Twice As Powerful Multimedia Tablet Lenovo A7-30 Now In India

Lenovo, a leading PC player has launched A7-30, an affordable multi-media tablet that offers you the complete entertainment experience. Now, watch the colours on your screen come alive while viewing the latest movies owing to the A-730’s bright 17.78 cm (7) display. Listening to your favourite songs will be twice as much fun thanks to its dual front-facing speakers that offer louder, natural, distortion-free sound.

At only Rs 9,979, the A7-30 will continue to surprise you with its superior performance. You can check your email, surf the web and download tons of apps at the same time, thanks to the A7-30’s quad-core processor that makes your experience extremely smooth and responsive.The A7-30 also equips you to stay connected with friends and family at all times with its voice calling and worldwide roaming features. And it won’t die on you when you need it the most, owing to its longer battery life that provides 8 hours of WIFI browsing on a single battery charge.

Speaking on Lenovo’s innovation in tablets, Rohit Midha, Director, Tablet Business Unit, Lenovo India, “While the PC market still represents a huge opportunity, most of the potential for new growth will be in the PC Plus space. Tablets form the backbone of Lenovo’s strategy to win as a PC Plus player. The A7-30 is our attempt to offer a complete package with performance and aesthetics available at an unbelievable price point. This device is a testimony of Lenovo’s track record in reliability.”

The A7-30 offers double the amount of storage with 16 GB in built memory (expandable upto 32 GB), which means you can download and store more apps as well as an incredible amount of content. This pocket sized wonder is available in white, offering a thinness of 10mm and weight of only 327 grams, making it perfect for reading and web-surfing on the go.

Positive Year For A3 Multi-Function Printer Market in India: IDC Report

The Indian economy in CY2013 went through a challenging phase with high inflation and a slowing growth. This coupled with the state and national elections created a slow-down of the overall economy and ICT spending.

Despite these challenges, the copier market in India has shown resilience. According to  International Data Corporation (IDC) the India Quarterly State-Level Copier Tracker shipments were 1.07million units in CY2013. This represents a 1% decline compared to previous year CY2012.  One ray of hope came from the color printer segment, showing 20% year-on-year growth, with mid-segment Average Selling Value and above price-band models. 

In Maharashtra, Mumbai contributed more than 50% of the state’s copier sales output. Being the financial, commercial and  entertainment capital, Maharashtra contributes a good quantity of sell-through from the mid-segment in addition to the entry-level segment (which contributes the maximum in every state.) 

In Delhi, the national capital and center for Government, Defense and Public Sector,  technology procurement continued.  Given almost all copier vendors are headquartered in and around Delhi, they can maximize their focus in these customer segments, particularly in Q1, which is the last quarter of the financial year. Most Government departments funds froze up towards the end of 2013 as the country headed towards National Elections in first half of 2014. While this slowed down the sentiments of the market somewhat, some cash-rich vendors responded with an aggressive penetration pricing strategy.

In Karnataka, Bangalore is the major contributor being the hub of Information Technology/Information Technologies & Enabled Services (IT/ITES) companies. Interestingly, IDC observed that a lot of major companies were setting up their branches in Tier II & Tier III cities of Karnataka such as Mysore, Mangalore and Hubli. The demand from these cities increased whether it is from IT/ITES, Manufacturing, Construction or Education. As one example, HCL Infosystems closed a large deal (nearly 1000 units) on behalf of Toshiba in Q4, 2013.

Rahul Kanwar, Senior Research Manager-Channel Research, IDC India said, "Tier III states such as Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir, Bihar, Chhattisgarh and Jharkhand are growing at 12% year-on-year. Adoption of copiers as the primary printing device as opposed to MFP, Printer-based is due to increased printing demand from the SMB and Jobbers segment is the major reason behind this growth.”

