HCL Infosystems & Avaya to Accelerate Digital Transformation in Enterprises across India

HCL Infosystems, one of India’s premier IT Services, Distribution and Digital Solutions Company, today announced a strategic alliance with Avaya, a global leader in business communications software, systems and services, to help businesses and organizations in India accelerate their digital transformation strategies. Under this alliance, HCL Infosystems will offer Avaya’s complete portfolio of customer and team engagement and data networking solutions and services to its customers across different industry sectors.

Speaking on the alliance, Madhavan P, Senior Vice President - Office Automation, HCL Services Ltd. said, “We are delighted to partner with Avaya to offer their cutting-edge technologies to better meet the evolving demands of a hyper-connected business environment. This is in line with our mission to add utmost value to our customers byproviding them the choice of best-in-class solutions through leading edge capabilities and solutions, especially in emerging technologies such as IOT, Mobility & Cloud, which are becoming imperative for digital transformation.

Vishal Aggarwal, Managing Director, India and SAARC, Avaya commented, “By working with an innovative company like HCL Infosystems that has pioneered IT in India, we look forward to deliver best-of-breed-technology services and solutions that give enterprises competitive edge through greater agility. HCL Infosystems’ strong footprint, brand reputation and industry expertise will help us grow our presence across India.”

This partnership will help HCL Infosystems and Avaya to enable their enterprise customers through a range of best-in-class communication solutions, including unified communications, contact center, mobility and video conferencing facilities. HCL Infosystems’ pan-India presence will enable customers across the country to gain access to Avaya’s leading-edge solutions and services. HCL will also offer smart applications from Avaya to help enterprises make informed decisions that can transition them into truly digital enterprises.

Digital transformation is increasingly gaining importance in corporate growth strategies as it empowers businesses, vendors and channel partners to significantly enhance customer experience and achieve higher levels of engagement.

NASSCOM & Tamil Nadu Government Partner to Set Up Startup Warehouse

In an effort to continuously support the young entrepreneurs, National Association of Software & Services (NASSCOM) announces the inauguration of its first warehouse in Chennai today. The MoU signing took place between Department of Information Technology, State of Tamil Nadu, acting through the Electronics Corporation of Tamilnadu and NASSCOM in presence of Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu J. Jayalalitha over video conferencing.

Chennai is known to be quite popular for its automobile and IT industry. One of the fastest growing cities in the world, Chennai is home to more than 20 Indian companies that have a net worth of more than USD 1 billion. It is often seen as the secondary financial hub following Mumbai. The cultural capital of the south is amongst the major upcoming start-up locations of the country. The city is emerging as the SaaS Hub as it has a large base of B2B SaaS product companies triggered by the success of few startups supported by right set of domain talent.

The warehouse which is spread across 8000 sq.ft can house upto 50 start-ups allowing them to learn, work, and accelerate their companies. The entrepreneurs will have a list of benefits which could help polish their entrepreneurial skills as well as polish their marketing ability including; Connect sessions, early stage mentoring, access to resources from Google, Amazon, Microsoft, IBM cloud, Kotak etc. The selection would be finalized by a selection committee comprising of stakeholders from the government as well as the industry, viz. Government of Tamil Nadu and NASSCOM.

Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu J. Jayalalitha said, “Chennai has a strong entrepreneurial culture and has been a great inspiration to other cities as well. We definitely want to back this culture and support these entrepreneurs in every possible way. We are extremely pleased to be partnering with NASSCOM to scale up the entrepreneurial growth of the city. The city is emerging as an important location for the start-up ecosystem and we hope that this initiative will bring a new dynamism to its entrepreneurs.”

Rajat Tandon, Vice President, NASSCOM 10,000 Start-ups, said, “Over the years, Chennai has been home to a lot of promising startups. We have seen immense talent and enthusiasm here and wanted to further encourage and support the entrepreneurs through our 10k program. The warehouse will nurture nearly 200 entrepreneurs to foster innovation under one roof. A co-working space like this is necessary in order to boost the startup ecosphere of the city. NASSCOM would like to thank the state Government for their support in building a conducive environment for the startup founders. ”

Start-up Warehouse is a premium co-working space introduced by 10000 Start-ups in August 2013. It incubates start-ups from a diverse range of verticals. The space is the ultimate place for entrepreneurs to learn, work, and accelerate their companies. At the warehouse, you get a number of facilities, including a 10 Mbps broadband leased line, quality infrastructure with AC, chair, tables, tea/coffee, logistics etc. The co-working space allows early-stage technology start-ups to work for 6-12 months during which start-ups will get showcased at select NASSCOM events and other events of partner organizations.

