Mindtree & ING Vysya Partner For Retail Banking App

Mindtree, a global technology services company, today announced that it has been selected by ING Vysya, a premier private sector bank, as a strategic digital partner for its next generation mobility program. As part of this program Mindtree will help ING Vysya deliver multi-channel and multi-platform banking experience to its customers while creating a digital roadmap designed to help the bank penetrate untapped markets with a simple yet differentiated service.

The first phase of the engagement saw Mindtree conceptualize, design and develop a retail banking hybrid mobile application to drive efficiency and engagement across multiple channels including Android, Windows, BlackBerry, J2ME and Website based platforms. This application provides a comprehensive retail banking experience to customers. It brings exclusive features, such as multi balance meter, shopping and deals, gift cards and cheque scan making it more engaging and relevant to customers.

Aniruddha Paul, CIO, ING Vysya said, ”Our digital roadmap will help us level the playing field with our larger competitors by creating innovative and path breaking solutions for our customers. We are glad to select Mindtree as one of our key Digital Partner. Their domain and technology expertise with a clear strategic intent is critical in our journey towards mobility. We see large opportunities in developing these kind of applications for the rest of our business.”

Gaurav Johri, Senior Vice President and Head of Banking Financial Services and Insurance, Mindtree said, “ING Vysya has been our strategic client for over 9 years. It is imperative for banks to have a well thought digital strategy blueprint to enable rapid go-to-market and also provide superior customer experience. We are excited to partner with ING Vysya in its journey to be the industry leader in digital banking.”

Patent Soon For World’s First Automatic Fresh Tea Brewing Machine

                                                                                                                                     

Signaling, perhaps, the first ever touch of technology to the age old art of tea brewing, beverages major, D’lecta Café has announced the unveiling of the world’s first ever automatic tea brewing machine. The company has already filed the technology for patent and plans to make the machine available in the domestic market in the forthcoming week.

Tea vending machines that are currently available in the market merely dispense pre-mix tea comprising of instant tea powder, sugar and powdered milk. The quality of such tea are often sub standard and have a sugar content of as much as sixty two percent. The new machine, meanwhile, does not mix tea, but brews it through the use of a patented technology*. Tea leaves of choice are infused in the machine to maximize flavor, smoothness and aroma of the final brew and dispense a cup of refreshing hot tea. The tea can be had black, green or white. Adding milk and/or sugar is as per preference, and has been provisioned separately on extended trays attached to the machine. Creamers made of evaporated cow milk, and aseptically packed, are used in place of powdered milk. The new tea vending unit will dispense a cup of freshly brewed connoisseur tea within thirty seconds, and can dispense up to 400 cups a day.

“Unlike coffee making, which has been seeing automation and technological advancements on an ongoing basis, tea brewing has largely remained a manual process. This is because tea brewing is a delicate process. But with the introduction of D’lecta Tea Brewing Unit, connoisseurs will be able to enjoy their tea of choice without going through the labourous process of manual brewing,” says Deepak Jain, Founder & Managing Director, Dlecta Foods Pvt Ltd.

This automatic fresh-tea vending unit is a first of its kind that will brew tea at the press of a button. It’s capable of dispensing a choice of beverages including the classic Assam tea, masala tea and green tea besides also offering black coffee, premixed coffee, café mocha, hot chocolate and soups. The machine has been designed, developed and patented* by Dlecta Foods which has recently forayed into the consumer markets with its dairy based products after successfully operating in the B2B segment for over 12 years.

“The machine has been ergonomically designed for elegance and space efficiency with arrangements to neatly accommodate consumables like paper cups, tea bags, coffee sachets, sugar and stirrers. The machine itself is easy to clean from the exteriors and comes with special hygiene features. The machine prompts for self-rinse if a selected option has been dormant for over 15 minutes and will also do an all rinse at the end of the day. All wet contact parts are made of stainless steel for longer life and easy cleaning,” adds Jain.

The machine is aimed at catering to the needs of the urban Indian offices and workspaces. The machine fulfils the typical needs of tea and coffee consumers by factoring in health, taste and convenience. The machine also proves to be economical by delivering 100 ml hot cup of freshly brewed tea for just Rs.5.50/-. The tea vending units are targeted at the Out of Home (OOH) segment and will be offered to offices and hotels on lease with a comprehensive AMC by the company.

