HP Accelerates Clients’ Journey with SAP HANA

HP announced the expansion of its HP ConvergedSystem portfolio for SAP HANA, delivering the largest SAP-certified solution for SAP HANA platform-based workloads, helping clients reduce costs and improve response time to business demands.

SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA is now used by thousands of global organizations to run their mission-critical operations and power end-to-end processes. Business-critical applications—such as those for enterprise resource planning, supply chain and customer relationship management—are vital to business operations and require a highly scalable infrastructure that can ensure up to 100-percent uptime.

The new HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA is certified by SAP to deliver up to 12 terabytes of data in a single memory pool to power the most mission-critical business applications. The commercialization resulting from the HP and SAP co-innovation initiative “Project Kraken,” HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA is a massively scalable system that enables clients to manage and analyze extremely large and diverse data sets from a single system to facilitate real-time business decisions. In addition, the system’s flexible configurations and high availability let clients consolidate mission-critical business apps to a centralized platform, helping reduce costs and simplifying the IT environment.

“Businesses are adopting SAP HANA to make real-time business decisions based on massive data sets, but are often constrained by their infrastructure’s scalability and availability,” said Tom Joyce, senior vice president and general manager, Converged Systems, HP. “With HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA, HP is helping customers achieve business transformation with SAP HANA by delivering a system optimized for the largest, most mission-critical workloads.”

Enabling increased operational efficiency while reducing downtime

HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA is designed to deliver a rapid return on investment. It is preconfigured, optimized and tested by HP Factory Express, enabling clients to order, install and operate the system in as little as 30 days.

In addition, the new system allows clients to:

• Increase operational efficiency by consolidating mission-critical applications on the same platform.

• Rapidly respond to business needs by quickly scaling system capacity with 6TB/8-socket and 12TB/16-socket scale-up configurations using Intel Xeon processor E7v2 family.

• Reduce downtime with HP Serviceguard for SAP HANA, which provides high-availability and disaster-tolerant features for enterprise data protection.

• Further ensure business continuity with up to 12 TB of in-memory computing. This allows clients to smoothly and securely transition their landscape running SAP HANA from legacy databases.

• Increase IT staff efficiency with intelligent manageability features that provide IT a single point of management for the server, blades, fault-tolerant fabric and enclosure.

“In-memory computing allows organizations to quickly make informed business decisions by processing massive amounts of data much faster than ever possible before,” said Matt Eastwood, group vice president and general manager, Enterprise Platforms, IDC. “However, to capitalize on its benefits, organizations need a highly scalable data management environment that allows organizations to capture and analyze all of their information on one platform, eliminating the need to transfer data from other systems—a major source of information delay.”

Dedicated support for HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA

HP also introduced HP Proactive Care Advanced as the recommended level of support for HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA. It provides clients with a single point of accountability for support of all system components. Dedicated technical resources proactively help prevent issues, maximize performance and accelerate problem resolution with personalized reports, best practices and on-going technical advice. This enables clients to optimize the usage and functionality of their IT system throughout its lifetime, while accelerating problem resolution with dedicated critical-case management.

In addition, HP announced new HP Consulting Services for SAP HANA that deliver rapid deployment and a smooth migration to HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA. The new services help clients migrate confidently to the environment, in addition to automating and simplifying system replication with the HP Serviceguard solution for SAP HANA, and validating the system operational readiness to meet unique business needs.

Cloud-based services offer flexible, cost-effective deployment model for SAP HANA

HP is bringing new cloud-based services to SAP HANA through HP Helion Business Applications for SAP solutions. A flexible, cost-effective deployment model, this solution extends the power of the cloud across infrastructure, applications and information. Also built on HP Converged Infrastructure, the managed cloud combines server, storage and network resources to provide customers with a secure hosted environment to run critical business applications with high availability from multiple locations—reducing latency and meeting data-sovereignty requirements.

In addition to the HP Helion cloud deployment model, HP has the capability to deploy Rapid Deployment Services for SAP solutions in the cloud. This helps make it possible to deploy new application functionality optimized for SAP HANA in highly reduced timeframes, increasing the velocity of the deployment of new innovation to drive a client’s desired business outcomes.

