Parrikar to lay the Foundation Stone for BEL’s Defence Systems Integration Complex in Andhra Pradesh

Navratna Defence PSU Bharat Electronics Limited (BEL) is setting up a Defence Systems Integration Complex at Palasamudram, Gorantala Mandal, in Anantapuramu district of Andhra Pradesh. It will be the largest such facility in the country once it is commissioned, covering an area of over 900 acres. Raksha Mantri, Manohar Parrikar, will lay the foundation stone for this facility on Wednesday, September 30, 2015, in the august presence of N Chandrababu Naidu, Chief Minister of Andhra Pradesh, M  Venkaiah Naidu, Union Minister for Urban Development & Parliamentary Affairs, P Ashok Gajapathi Raju, Union Minister for Civil Aviation, Nirmala Sitharaman, Minister of State for Commerce & Industry and Y S Chowdary, Minister of State for Science & Technology.

S K Sharma, Chairman & Managing Director, BEL, says: “We at BEL have been continuously investing in modernization and creation of special infrastructure to cater for emerging defence business opportunities. The upcoming facility at Palasamudram is one such initiative. We are also strengthening our infrastructure in areas like Night Vision technologies and elements of Multifunction Radars. Various new Surface to Air Missile (SAM) programmes are proposed to be taken up by BEL, viz, Quick Reaction SAM , Long Range SAM, Medium Range SAM, etc, in addition to Network Centric Communication and Electronic Warfare systems.’’

BEL CMD adds, “To achieve self-reliance in defence, there is need for a very strong indigenous R&D. In this direction, BEL has not only maintained a consistent policy of R&D investments but also has launched collaborative R&D with private SME firms in the country. On an average, 80% of BEL’s Sales turnover is from indigenous R&D every year. BEL has now launched a Product Development & Innovation Centre at Bangalore to give further thrust towards indigenous R&D.”

As part of diversification and business growth, BEL is looking towards major expansion into New Generation SAM systems, High end Image Intensifier Tubes and Thermal Imaging detectors for Night Vision Devices, Inertial Navigation Systems, Electronic Ammunition Fuses, Air Traffic Management Radars, Intelligent Traffic Management Systems and Solar Power Plants.

The Palasamudram facility will enable BEL to expand its Missile systems business and will carry out manufacturing & integration for the ongoing and upcoming projects. It will have state-of-the-art infrastructure such as Assembly Hangars and Hard Stands for Radars and Weapon integration, RF radiation sources for target simulation, Automatic Test Equipment, Clean Rooms for electronic assembly, Non-Explosive & Explosive Integration Buildings, Missile Storage buildings, Environmental Test Chambers, Fire Stations, Solar Power Plant, Estate and Admin buildings.

BEL is currently manufacturing the Akash Missile Systems (AMS) for the Indian Air Force and the Indian Army. The Akash Missile System is a supersonic, short-range surface-to-air missile system designed and developed by DRDO, with the capability to engage a wide variety of aerial threats like aircraft, helicopters and unmanned aerial vehicles. BEL is the lead integrator of the Akash Missile System for the Indian Air Force and supplies the Radars, Control Centres, Simulators, associated maintenance vehicles and the integrated software.

Testing and integration of missile systems involves actual deployment of Air Surveillance Radars, Fire Control Radars, Control Centers, Missile Launchers and other support systems to validate the detection, tracking, command and communication link parameters. Multiple groups of the equipment have to be positioned at suitable spacing over a large area to simulate field conditions. The upcoming facility will cater to these requirements. At present, BEL carries out its missile manufacturing and integration activities and system level checks at its Bangalore Unit. In order to cater to the large requirements of futuristic Surface to Air Missile systems, missiles and associated electronic sub-systems & components, BEL is setting up this facility in Andhra Pradesh.