Mercedes-Benz To Double Capacity With Second Plant In India

Luxury car maker Mercedes-Benz India Pvt. Ltd would start manufacturing at its second plant shortly, which would help the company double its production capacity in India, an official of the company said. 

“The second plant is in the final stage and in the process of getting all the approvals. The plant will be ready for use very soon,” Boris Fitz, vice-president (sales and network development) of Mercedes-Benz India said. 

The company’s first own plant started production in the country in 2009 which has an installed capacity of 10,000 units per annum located at Chakan near Pune. After completion of the second plant, the production capacity would be doubled to 20,000 units per annum. 

Last year, Mercedes-Benz registered sales of more than 9,000 units. “This calendar year, we are expecting to grow in double digit,” Fitz told reporters at the launch of special editions of A-Class and B-Class compact cars in the city on Thursday. “The new plant will make the company future-ready as the luxury car market is going to expand at a higher growth as compared to the normal passenger car market,” he said. 

At present, the volume of the luxury segment was 1.5% of the total car market in the country. “By 2022, this will go up to 4% of the total market estimated as 5.5 lakh units,” Fitz said. 

He said with the commissioning of the second production line, total invested made in India would touch Rs.850 crore. Mercedes-Benz plans to launch three more models in the current calendar year.

Get Cloud-based Healthcare Info From Philips & Salesforce.com

Royal Philips and salesforce.com has announced a strategic alliance to deliver an open, cloud-based healthcare platform, leveraging Philips' in medical technology, clinical applications and clinical informatics and salesforce.com in enterprise cloud computing, innovation and customer engagement.

The platform will enable medical device and data interoperability, the collection of data and subsequent analysis to enhance clinical decision making by professionals and enabling patients to take a more active role in managing their personal health.

The collaboration has till now resulted in two clinical applications to be launched on the new platform: "Philips eCareCoordinator" and "Philips eCareCompanion".

These care collaboration applications will allow the care team to monitor patients with chronic conditions in their homes and will facilitate Philips' Hospital to Home clinical programs.

"With this strategic alliance, Philips is making great strides to deliver real-time, digital healthcare solutions," said Frans van Houten, Chief Executive Officer of Royal Philips . "Healthcare data exists in many different forms and in many different systems today. Together with salesforce.com , we have a tremendous opportunity to reshape and optimize the way healthcare is delivered and provide better access to data across the continuum of care."

The envisioned platform, based on the Salesforce1 Platform, will enable collaboration and workflow, as well as integration of data from multiple sources worldwide, including electronic medical records, diagnostic and treatment information obtained through Philips' imaging equipment, monitoring equipment, personal devices and technologies like Apple's HealthKit.

The cloud-based platform is designed to be scalable with built-in privacy and data security. By combining the data, the platform will allow for analysis that will enhance decision making by professionals and engage patients.

Both Philips and Salesforce.com foresee that the platform, will utilize Philips' clinical data stores and medical device interoperability. It is intended to be open to developers and is expected to result in a vibrant ecosystem of partners creating applications.

As a result, the envisioned platform has the potential to transform both professional healthcare delivery and continuous personal health management.

FlexPod Passes $3 Billion; Growing 81% Annually

Cisco and NetApp today announced that the FlexPod integrated infrastructure solution has generated $3 billion in joint sales since its launch in 2010. FlexPod unit shipments have grown 81 percent year-over-year, with demand for FlexPod solutions now reaching a $2 billion annualized demand run rate.

By combining compute, networking and storage into a single system, integrated infrastructure provides the ability to dramatically improve the efficiency and agility of data center infrastructure, while reducing deployment risks. As a result, integrated infrastructure has emerged as one of the fastest growing segments of the IT infrastructure market, with Gartner estimating that the integrated systems market will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 56.3 percent between 2012 and 2016.

"Our partnership with Cisco on the FlexPod integrated infrastructure redefined how enterprises deployed private cloud infrastructure," said Tom Georgens, Chairman and CEO, NetApp. "As the data center extends to include public cloud services for better economics and infinite scale, NetApp and Cisco are again leading the way, helping customers realize the transformative business benefits of hybrid cloud.”