The HP Helion Business Applications deployment model may also be enabled via the HP as-a-Service Offering for SAP HANA. This solution lets clients take advantage of the SAP HANA platform while financing through an OpEx consumption model for predictable monthly payment options that align operational and financial requirements to the business.

“Our partnership with HP has always been about co-innovating and collaborating to provide new technology solutions that help our customers transform their business,” said Kevin Ichhpurani, senior vice president, Corporate Business Development and Strategic Ecosystem, SAP. “The new HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA further extends the power of SAP HANA into enterprise organizations, supporting massive data sets and mission-critical workloads, speeding up response times and reducing costs, all in a single platform, near real-time environment.”

HP received two 2014 SAP Pinnacle awards for Co-Innovation Partner of the Year and Rapid-Deployment Partner of the Year. The awards recognize HP’s proactive, innovative technology adoption and expansion, as well as its collaboration with SAP to help customers achieve their desired business outcomes with minimal risk.

Availability

• HP ConvergedSystem 900 for SAP HANA is scheduled to be available worldwide this fall.

• HP Consulting Services are available globally, and can be ordered packaged or customized.

• The cloud-based HP Helion Business Applications for SAP solutions are now available worldwide.

NASSCOM & CMR Offer Business Foundation Courses

Aimed at building a robust skills foundation for a market ready future The National Association of Software Services Companies (NASSCOM) today announced that it has entered into a collaborative MoU with CMR University (CMRU). Under this MoU, CMR University will integrate Global Business Foundation Skills (GBFS) Courseware developed by NASSCOM (IT-ITeS Sector Skills Council) in its curriculum. The strategic alliance aims to offer measurable training programs to students and enhance employability skill sets of engineering graduates. 

The Indian IT–BPM Industry currently employs about 3.1 million people directly and about 9 million indirectly. As per the NASSCOM Perspective 2020 report, the industry has a potential to contribute to, as much as, 30 million employment opportunities (direct and indirect) by 2020.

On the occasion Sandhya Chintala, Executive Director-SSC & Vice President, NASSCOM said “This MoU is a key milestone in our mission to develop a skills ready workforce. According to the NASSCOM’s National Skills Mission, about 500 million professionals would need to be skilled by 2022 to make them employable. To be able to achieve this target, a structured approach involving all stakeholders is imperative. Skill gap needs to be addressed through comprehensive efforts, at various levels and catering to different needs of the society and industry. Through this collaboration, we hope we will be able to nurture the next generation of talent for the industry. ”

NASSCOM Sector Skills Council will conduct ‘Train-the-Trainer’ program for college faculty involved in this project to give them a holistic view of the initiative. Only the trained faculty members will be able to train students on the GBFS program. Under this MoU, NASSCOM will also provide guidelines & recommendations related to aspects of the GBFS program such as faculty selection, student selection, infrastructure for training and evaluation. CMR University will conduct the NASSCOM Assessment of Competence before and after the GBFS training and mobilize the faculty to facilitate teaching-learning support for pursuance of the courses to enhance student employability.

The Sector Skills Council (SSC), the skill standard setting body of the IT-ITeS Industry is the education and skill development initiative of NASSCOM. The council works with NASSCOM industry members, select academic and skill development institutions to help improve the quality and quantity of the employable workforce available to the industry, through its NAC-Tech (NASSCOM Assessment of Competence), both before and after Global Business Foundation Skills (GBFS) training.

Indian Bank Increases Business Agility with NetApp

ING Vysya Bank, India’s premier private sector bank has selected NetApp’s FAS storage system to deliver the necessary throughput, capacity and connectivity to enable the bank to not just meet the demands of evolving market conditions but build an effective ecosystem of financial services, across 553 branches.

ING Vysya, an institution that believes in innovation, had embarked on an integral plan to build a world class technology environment to support business growth for the next seven years without capacity issues. With the NetApp FAS storage system ING Vysya can deliver online and mobile banking services to more than 2,000,000 customers across the country. 

“We are proud to be the first core banking application in India to be hosted on NetApp. With NetApp’s FAS storage series we can leverage our core banking system (CBS) to provide innovative products to customers while improving performance by 60 percent immediately. It also reduced our batch processing time by 100 percent, significantly improving business agility, system uptime, resulting in greater customer satisfaction” said Aniruddha Paul, CIO, ING Vysya Bank 

Sandeep Kaul, Head-IT Infrastructure of ING Vysya Bank said “We were looking to build a storage solution that would reduce the business’ time-to-market drastically. However, we were also looking for opportunities to utilize our existing infrastructure to cater to new needs. And that’s precisely what NetApp provided us with - enough flexibility, a wide array of software with varied functionality and the confidence that we can leverage the storage infrastructure on a wider platform, in terms of the number of applications it can support efficiently.”