“Another highlight of D’lecta Tea Brewing solutions is the company branded dairy creamer that has been introduced as replacement for milk powder. Branded as ‘Milke’, these are 10 gram serving of evaporated milk and are ideally suited for one cup of tea or coffee. Made from pure cow milk D’lecta Milke has only 23% sugar content and comes in aseptic packaging making it simpler, tastier and healthier option. Our tea brewing unit will revolutionize tea consumption pattern in India,” concludes Devendra Garg, Executive Director, Dlecta Foods Pvt Ltd.

NetIQ Brings Out Latest Versions Of Sentinel 7.2

NetIQ today announced the latest versions of its NetIQ Sentinel Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) and NetIQ Change Guardian privileged user activity monitoring solutions. As organizations begin to integrate more sources of identity data into their overall security and breach prevention strategies, these solutions comprehensively monitor privileged user activity to reduce the risk of data breach in an increasingly perimeter-less IT environment.  

The shift away from a legacy, “perimeter-first” security approach renders most traditional ways of protecting devices, infrastructure and technology obsolete.  Security teams increasingly need visibility into user activity and the context of those activities to determine if the behavior they are exhibiting is normal and appropriate or the result of breach. Now, customers using NetIQ Sentinel 7.2 will benefit from new threat intelligence feeds that help customers protect their networks and sensitive data from today’s most widely used botnets, including SpyEye and Zeus. Also new in NetIQ Sentinel 7.2 is greater NetFlow traffic analysis to help customers quickly detect malware, bad actors and investigate suspicious network traffic.

Today, the greatest exposure and risk to today’s organizations are privileged users, including non-human privileged accounts. Data compromise occurs as a result of privileged identities and accounts that are either intentionally or inadvertently used in inappropriate or nefarious ways. New features in Change Guardian 4.1 offer customers deeper integration with Active Directory (AD) identity stores and expanded file integrity monitoring (FIM) capabilities, allowing IT teams to more quickly detect threats and respond to audits faster and at a lower cost of ownership.

“NetIQ Sentinel and NetIQ Change Guardian collectively monitor the people, identities, accounts and interactions with data that ultimately predict a threat or identify a breach,” said Renee Bradshaw, Senior Solution Manager at NetIQ. “This is foundational to an Identity-Powered Security strategy. By integrating identity data to identify connections between privileged users and potentially suspicious behaviors, these solutions help security organizations cut through event noise and avoid fighting a battle on the last lines of defense – at the data level – when sensitive company data has most likely already been compromised or stolen.”

Sentinel 7.2 and Change Guardian 4.1 are generally available today worldwide and offered on a subscription or perpetual license basis. For more information please visit www.netiq.com.

HR Emerges As Strategic Business Partner

To assess the effect of the continuously changing business environment on hiring trends and the outlook for FY2015, National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM) organized the two-day annual HR Summit 2014 at ITC Grand Chola, in Chennai. On the side-lines, NASSCOM also announced the findings of a recently conducted HR survey. The survey was aimed at identifying the HR priorities of the industry, defining its operational metrics and showcase technology as a key differentiator for the segment. Echoing the upbeat mood of the industry NASSCOM today also announced the annual rankings of top 20 IT-BPM employers in India, for Financial Year 2013-14. Tata Consultancy Services has emerged as the largest recruiter over the last year, followed by Infosys and Cognizant Technology Solutions.

According to the survey, driven by the improving global economic climate and gradual rise in the technology spend, the Indian IT-BPM industry will increase its net hiring by approximately 6 per cent over last year. With a renewed focus on skills over building capacity, SMEs are expected to drive hiring with 7-8 per cent growth in headcount.

Industry is now focusing more on lateral hiring as there is a higher demand for niche technology skills and domain-specific capabilities. Digital skills that pan across analytics, cloud, mobile and analytics are the key skills in demand by the industry.

R. Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM expressed “The future of the industry is in its talent with niche skills as they can match their capabilities with the strategic goals of their potential employer. The industry is also putting in place multiple solutions to address niche skill set requirements and is actively engaging with employees to build a strong entrepreneurial culture. NASSCOM through the Sector Skill Council has published detailed job roles for the industry and the skills and competencies required in these role”.