The facility is about 80 Km from the Bengaluru International Airport on NH 7. The proposed Complex will be a world-class facility with Automated Guided Vehicles and Industrial Robots for material movement and handling. The facility will be built in stages as the various projects mature and the estimated investment will be about Rs.500 Crores over 3 to 4 years.                                                                                                                                                      

BEL also plans to expand this facility for the creation of a Military Industrial Complex to set up the necessary ecosystem for manufacture of electronic components and equipment for various upcoming Defence projects in collaboration with SMEs as part of the Government’s ‘Make in India’ initiative.

Dr Devi Shetty Launches Tele-ECG at BSF STS Camp in Yelhanka

Dr Devi Prasad Shetty, Chairman and Founder of Narayana Healthcare inaugurated a Tele ECG Link established at the BSF STS Camp in Yelahanka with Narayana Healthcare, Bangalore on September 16, 2015. With the facility, the patients who are far flung can now consult with experts for treatment and consultation.

Speaking at the inauguration, Dr Shetty in his Health Talk highlighted on the lack of awareness on heart diseases and how it impacts not just the elders but also the youth in the country. He spoke on the change in lifestyles and eating habits that have resulted in heart problems. He said that Indian are 3x more prone to heart diseases than the Europeans. He also cited about various innovations in the field of healthcare with special emphasis on Cardiac Care.

Vimal Satyarthi, DIG & Commandant, STS BSF Bangalore in his inaugural spoke about how Narayana Health is contributing in the welfare and wellbeing of BSF troops. Dr Mukesh Saxena, IG/Director, BSF New Delhi and Dr V.G. Talawar, Vice-Chancellor, Reva University was the guest of honour. Dr J.R.Das, Medical Officer STS coordinated the event which concluded on interaction of the chief guest with the jawans.

Telemedicine is a healthcare initiative that allows the transmission of services including diagnosis and consultation remotely. Doctors and physicians from larger towns or medical institutions can connect to the health care centers or hospitals in the remote areas through a networked environment that makes patient data available online through interactive audio and video facilities. The initiative aims at bringing the latest developments in medicine to the remote villages and towns in India.

To promote welfare and wellbeing of Seema Praharies, which is the main focus during the BSF Golden Jubilee Celebrations in 2015. BSF STS camp has conducted several medical health camps and demonstrations on various discipline for the benefits of staff, trainees as well as those serving and retired BSF facilities. Some of the recent camps include: Breast Screening and Mammography test camp for ladies; Nephrologists Consultation camp; Bone Densitometry camp; Cardiac Medical Camp, CPR Demo camp among others.

Mindtree Strategic Technology Partner for flydubai

Mindtree, a leading digital transformation and technology services company, has announced a strategic partnership with Dubai-based flydubai to shape the full digital experience of the connected traveller.

Mindtree will focus on transforming flydubai’s information technology to support passenger sales and service systems, including services such as electronic ticketing and real-time baggage tracking. The agreement will also extend to other strategic business areas such as revenue management, target monitoring, ancillary revenue and operationaloptimisation.

flydubai has a fleet of 49 new Next-Generation Boeing 737-800 aircrafts operating to more than 90 destinations across Africa, Caucasus, Central Asia, Europe, the GCC, Middle East and the Subcontinent. 

Commenting on the announcement, Ramesh Venkat, Chief Information Officer of flydubai, said: “We welcome this agreement with Mindtree who bring their creativity, IT architectural design capabilities and experience of working within the aviation industry. We look forward to working together to further enhance efficiencies for the benefit of our passengers.”

Parthasarathy N.S., President and Chief Operating Officer of Mindtree, said: “We are committed to flydubai’s goal of treating each passenger not just as a routine traveller but as a customer to be engaged and served across a full range of touch points. Mindtree will work with flydubai to digitise their value chain, hone operations and create remarkable experiences for each traveller before, during and after their journey.”  

FreeCharge’s Digital Wallet Targets Rs 1000 Crore

FreeCharge, India’s leading digital platform for recharge and utility payments, with a volume of over 200 million transactions annually, today announced the launch of FreeCharge Digital Wallet. The ‘comprehensive and trusted’ digital wallet service will transform mobile and web transactions by facilitating easy and secure payments. The wallet is being launched in partnership with YES bank, one of India’s leading private sector banks and targets Rs 1000 crore over the next few years.

