at the Indian Institute of Management Indore that centered on a study of corporate innovation centers in India, addressing issues from a strategic perspective as well as from the perspective of an individual contributor working at these centers. In order to create successful products, Prof. Krishnan stressed that it is very important to first immerse oneself into the lives of the concerned people and know what their real needs are.

The first panel discussion addressed ‘’Smart Cities” movement emphasis on the nature, scope and challenges of the concept.  Eminent panelists Prof. T. G. Sitharam (IISc), Mr. Prashanth Bachu (EMBARQ India), Prof. Vinayak S. Naik (IIIT Delhi), Prof. Niloy Ganguly (IIT Kharagpur) and Prof. Archan Misra (Singapore Management University), shared their opinions and perspectives about how mobile technologies, crowd-sensing and big data analytics will play an active role in new developments in this realm for emerging markets such as India. A key conclusion of the panel was that smart city applications associated with retail, transportation, logistics, location-based services, sustainability and social networking are here to stay. 

The second panel discussion was on “Data Science”, a terminology introduced off late, to refer to different data mining, high performance computing, machine learning and statistical techniques that are used to enable sophisticated analytics over Big Data.  The distinguished panelists Prof Umesh Bellur (IIT Bombay), Prof. B. Ravindran (IIT Madras), Prof. P. Krishna Reddy (IIIT-Hyderabad) and Dr. Ashish Mahabal (Caltech) shared their perspectives on role and significance of analyzing Big Data in astronomy, smart grid and agriculture domains and laid out interesting research challenges that need to be addressed.

The afternoon session began with another enthralling keynote address by Pramod Varma, Chief Architect at UIDAI (Aadhaar project). During the talk, Dr. Varma shared his experiences with building the technology system that powers the Aadhaar project. Aadhaar, India's Unique Identity Project, has become the largest biometric identity system in the world, already covering more than 580 million people. Its strength lies in the simplicity of its design, sound strategy, and technology backbone issuing one million Aadhaar numbers and doing 600 trillion biometric matches every day. 

The essence of the symposium was to encourage students and researchers from industry and academia to discover opportunities to collaborate and develop pioneering solutions that matter to the world. The event also showcased a gallery of posters presented by research scholars. The posters were selected through a peer-review process, and awards were given for the top two posters based on technical merit and presentation style.

Mindtree Is Platinum Sponsor At STAREAST 2014

Mindtree, a global technology services company, will unveil its latest innovations for testing in a connected world as a Platinum Sponsor of STAREAST, the premier event for software testers and quality assurance professionals. Mindtree’s Rajeevan Velayudhan will conduct a technical presentation entitled “Is Your Test Strategy Ready for a Connected World?” on Thursday, May 8, 2014 at 9:45am.

The presentation will highlight how QA organizations need to re-think the protection of entire customer experiences while ensuring high quality individual applications. Velayudhan will illustrate how building a map of end-to-end business processes and their interactions with each other is no longer just a domain of individual application teams. This new approach is ‘user centric’ whereby teams move from testing applications to testing customer experiences over multi-channel platforms in distributed locations and networks.  The benefit of this approach is improvements in quality, cost and agility while ensuring QA gets its rightful seat at portfolio strategy discussions and becomes more than just a project activity. 

Dominique Raviart, analyst at NelsonHall states that “Mindtree is developing an end-user approach to the software testing work it conducts. This end-user approach is of course found in usability testing engagements and expands towards Mindtree training its testing practice personnel to consider the end-user side of a testing project. Mindtree is therefore not offering a distinct service offering but a dual approach to testing, both as a technical service and an end-user perspective. This is a nice differentiator in an IT market that is gradually leaning towards consumerization and putting end-users back at its center.”

“At Mindtree, we ensure that our clients deliver the best value to their customers while maximizing efficiencies and collaboration,” said Manas Chakraborty, Global Head of QA at Mindtree. “Our innovative approach is based on deploying scalable frameworks & models that examine entire business processes and focus on customer centricity.”

Mindtree experts will be at the conference to discuss the approach and components that will help client organizations adopt this transformational approach to Quality Assurance.

Now Follow Superstar Rajinikanth On Twitter

One of India’s most prolific and influential superstars, the inimitable Rajinikanth, makes his much awaited debut on Twitter today. This also marks the superstar’s debut in the digital space. CA Media Digital’s first venture, Fluence - India’s leading celebrity digital network, will manage Rajinikanth’s digital interests, to further create and leverage the Thalaivar’s social presence. Twitter users around the world can follow and converse live with India’s original superhero, superstar Rajinikanth by visiting Twitter.com/SuperStarRajini or @SuperStarRajini on their Twitter app.