“As CIOs look to simplify IT and focus on delivering business outcomes, there’s been a major industry shift toward integrated infrastructure,” said John Chambers, Chairman and CEO, Cisco. “In 2010 Cisco and NetApp launched FlexPod to deliver a more efficient, agile data center infrastructure to customers. Together, we’re evolving the FlexPod architecture together to help our customers unleash their applications and realize the promise of hybrid cloud environments.”

FlexPod Momentum:

• Worldwide Adoption: FlexPod is deployed with more than 4,100 customers and available in over 100 countries, an increase from 2,300 customers, and 70 countries last year. 

• Channel Acceleration: Critical to the success of FlexPod has been its popularity with channel partners. The FlexPod global reseller ecosystem continues to grow with more than 1,000 channel partners qualified to sell and support Cisco and NetApp technologies.  These include 110 FlexPod Premium partners with the specialized skills to sell and support integrated infrastructure.

* FlexPod Roadmap: As businesses embrace hybrid clouds to rapidly and cost-effectively deliver business-critical applications and services, Cisco and NetApp are aggressively integrating innovative technology into the FlexPod architecture, including Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) and Cisco Intercloud Fabric, along with NetApp’s clustered DATA ONTAP, Flash and cloud technologies.

* Ecosystem Innovation: Technology partners have also contributed to the success of FlexPod, with key companies such as Microsoft, SAP, Oracle, Citrix, F5, BridgeHead Software, Eaton, and Splunk, optimizing applications to run atop a FlexPod integrated infrastructure.

* Building on Success: Today’s news continues to deliver against the three-year plan announced by Cisco and NetApp in January 2013 to align technology roadmaps and address the next-generation cloud-integrated data center design. As part of this initiative, FlexPod will serve as the foundation for a virtualized, multi-tenant, cloud-ready data center.

U.S. Accounting Firm Attains 95% Faster Access to Customer Records: Katz, Sapper and Miller (KSM) is one of the top Certified Public Accountant (CPA) firms in the United States. In the tax and accounting business, maximizing time spent on productive billing is a major priority. With its data footprint growing at roughly 25 percent each year, KSM had outgrown its five-year-old IT infrastructure. FlexPod Premium Partner Logicalis recommended a complete data center reinvention based on a FlexPod platform with VMware vSphere to vastly improve performance and virtually eliminate downtime. Now, customer records are instantly searchable—taking less than three seconds to complete instead of two to three hours with the previous systems. It is a 95 percent reduction that has allowed KSM to improve its content management capabilities and deliver better customer service.

“In the tax and accounting business, maximizing time spent on productive billing is essential. Every second or hour of downtime can cost the firm hundreds and thousands of dollars,” said Darrell Williams, director of Katz, Sapper & Miller’s Information System Department.  “Not only were we impressed with the simplicity and performance of FlexPod but the integrated components have been a tremendous asset in helping us centrally manage all of our data center requirements.  With FlexPod, delays, downtime and the costs associated with these problems are no longer an issue. Our attention is now on our clients, and not business issues.”

U.K. City Council Cuts Energy Bill, Improves Capacity by 50%: Salford City Council serves roughly 230,000 citizens from inner city, residential and rural areas of the Greater Manchester region in the northwest of England. The Council houses one of the most advanced data center facilities by public sector standards, yet capacity constraints were beginning to appear. Employees were consuming data in new and different ways and departments were operating independently and deploying their own IT equipment. This fragmentation was leading to security and compliance issues. In response, Salford City Council transitioned their traditional data center to a community cloud based on FlexPod. This has enabled the Council to establish a solid foundation for the delivery of cloud services—increasing its server capacity by 50 percent and noticeably improving the speed and response of its applications—while reducing its energy bill by 50 percent to date. Salford City Council has also achieved a five-to-one reduction in data center space requirement, providing the Council with room for additional revenue generating hosting services.