With an ecosystem of 8.2 million daily unique users, 4 million monthly engaged hours, 15 million stored cards, combined with GMV of over USD 4 billion, the FreeCharge Digital Wallet is set to become India’s most used wallet in the next 6 months.

In line with Snapdeal’s vision of building the most impactful digital commerce ecosystem in India, the FreeCharge digital wallet will enable a culture of digital payments through multiple partnerships.

In addition to a large and robust network of merchant partners, FreeCharge will partner with FINO - a payments bank licensee to build scale and ability to reach even the under-served.

FreeCharge Digital Wallet is powered by cutting edge technology, consumer behaviour insights and innovations in payments. It is a robust and flexible platform that leverages enabling technologies such as HCE, NFC, QR code and BLE to bring in efficiencies in the consumers’ purchase experience.

Commenting on the launch, Kunal Shah, CEO and co-founder, FreeChargesaid “FreeCharge has hit an important milestone in its journey today. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we are all set to transform the way people make payments. A secure, easy to use and feature-rich service, the wallet is equipped with state of the art technology and a robust partner network, making it a truly game-changing service that will bring value to consumers and our partners in the ecosystem.”

Congratulating FreeCharge on this milestone launch, Kunal Bahl, CEO and co-founder, Snapdeal said, “Our aim is to bring in efficiencies in payments using digital commerce to cater to every consumption need that a user may have. Consumer needs are constantly evolving and we feel it is the right time to launch a trusted and feature-rich digital wallet service. At Snapdeal we are building an ecosystem that powers billions of digital commerce transactions. With the launch of the FreeCharge Digital Wallet, we will now play an even more intrinsic role in our customers’ lives”

Commenting on the way forward for the Digital Wallet, Anand Chandrasekaran, Chief Product Officer, Snapdeal said, “We are very excited about this landmark product launch. With 87 million combined registered users, we will ensure a seamless transition by offering easy integration and access to the platform resulting in a superior consumer and merchant experience.”  

HyperVerge Winner of G-Startup India at GMIC Bangalore 2015

GMIC Bangalore, India’s major mobile conference, has announced the winners of their flagship startup competition, G-Startup.  HyperVerge, a Bay-area based startup, which uses deep learning to organize images emerged as winners at the competition. A global platform, G-Startup is emerging as one of the most prominent launch pads for innovative mobile startups to showcase their product, reach out to international investors and collaborate with peers and industry experts.

 

Launched for the first time in India, G-Startup saw competition from 120+ startups from across the world.The previous editions of G-Startup have been held in San Francisco and Beijing. Some of the previous winners and runner-ups at the competition include companies likeFleksy Keyboard and Open Garden, who’s product FireChat is a disruptive mobile communication platform that also works without a data plan and where there is no Internet connection or cellular phone coverage. Other big names that have participated in the G-Startup competition include Chinese cab giant DidiDache that recently merged with KuaidiDache to create one of the world's largest smartphone-based transport services valued upwards of $8.5 billion and Visual Lead, an Israeli QR Technology companywhich recently received strategic investment from Alibaba.

 

Speaking about winning at G-Startup India, Kedar Kulkarni, co-founder of HyperVerge said, “We are extremely excited to win the first ever G-Startup competition in India. GMIC being one of the biggest conferences in India has been a fantastic platform for us to showcase our product and gain visibility in the right circles. In fact, after coming to GMIC, we have already seen investment interest from atleast 3 groups from China. We now look forward to going to GMIC Beijing 2016 and compete with the rest of the winners from across the globe.”

 

The eminent jury for G-startup India consisted ofSasha Mirchandani, ‎Founder & Managing Director, Kae Capital, Amit Somani, Managing Partner, Prime Ventures and Hiro Mashita, Founder & Director, M&S Partners.