BVR Mohan Reddy, Vice Chairman, NASSCOM said “The role of HR leaders is rapidly changing as technology disruptions are creating new opportunities for the industry. HR is gaining more prominence as a ‘strategic business partner’ for the industry with HR transforming to meet new and dynamic business priorities while preparing for the future and developing next level of leadership”.

Technology for HR function will prove to be a boon as technology solutions are expected to bring in clarity in HR processes resulting in increased employee satisfaction. It is expected that for half of the firms, more than 50% of HR processes will be automated. Digital technology will play a significant role to improve the talent hunting process resulting in finding right candidate in reasonable time span. This will witness a rapid shift to non-traditional hiring methods such as online job portals, social media and referrals. New digital channels specifically online portals, social and digital media, like Facebook and LinkedIn are driving recruitment processes.

Addressing Industry challenges: Skill gap

With industry focus shifting towards digital skills, NASSCOM recommends a ‘Multiple Engagement Solution’

Multiple Engagement Solution:

* Leadership training: Manage the required change in leadership mindset for managing projects and teams for digital solutions and develop a leadership program, which includes new KPIs. Also, build a strong HR communication and training process to help in leadership transition

* National level Hackathon/Codefest: Conduct regional and country level competitions for technologists on digital solutions to promote knowledge, awareness and skill development

* Collaboration with industry external partners: Collaborate with User Experience (UX), Design Thinking and Data Research firms to develop skills and solutions utilizing digital services and concepts

* Collaboration with Universities: Define trainings, skillset requirements for digital technologies and communicate to technology and business schools. Collaborate with universities to define right training to educate the future workforce

Mobile Commerce Platform Is Now On iPad!

Paytm, a mobile commerce platform can now be accessed through its new iPad app. The newly-launched app enables mobile recharges, payments for Mobile, DTH, 3G data and utility services and gives access to the full Paytm marketplace. Within two days of its launch, the app has been featured by Apple as the Best New App and the Number 4 Free Lifestyle App on its iOS App Store.

Pratyush Prasanna, VP-Business, Paytm said, “Today’s digitally-savvy consumers have multi-screen usage habits. The iPad is the device of choice for many Paytm users. With our new app, we give users the freedom of choice in terms of the platform they might want to access our services from. The launch of this app and its customisation for the larger iPad screen are just one of the many ways in which Paytm has demonstrated its dedication to constant innovation and focus on enhancing user convenience.”      

The Paytm app for iPad has been developed from ground up. Its user interface and experience have been customised specifically for the larger screen of the iPad. The app caters to all users of Paytm services such as niche shoppers, DTH and postpaid bill payers and those who want a quick and simple recharge for their mobile phones.

The app is already available on iPhone, Windows and Android phones.

Cloud Foundry & OpenStack For Innovation In Cloud

SAP SE is committed to an open platform for customers and partners to run their businesses in real time in the cloud. SAP today announced that it has become a sponsor of two key open source communities: Cloud Foundry, the industry-leading open platform-as-a-service (PaaS), and the OpenStack foundation, delivering the industry-leading open infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). In addition, SAP announced new cloud-based developer tools SAP HANA Answers and SAP River Rapid Development Environment. The announcements were made at the O'Reilly OSCON Open Source Convention, held July 20-24 in Portland, Oregon.

“The developer and open source community are key to breakthrough technology innovation,” said Bjoern Goerke, executive vice president, Products and Innovation Technology, SAP SE. “Through the CloudFoundry and OpenStack initiatives, as well as new developer tools, SAP deepens its commitment to the developer community and enables them to innovate and code in the cloud.”

Fostering Innovation with Cloud Foundry
Cloud Foundry is the industry-leading open PaaS fostering innovation in the industry. As an announced Platinum Member of Cloud Foundry, SAP is actively collaborating with other the founding members to create a foundation that enables the development of next-generation cloud applications. As initial steps of the Cloud Foundry collaboration, in recent months SAP announced the code contribution and availability of a Cloud Foundry service broker for SAP HANA. Developed in close association with Pivotal and available as open source on GitHub, the service broker will allow any Cloud Foundry application to connect to and leverage the in-memory capabilities of SAP HANA.