Anil Valluri, President - India & SAARC at NetApp Marketing Services, said “Increasingly, organizations are looking at a new era of business agility within their businesses. We are pleased to be working closely with ING Vysya to help them deliver innovative products to customers without compromising on quality. With a cross – functional, multi country team, we have relentlessly endeavoured to ensure that ING Vysya derives significant value out of our relationship.”

The FAS storage system from NetApp optimizes memory and I/O bandwidth to provide superior performance while providing the network connectivity and capacity scaling needed to meet growing and changing data center requirements, as well as ensuring a proven availability in excess of 99.999%. The recently launched FAS8000 provides an enterprise storage solution accelerates resource-intensive applications with hybrid flash arrays that give more than 2.6M IOPs of flash-integrated, low-latency performance.

Micromax Appoints Sanjay Kapoor As Chairman

Micromax India’s second largest smartphone player and leading consumer electronics brand, today announced the induction of Sanjay Kapoor, former CEO of Bharti Airtel to the Micromax promoter group and Chairman of the board with immediate effect.

This development reflects Micromax’s vision of stepping up to the next phase of growth as it continues its journey to become India’s number one smartphone player and the first Indian mobile brand to be successful globally. Micromax will be leveraging Sanjay’s vast experience in building India's biggest telecom services brand and his industry expertise built playing an active role in prominent industry forums like GSMA, CII, COAI and NASSCOM over the past 13 years.

Announcing the new Chairman, Rahul Sharma, Co-founder of Micromax Informatics Limited said, “We are glad to have Sanjay to be a part of Micromax's promoter group and on our board as the new Chairman. Sanjay is one of the most respected professionals in the Indian corporate world and has been instrumental in building some of the most successful technology brands in the country over the past three decades. I am confident that he will be able to provide required strategic direction to take our billion dollar business to the next level of growth and expansion.”

He further added, “Sanjay’s strategic and inspirational leadership skills will certainly provide strong impetus to Micromax as we pursue our aim to be the first Indian hardware brand driving success globally. He will be instrumental in building synergies for our existing international businesses and spearhead our foray into other international markets in the near future.”

Commenting on his appointment, Sanjay Kapoor, Chairman, Micromax Informatics Limited said, “I am excited as an entrepreneur to be a part of the promoter group and as a professional to lead the Micromax board & management. I look forward to adding value to all stakeholders leveraging my strengths in building scale, developing brands and understanding consumers. There is a tremendous potential for Micromax, a vibrant youth brand that has led the democratization of technology for masses, offering affordable innovations to the consumers."

He further added, "Micromax is truly the new age brand that has made an indelible mark on the industry within a short time by changing the dynamics of the mobile eco-system. Proliferation in data services and cutting edge devices that make technology affordable for masses will be critical for next phase of growth and I am confident that Micromax will lead this transition.”

Sanjay is an established global leader in Telecom and allied industry. Sanjay was the Chief Executive Officer for India and South Asia of India’s largest telecom company, Airtel (March 2010 till May 2013). Sanjay remains one of the key leaders in building Bharti Airtel from being one of the many players in the industry to making it as the number one telecom player in India, during his tenure with the company from July 1998 to May 2013. He has also been a Board & Executive committee member of GSMA, (the global forum bringing together nearly 800 global mobile operators); Board member of Indus Towers (world’s largest telecom tower company with a portfolio of more than 1 lakh towers). Presently, Sanjay is an active member on the board of Bennett, Coleman & Co. Ltd and PVR Limited. He was declared the “Telecom person of the year” at the Voice and Data Telecom Leadership Awards 2012.

Prior to joining the Bharti Group, Sanjay worked with Xerox India as Director-Operations Support. He spent 14 years with the global Document management company, handling a range of key portfolios, ranging from Sales & Marketing to General management functions.  He began his professional career as an Executive Trainee with Jay Engineering Works Ltd., the manufacturers of Usha fans and sewing machines, in 1983.