 

According to Amit of Prime Ventures and Hiro of M&S Partners, “It was a pleasure to be a part of the jury of the first edition of G-Startup. The quality of startups that displayed their products and the depth of research they had done was impressive to say the least. The G-Startup competition by GMIC provides an excellent opportunity for startups from India and China to collaborate and learn from each other. HyperVerge impressed us the most with the the deep technology expertise demonstrated by them. What got us even more excitedwas the fact that such differentiated mobile products are being created out of India”.

 

G-Startup’s platform has given several disruptive mobile startups international exposure. As part of the win, HyperVerge will get a round-trip airfare to Beijing for GMIC Beijing 2016, where they will be given a demo booth to showcase their product. With Beijing being among one of world mobile ecosystem’s key centers for innovation, GMIC organizers hope that HyperVerge would also get to collaborate with their global counterparts.

 

Talking about G-Startup, Gurpreet Singh, President, Asia, GMIC said "We are excited to bring our flagship startup competition to India after China and the U.S. Since 2010, G-Startup has emerged as a leading global platform to nurture and support startups. Startups that have gone through the platform have achieved wide-ranging success, from achieving billion-dollar valuations to being acquired by tech giants like Apple and Google. By bringing this platform to India, we wish to help and bring the same level of support and success to Indian startups."

 

GMIC brings together some of the most advanced and disruptive companies in the Mobile Internet Space. It hosts Mobile Executives, Entrepreneurs, Developers and Investors across global platforms to build partnerships, learn from industry thought leaders and study mobile technology trends. Some of the well-known names that were a part of GMIC include Sachin Bansal (Co-founder Flipkart), Naveen Tiwari (CEO, Inmobi), Kunal Shah (CEO, Freecharge) Fu Sheng (CEO Cheetah Mobile), Li Tao (CEO, APUS Group) and Vijay Shekhar Sharma (CEO, Paytm), among others.

Zopnow Explores SCRO Solutions As It Diversify Into Apparels & Fashion Garments

By Manu Sharma

One of the recent startup entrant’s in the online grocery space -- Zopnow -- believes that technology is the way forward and so along with their self-developed robust platform are also exploring the supply chain, retail and Omni-channel (SCRO) solutions as they diversify into apparels and fashion garments.

Technology Essential for Seamless Connection

On the technology front. Zopnow has already developed its own platform across various devices like mobile, app and website. So technology enables the insight of the inventory of all the outlets - Hypercity and More -stores across the five cities. IT also helps acquire customers and route their deliveries within the shortest time. However, seamless connection in today's digital age is still a concern and so is the need to reduce costs, increase profitability and improve collaboration & deliver on the customer promises every time.

Scaling Up the IT Infra Critical

Addressing the gathering of the 9^th Edition of Supply Chain Practitioners’ Council held recently at the JDA Software campus in Bengaluru, Mukesh Singh, CEO of Zopnow says, “Time and delivery are critical components in our business and so have developed our own open source platform and the website has been developed using php and Java. So today we have a team of IT staff who manage and maintain the services. But as we move forward need to scale up our network and security is essential for the company. As an entrepreneur, we are definitely interested in new and innovative SCM technologies.”

Healthy Margins for Apparels & Fashion Brands

As per industry reports the online retail segment is expected to turn into a $2.8-billion industry by 2016. Lately India is indeed seeing a flourishing online market for apparel & fashion brands, which offers e-tailers a healthy margin of 30-40%. On the other hand, e-grocery gets them a margin of 10-12%.

Diversify Next Step Forward for the Business

Presently, Zopnow has an exclusive agreement with two of India’s largest grocery chains – K Raheja Corp group’s ‘Hypercity’ and Aditya Birla Retail’s ‘More’ to deliver groceries across cities like Bangalore, Pune, Mumbai, Hyderabad and Gurgaon. Zopnow also plans to expand into other major cities in the coming months. 

“Now that it has been three years since we have entered into groceries, we have decided to diversify into apparels and fashion garments. We have a technology tie-up with Hypercity and More, wherein we have access to their inventory and also physical access to their chain of stores across the country,” remarks Singh and adds, “we believe many customers already appreciate our quick delivery, access to inventory and delivery network. We definitely want to diversify and there is no doubt on that as it is the next step forward for the business. We in talks with leading retail chains including -- Pantaloon, Reliance Retail and also K Raheja.”