Fans can also follow the actor's Twitter account by simply dialling, or giving a missed call at 080 6700 6666 to access their idol’s Tweets, which is possible due to a global integration between Twitter India and ZipDial.

One of India’s most influential and bankable movie stars, Rajinikanth's mass popularity and appeal is largely drawn from his mannerisms and stylized dialogue delivery. He has received India's third highest honour, the Padma Bhushan, for his contribution to Indian cinema.

A cultural icon, the normally reticent superstar is looking forward to interacting with his fans on the platform. “I have always believed that my career graph is a miracle I owe my fans. I have been contemplating joining the social media platform for a while to connect with them, hear what they have to say and share my thoughts.  Unfortunately I never got around to it until now. By partnering with Fluence I am confident that I have the best team and the best guides who will help me connect with my audience” said the Superstar. "I decided to start with Twitter because I felt that the platform is abuzz with all the news and the trends that happen across the globe and I'm told that this is where all the best Rajini one liners are!” he added.

Excited about the association, Ashish Joshi, VP Digital & Business Head – Fluence said “We are thrilled to partner with the enigmatic Rajinikanth. The digital landscape is exploding and when you work with Thalaivar the possibilities are endless. Twitter is the first step in building and growing his online presence and getting all the fans out there to directly engage with the phenomenon that is Rajinikanth. We will work closely with him to broaden the horizons of the digital landscape to create interesting and entertaining consumer facing properties that will engage the fans in a way that only Rajini sir can.”

Said Twitter's India Market Director, Rishi Jaitly, "Twitter is the world's leading real-time information network where users discover and converse with the people, organizations and media that interest them. This is truly an "only-on-Twitter" moment as Superstar Rajinikanth’s debut on Twitter also marks his debut in the digital space more generally. We welcome Rajinikanth to Twitter, are happy to support his launch on the platform and look forward to watching him use our mobile service to engage in live, public conversations with fans and other icons around the world."

To make Superstar Rajinikanth’s debut on Twitter more exciting; fans from all over the world, who follow him on twitter @SuperStarRajini in the first week, will receive a ‘WelcomeGraph’, a personalized welcome picture from the icon.

‘Infrastructure Key Focus For The BJP Government’

A BJP-led government will take speedy decisions, focus on reviving economic growth, give priority to infrastructure and manufacturing, and protect the interest of farmers in land acquisition, the party's prime ministerial candidate Narendra Modi has said.

In an e-mail interview with this agency, Modi outlined his economic vision and said a National Democratic Alliance (NDA) government will seek to clear projects in fast-track mode, push for single-window clearance system, make procedures swift, ensure time-bound delivery and better coordination with the states for faster project clearances.

He said the "present state of policy paralysis" cannot be permitted to continue.

"We have to clear projects in a fast track mode. If there are environment related concerns, they need to be suitably addressed, but all decisions must be taken in a time frame. We cannot permit the present state of policy paralysis and indecisiveness to continue for long," said Modi.

"Whatever little growth we are having that can also be called as a jobless growth. This is because the UPA government has never given adequate emphasis on the manufacturing sector," Modi said.

The Gujarat chief minister said an NDA government will "focus on reviving the economy and growth".

"Our focus is going to be clearly on infrastructure and the manufacturing sector. It will not only encourage investment, but will also produce the required employment opportunities," he said.

He said there was a need to revive investor sentiment and the NDA government will move towards a policy of faster and time-bound project clearances to give a fillip to manufacturing.

On land acquisition policy, he said the first priority has to be on protecting the interest of farmers whose land was being acquired.

"They have to be adequately compensated as per the market rates. As far as possible, we should go through the private purchase route rather than compulsory acquisition. Even where compulsory acquisition is resorted to, the compensation should be decided as consent between the farmer and the acquiring authority," Modi told this media agency.

He said a "win-win situation" was possible and farmers should benefit "from development that comes".

Answering a query about priorities in infrastructure, Modi said there was need to focus on areas such as highways, railways, ports and power. He said a BJP-led government will revive the National Highway Development programme.

"It is unfortunate that the very good beginning made by the (earlier) NDA government (of Atal Bihari Vajpayee) was not continued by the UPA in right earnest. We will bring back the focus by connecting the country through a network of good quality highways," he said.

Modi said the government will start work on a high speed rail network.

"The railways have been ignored by successive Congress governments. We plan to begin a journey of transformation to take the railways at par with the most modern rail networks in the world."

Affirming the party's opposition to Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in multibrand retail, Modi said the party was in favour of FDI which leads to growth, employment opportunities and sharing of new technology.

"I would reiterate our party's commitment to encouraging FDI in various sectors to boost economic growth and to create employment opportunities for our youth," said Modi.

Source: Agencies