Sanjay holds a Bachelor’s degree in Commerce (Hons.) from Delhi University, an MBA from Cranfield School of Management (UK) and is a Graduate of The Wharton Advanced Management Program.

VMware unveils Horizon 6 for Indian Enterprises

  

VMware Inc., the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, has unveiled VMware Horizon 6, an integrated solution that delivers published applications and desktops on a single platform, for Indian enterprises. Horizon 6 is the industry’s most comprehensive desktop solution with centralized management of enterprise applications and desktops, including physical desktops and laptops, virtual desktops and applications and employee-owned PCs.

Today, end users are using new types of devices for work, accessing Windows applications alongside non-Windows-based applications, and are more mobile than ever.

In India, according to survey respondents, almost every employee (97 percent) works outside the office, and 9 in 10 employees believe that they are more productive if they are allowed to work outside the office. However, strict IT policies continue to be imposed to prevent the leakage of confidential information (73 percent) and avoid the misuse of company assets (66 percent) by employers today. These insights came from the VMware MeConomy 2014 survey that was conducted in 14 countries across Asia Pacific and Japan to understand the attitudes and preferences of employees in an increasingly mobile world. The study also found that more Indian organizations are supporting employees in ways to gain access to the resources for working outside the office (90 percent).

“With India’s increasingly mobile and young workforce today, organizations are busy preparing for the mobile cloud era. They want to transform their applications and enterprise desktops and extend access to employees on any device, from anywhere and want a comprehensive solution that is simple, secure and cost effective,” said Ramesh Vantipalli, Head EUC India & Regional SE Manager - South, VMware India.

In this new mobile cloud world, managing and delivering services to end users with traditional PC-centric tools has become increasingly difficult and can lead to security and compliance concerns. Horizon 6 provides IT with a new streamlined approach to deliver, protect, and manage Windows desktops and applications while containing costs and empowering end users to work anytime, anywhere, on any device.

Next-Gen Leadership For Cisco In India

Cisco today announced the next generation of its leadership in India, reflecting the strategic importance of Cisco India for the company. The new leadership comprises Dinesh Malkani, President - Sales for India & SAARC; Amit Phadnis, President - Engineering & India Site Leader; and V C Gopalratnam (Gopal), President - Strategy, Planning and Operations, India and CIO, Asia Pacific and Japan & Greater China. Together, this leadership team will help accelerate Cisco’s momentum in India by strengthening its focus on innovation to lead market transitions. This announcement underlines Cisco’s commitment to India and marks an exciting new phase of growth, aligned to the country’s national transformation agenda. The Cisco India site is a complete ecosystem with a significant presence of engineering, Services, Sales, IT, and other support functions.

Dinesh Malkani takes over from Jeff White and will report to Irving Tan, Cisco’s President, Asia Pacific & Japan. India is at the heart of Cisco’s emerging markets strategy, and Dinesh will lead the company’s efforts to help transform the country’s economy through technology. He will drive Cisco's senior level external engagement, including those with government and industry associations, to drive growth and market leadership in India and SAARC.

Amit Phadnis as the new India Site Leader will lead Cisco’s focus on innovation, ecosystem and talent development in the country. Amit will drive the India Site charter, focusing on strengthening the interlock between Cisco’s teams, including engineering and sales, and customers, while aligning the company’s India site strategy with evolving customer and partner needs. As part of his focus on the India site, Amit will drive the university relations strategy, employee engagement and talent development for the employee base in India. Another major focus area for Amit is developing the Engineering and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) partner ecosystems. In addition to this role, Amit leads the Enterprise Engineering portfolio in India and will continue to report into the organization led by Rob Soderbery, Senior Vice President & General Manager of the Enterprise Networking Group in the US.

V C Gopalratnam (Gopal) will take on the newly created role of President of Strategy, Planning and Operations for Cisco India, in addition to his role as CIO for Asia Pacific, Japan & Greater China. Gopal will help create better synergies between Cisco’s internal IT organization and the company’s technology roadmap as well as drive infrastructure development and operations to facilitate growth and productivity. Gopal will work closely with the university relations team in shaping curricula to help produce next generation industry ready talent. He will also oversee enablement of Cisco’s priorities of inclusion and diversity (I&D), employee volunteering and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Gopal will continue to report to Rebecca Jacoby, Cisco’s global CIO. Gopal also serves on the board of the Cisco Foundation.  