Earlier Model Not Viable

In the beginning, Zopnow had come out with the warehouse model with partnership with MNCs like HLL, P&G till 2014 to run their operations. Since then they have shut down on the warehouse model and now station their staff at the physical stores.

Retail Solution Success Story

Shoppers Stop, another leading Indian branded store have scaled up from one format and one company to five companies, eight format and 200+ stores. Initially, when they had about five stores they looked for ERP solutions to scale up and that’s where JDA Software came in. Today, the retailer has over 200 stores and since it difficult to track all its customers' and so they needed a proper system & process in place and the backbone was JDA’s Merchandise Management System (MMS). Today the firm is very profitable due to the availability of merchandise across stores and have gained from optimized inventory and also replenish orders.

Similarly PepsiCo, ITC Foods, Asian Paints are all experiencing similar breakthrough’s by using JDA’s solutions.

EMC COE Emphasis on Open Flexible & Cost Effective Platform for Surveillance

EMC India Center of Excellence (COE) announced the launch of Surveillance Lab in Bangalore. EMC has made a multi-year investment to form the industry’s largest, most advanced test and certification Surveillance Labs. The Surveillance Lab will help organizations to reduce the deployment risk and support requirements and also provide a proven, repeatable architecture and a known performance baseline for production environments.

With the government of India’s increased emphasis on the development of smart cities, safety has become a major concern for all the stakeholders. Thus, making the role of technology extremely crucial, especially surveillance technology. Shielding people, infrastructure and critical data from deliberate or accidental threats is serious business—and it’s a business that’s growing at an unprecedented rate. In the present scenario, video surveillance has become the largest and fastest-growing component of the physical security industry in India.   

Industry research released by IHS Technology forecasts the sales of video surveillance equipment to reach $26B in 2018, growing 2X faster than the overall IT market. The advancement made in technology and the increasing demand to strengthen the security has led to new requirements for video surveillance. Leading vendors in sectors like transport, manufacturing, IT, ITeS and government are quickly transitioning to the digital era, where large pools of high resolution video and data can be stored safely, retained and used for intensive analytics whenever required.

The new Surveillance Lab in Bangalore complements EMC’s dedicated lab in North Carolina, USA that’s been testing with partners for more than 6 years.   To ensure the quality of physical security applications, which is supported with EMC’s portfolio of products, EMC has partnered with the leading surveillance vendors. The lab will offer EMC Proven Solutions documentation for field sales, delivery teams and partners, Reference Architectures (RAs), white papers, technical notes and sizing guidelines, as well as technical presentations to the customers.  The key features of the lab includes dedicated engineering team, partner testing & validation, proof of concept and test to fail philosophy.

“Security is one of the most important components of a smart city. The development of dedicated surveillance lab testifies our commitment to physical security. It also underscores our commitment to global surveillance market as well as the customers in India and across APJ. Our expertise in the technology and in the security domain offers leading physical security vendors a forum that will allow video surveillance workload to be more manageable and enable easy analysis of the available data,” said Sarv Saravanan, Senior Vice President & General Manager, EMC Centers of Excellence – Asia Pacific Japan. He further added that “through this lab we aim at creating awareness about the importance of overall surveillance practice and also our advanced test/validation capabilities”.

“As India strides towards developing smart cities, the pressure to develop cutting edge, scalable and proven security solutions is massive. EMC’s Video Surveillance lab offers the private security vendors a platform that is open, flexible, cost-effective and is analytics-ready. EMC wants to be an enabler and strives towards developing purpose-built platforms that leverage its enterprise storage expertise and business partnerships that are focused on the growing security space,” said Michael Gallant, Global Practice Lead, Surveillance & Security, EMC Corporation. He said “working together with our partners we want to offer customers integrated solutions that are customized to their needs for simple deployment and the management of large scale video data that is generated today.”