“FlexPod has enabled us to develop a multitenant community cloud platform providing services to the City Council, our partner organizations and SME companies in the local area,” said Jonathan Burt, corporate infrastructure architect at Salford City Council. “The validated design built on FlexPod has provided us with a platform to deliver secure Infrastructure as a Service and Software-as-a-Service offerings to different organizations throughout Salford, whilst reducing our internal costs to the City Council and supporting the local economy during significant cuts to our funding.”

German Stock Exchange Doubles Business Transactions: Based in Germany, Boerse Stuttgart is Europe's leading stock exchange organization for private investors. Boerse Stuttgart´s main differentiator in the financial market is to execute orders with speed and cost efficiency. Their IT strategy and goals are aligned with these business requirements, with initiatives designed to deliver cost-efficient, reliable and fast service-delivery. With FlexPod, Boerse Stuttgart can now handle twice as many business transactions as before and even unexpected events like massive stock changes can be fulfilled with no influence on the quality of the service-delivery.

“As Europe's leading stock exchange for private investors, it is crucial not only to execute retail orders as fast as possible but in a cost efficient way as well, ” said Peter Litschel at Boerse Stuttgart. “A shared infrastructure based on FlexPod enables us to ‘bridge-the-cloud’ and focus on our core business. With more than one million tradable products we have to process a considerable quantity of trading data. We can now trust that our operation is efficient, fast and flexible. This allows us to focus on providing retail investors with the financial services they need.”

Azadine Helps Fight Against MDS & AML Types Of Cancer

Intas Pharmaceuticals Limited, one of the leading Pharmaceutical Organizations of India has reinforced its oncology product range by successfully introducing for the first time in India, Azacitidine molecule in Azadine. Azacitidine induces antineoplastic activity via two mechanisms; inhibition of DNA methyltransferase at low doses, causing hypomethylation of DNA, and direct cytotoxicity in abnormal hematopoietic cells in the bone marrow through its incorporation into DNA and RNA at high doses, resulting into tumourous cell death. Azacitidine has been approved by the U.S. FDA since May, 2004.  

Myelodysplastic Syndrome (MDS) is a type of cancer in which the bone marrow does not make enough healthy blood cells and there are abnormal (blast) cells in the blood and/or in the bone marrow. Advanced stages of MDS may lead to Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (AML). It is estimated that 4-5 people per 1,00,000 suffer from MDS/AML Data extrapolated to Indian population from global epidemiologic studies suggest that the disease burden of MDS in India is likely to be sizeable. Also, cytogenetic studies suggest that MDS patients in India get affected by the disease at a younger age and also tend to have a “higher risk”

Currently, for combating this type of Cancer in the country, oncologists have to rely on an imported version of Azacitidine. The treatment cost of imported Azacitidine can range between Rupees 15-18 lakhs. The cost of treatment with other options ranging from conventional agents to transplants may cost between 2 lakh to 15 lakh. Azadine has been priced with an objective to make it accessible to a majority of the needy patients. It is priced at 1/5^th of the innovator brand. Azacitidine is the only drug which has been shown to prolong overall survival duration, prolong time to transformation into AML, increase response rate, reduce transfusion burden & improve quality of life. Azacitidine will also offer better convenience and compliance and reduce hospital visits due to subcutaneous administration.  

Azadine is manufactured in the state of the art, Intas SEZ facility in Ahmedabad, Gujarat which is spread over 35,565 sq. mts. The plant has dedicated manufacturing facilities for Cytotoxic formulations (Tablet, Capsule, Liquid Injection, Lyophilized Injection, Ointment) and Other Oral Solids (Tablets, Capsules). This plant operates in compliance with global regulatory standards like USFDA, MHRA and ANVISA. 