SAP Sponsors the OpenStack Foundation
SAP is committed to an open cloud platform that will meet the needs of its customers and partners. To this end, SAP will act as an active consumer in the OpenStack community and make contributions to the open source code base. In addition, SAP has significant expertise in managing enterprise clouds, and its contributions will focus on enhancing OpenStack for those scenarios.  Since SAP is leveraging OpenStack and Cloud Foundry for its platform, developers, customers and partners will be able to take advantage of the latest cloud technologies.

The new open source partnerships are a significant step in SAP’s strategy to provide an open technology platform and deepen its commitment to the developer community. SAP recently announced an agreement with Databricks — the company founded by the creators of Apache Spark — to deliver a Spark distribution for integration with SAP HANA platform that is based on Apache Spark 1.0. In December 2013, SAP announced contributions to the open source community, such as the SAP HANA database client via GitHub site that enables developers to efficiently connect Node.js applications to SAP HANA. Also, SAP contributed key portions of the SAPUI5 framework as open source code on the GitHub site under an Apache Version 2.0 license.

New Cloud-Based Developer Tools
SAP announced new cloud-based developer tools aiming to enable developers to easily start building applications on top of SAP HANA Cloud Platform, the in-memory PaaS offering from SAP, enabling customers and developers to build, extend and run applications on SAP HANA in the cloud. SAP HANA Answers is a knowledge hub website for developers providing fast access to SAP HANA information and expertise in the cloud. Via the SAP HANA Answers plugin, the site is directly accessible from the SAP HANA Studio, an Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE) for administration and end-to-end application and content development for SAP HANA. SAP HANA Answers is a single point of entry for developers to find documentation, implement or troubleshoot all things SAP HANA. As part of creating a rich developer experience, in June the company announced the beta release of SAP River RDE as part of SAP HANA Cloud Platform. Developers can get started easily with free trial versions for the SAP HANA Cloud Platform here.

Mobile Browser Enable Access To Fashionable Brands

Tired of seeing the same old styles in the mall every time you go shopping? Dying to get that new, chic look but your pocket feels rather light? Or, do you want to give your wardrobe a facelift but are just too busy to make a day of it? Well, you can say goodbye to these problems, because Myntra.com is now on the Speed Dial start screen on the Opera Mini mobile web browser.

Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers in India. It works on most mobile handsets, varying from basic Java phones to the newest smartphones. It features advanced compression technology, which shrinks webpages to as little as 10% of their original size, helping users save on data charges tremendously. This data compression also leads to faster page-loading, even in bad network conditions, making it a great companion for users on the go.

Myntra.com is one of India's largest e-commerce stores for fashion and lifestyle products. With the new Speed Dial entry, Opera Mini users will now be just a click away from Myntra.com, helping them choose from more than 70,000 styles spanning over 700 fashion labels across apparel, footwear and accessories. And, to make their shopping experience even better, Myntra.com offers great benefits like cash on delivery and a 30-day exchange / returns policy.

Sunil Kamath, Vice President for South Asia at Opera Software, says, “Online shopping is becoming all the rage in India today. Each day, more and more of our users are spending time on online shopping portals, and the fashion & apparel segment is becoming one of the most popular attractions. With this in mind, I’m sure that our users will love having Myntra on their Speed Dial. Opera Mini’s data compression technology will, of course, ensure that they can breeze through browsing the thousands of Myntra’s top-of-the-line fashion products, without worrying about their internet bills.”

Commenting on the partnership, Prasad Kompalli, Chief Revenue Officer at  Myntra , said, “Everyone loves surfing and shopping on their mobile phones these days. At present, almost 35% of our revenue comes from mobile web browsing, which I believe will soon be the next big driver for e-commerce in India. In fact, mobile internet has made it possible for us to connect with new consumers in smaller cities and towns, where phones are the primary means to access the web.”

Myntra’s Kompalli adds, “Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers in India, with millions of users across diverse parts of the country. We are confident that our presence on Opera Mini’s Speed Dial will help us reach many new users and bring them closer to our brand.”