Cisco is uniquely positioned to help its customers navigate the demands of the cloud, mobility, the application economy, and the Internet of Everything. In India, over the next few years, a key priority for Cisco is to be a transformational partner to the government and help build an ecosystem that brings technology and services into villages, and benefits the masses. The new leadership team will drive this agenda through sustained engagement with customers and external influencers; delivery of relevant products, services, and solutions; and an ongoing focus on local innovation and engineering to offer business outcome based solutions.

India Tops Asian Smartphones Market In Q1 2014

India was the highest growing market in Asia Pacific with a year-on-year smartphone shipment growth of over 186% in 1Q 2014.The vast majority of the country's user base migrated to smartphones from feature phones and as a result Indian smartphone market outshone other emerging markets like China which registered a year-on-year growth of 31% in 1Q 2014.

The smartphone penetration in India still hovers at 10% and it is expected to grow due to a variety of factors including greater availability of low-cost devices and additional sales emphasis by top-flight vendors on less populous parts of the country.

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC), the overall India mobile phone market stood at close to 61.07 million units in 1Q 2014 which is a 10% quarter-on-quarter dip and a mere 1% year-on-year growth. The dip in the overall mobile phone market shipments can be attributed to the 18% decline in the feature phone shipments from 4Q 2013 to 1Q 2014. This was offset by the smartphone market, where units shipped grew by close to 17% in 1Q 2014 compared to 4Q 2013. The consistent growth in the smartphone market is driven by enhanced consumer preference for smart devices and narrowing price differences.

The share of feature phones in the overall market further slipped further to 71% in 1Q 2014 which is a considerable decrease from 90% share in 1Q 2013.

The India smartphone market grew by a whopping 186% year-on-year in 1Q 2014. According to IDC Asia Pacific Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker (excluding Japan), vendors shipped a total of 17.59 million smartphones in 1Q 2014 compared to 6.14 million units in the same period of 2013. The shipment contribution of "phablets" (which IDC defines as 5.5 inch-6.99 inch screen size smartphones) in 1Q 2014 was noted to be around 5% of the overall market. The category grew by 125% in 1Q 2014 in terms of sheer volume over 4Q 2013. The primary reason behind this trend is the launch of low-end phablets by international and local vendors alike.

The sub-200 USD category in smartphones contributed to about 78% hinting at the fact that the growth in the India Smartphone market still remains constrained towards the low-end of the spectrum.

  "As more vendors continue to launch low priced smartphone models, the price gap between feature phones and smartphones will be narrowed, driving rampant user migration in the price sensitive Indian market," says Manasi Yadav, Senior Market Analyst at IDC India.

"This rapid pace of growth in smartphones is expected to continue in India. While we notice that much of the growth is coming from low-cost devices using the Android operating system, Windows is making adequate gains too based on the strength of the entry level product mix in smartphones," comments Kiran Kumar, Research Manager- Client Devices at IDC India.

Top Five Smartphone Vendor Highlights

* Samsung maintained its leadership in the smartphone market with 35% market share in 1Q 2014. High volumes came in from the low-end devices like S7262 Galaxy Star Pro Dual SIM and Galaxy S Duos 2 S7582.

* Micromax held onto its 2nd position with approximately 15% market share. The top selling models for Micromax came in from the low-end Bolt Series.

* Karbonn was 3rd position with approximately 10% market share. Its low-end range of 2G smartphones did well in 1Q 2014.

* LAVA climbed up to the 4th position with close to 6% market share. New XOLO launches like A500S and A500 have fared well.

* Nokia made its way back to the top 5 list with about 4% market share. The Nokia X launch coupled with other low-end Lumia phones helped in improving the overall performance of the brand.

IDC India Forecasts:

IDC anticipates that the migration from feature phones to smartphones will increase as cheaper variants of smartphones are launched in the market. Growth in the smartphone segment is expected to outshine the overall handset market growth in the foreseeable future. According to the 1Q 2014 lDC forecast, the India smartphone shipments will reach 80.57 million units by the end of CY 2014. IDC expects that the Indian smartphone market will grow at a CAGR of about 40% for the next 5 years.