Intas is a leading multi-specialty Pharmaceutical organization committed to deliver affordable and innovative pharmaceutical solutions. The company is now the 12^th largest pharmaceutical company in the domestic market (as per IMS Health India, Secondary Stockist Audit (SSA), April 2014 MAT). Intas is one of the leading players in chronic therapy in domestic market. Its portfolio extends to central nervous system (CNS), cardiovascular system (CVS), oncology, diabetes, gastroenterology, pain management, urology, nephrology, gynecology, infertility and respiratory care. Intas has presence in more than 70 countries worldwide with robust sales, marketing and distribution infrastructure in highly regulated markets like North America, Europe, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand among others.  

Netmagic Wins Cloud IaaS Provider Award 2014

Netmagic, an NTT Communications company has been named Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Provider of the year at the 2014 Frost & Sullivan India ICT Awards held on June 24^th at Le Meridien in New Delhi. Netmagic was felicitated with this award in recognition of its outstanding performance, market leadership, and new technologies application in cloud services. Its feature rich self-service, pay-as-you-use, project governance capabilities and end-user confidence delivered through public cloud grid at major cities in India has positioned Netmagic as a holistic cloud consulting partner and a value-for-money service provider who offers best in class cloud infrastructure and solutions that empower enterprises with fully automated access, control, security, and scalability.

                                                                            

Sharad Sanghi, Managing Director and CEO, Netmagic, says, “It is a moment of honor and elation for us to have received this esteemed award. What makes us even happier is that we have been recognized by a jury consisting of some of India’s best analysts and leaders in the ICT industry, equally backed by the continuous faith and support of our customers.”

“We are proud to have been at the forefront in defining India’s cloud story. We were one of the first to bring cloud services to India. In this highly competitive space, key to success is the constant thirst to innovate. It is this thirst that propelled us to launch India’s first Software Defined Storage Service with metered IOPS (NTSS) as well as cloud-based Web Application Firewall (WAF) Platform last year. We have also witnessed a strong growth for Disaster Recovery (DR) on Cloud offering that helps enterprises offset CAPEX considerations and invest in a cost effective, yet robust DR solution. Besides, our expert consulting and solution capabilities backed by strong service delivery has allowed us to give complex IT consolidation and migration solutions around a hybrid cloud approach, thereby protecting customers’ existing IT infrastructure while moving them on a gradual path to public cloud. With the global expertise of NTT Communications, we will continue strides of innovation, and support our customers at every step of their IT infrastructure evolution,” he added.

Benoy CS, Director, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan, says, “Netmagic has demonstrated its commitment to deliver to enterprises, innovative cloud services that eliminate up-front capital costs and offer enterprise - class features like instant deployment, ability to rapidly scale both horizontally and vertically, predictable uptime and lower total cost of ownership. Netmagic’s home grown cloud architecture provides enterprises with a tactical and strategic business planning advantage since it offers transparent metering for IT usage and also supports on-demand IT provisioning for uncertain business demands. Netmagic has led a consultative approach to help organizations transition to cloud based services by simultaneously mitigating the risk of data migration from their legacy systems.”

The award recipients were judged on a variety of parameters that included revenue growth, market share growth, product portfolio diversity, key achievements, and go-to-market strategy, and involved in-depth primary interviews of various industry participants and secondary research conducted by Frost & Sullivan analysts. An elite panel of jury members comprising prominent CIOs/CTOs from the collaboration industry evaluated the compiled data and incorporated the end-user perspective. Frost & Sullivan then presented the Awards to companies that received the highest number industry ranking in each category.

Netmagic offers a range of cloud infrastructure solutions for compute, network, storage, and applications as well as strategic cloud deployments for disaster recovery. Netmagic’s enterprise-grade cloud platform is certified by industry leaders such as SAP and Cisco. The company works with market leaders such as Ratnakar Bank (RBL), Flipkart, Myntra, Star TV, DishTV, India Infoline, MakeMyTrip, and several others.