BT & Intel Security Collaborate to Develop Next Generation Security Services

BT and Intel Security have announced a strategic agreement to create new solutions to help organisations improve security and prevent cyber-attacks. The companies will also work together in a joint cyber partnership to further develop their common vision of creating next generation security services. RSA Conference attendees can visit BT Security booth 7.07 for a demo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, California.

These new solutions will bring together key elements of both companies’ technology platforms and address current shortcomings of traditional point security products by avoiding the operational silos that widen the gap between detection and response. They are designed to simplify management and support, close many of the expertise gaps in the market and improve speed of response.

In the face of an ever-evolving cyber threat landscape, organisations need continuous innovation to help them protect their critical data and applications wherever they choose to host them; on their premises, in the cloud or a hybrid of both. BT and Intel Security are focused on integrated, open security systems with cloud-first technology designed to empower organizations to resolve threats faster and with fewer resources.

Together, BT and Intel Security will work to address these threats with a single ecosystem that can handle multiple security controls. This means that the controls within both companies’ platforms will talk and interact with each other. This may provide considerable cost benefits for customers as the same controls can be delivered often with less hardware, less configuration and less management overhead.

Mark Hughes, CEO of BT Security, said: “At BT, we are determined to stay ahead of the security game. We are collaborating with Intel to bring together BT’s security intelligence with Intel’s advanced security tools in real time. We believe that our combined proposition will be an industry first in terms of the scope and ambition. Intel’s cutting edge security technology and our knowhow in service design and delivery can help make our customers safer.”

Raj Samani, EMEA chief technology officer, Intel Security, said: “Our goal is to enable businesses around the globe to more aggressively and effectively defend against data security incidents and targeted attacks. Together with BT, we plan to close the gaps between detection and remediation by creating and managing a security ecosystem designed to enable real-time communication, intelligence exchange and response across security tools.”

SecureBase Offers Global Shared Database on Malicious Advertising and Stubborn Trojan Threats

Cheetah Mobile Inc., a leading developer of mission-critical mobile utility and security applications, announced the creation of SecureBase, a shared security database for researchers, at RSA Conference in San Francisco. SecureBase members will gain access to real-time data on the latest mobile threats around the globe, such as malicious advertising and stubborn trojans.

SecureBase arose from Cheetah Mobile’s desire to increase collaboration in the mobile security industry and ensure a safer future for mobile users and their devices. The database will serve as a comprehensive security knowledge center offering data visualization and up-to-date statistics, drawing from Cheetah Mobile's nearly 2 billion app installations.

“With SecureBase, Cheetah Mobile is leveraging its years of commitment to data-driven mobile security,” said Ming Xu, President of Cheetah Mobile. “We’re extremely focused on making the mobile experience safer for users. Sharing our data and insights with the industry is an important next step for us.”

“Mobile security has reached an important turning point,” said Yong Chen, Senior Vice President of Cheetah Mobile. “Last year, Cheetah Mobile detected over 9.5 million mobile viruses, three times as many as in 2014. In order to protect users from these perpetual attacks, the mobile security industry needs to join forces and work together. We created SecureBase to build bridges to our fellow security researchers.”

Trustlook, the maker of the popular Trustlook Mobile Security & Antivirus app for Android devices, has signed on as a launch partner for SecureBase. "We are very excited to join Cheetah Mobile as the first enterprise partner for SecureBase," said Allan Zhang, CEO of Trustlook. "Our collaboration on mobile threat research will help to better protect each of our customers.”

Additional launch members of SecureBase include Prof. Yike Guo, Discovery Science Group, Director of the Data Science Institute, Imperial College; Prof. Qingfu Zhang, Department of Computer Science, City University of Hong Kong; Prof. Chu-Sing Yang, Director of the Taiwan Information Security Center@NCKU (TWISC), National Cheng Kung University; Prof. Hung-Yu Kao, Intelligent Knowledge Management Lab, National Cheng Kung University; and Prof. Mauro Conti, University of Padova.

According to Cheetah Mobile Security Lab’s latest research, more than 18% of global mobile ad network traffic comes from malicious promotion, such as fake app updates and ads disguised as security alerts. These bad actors have been particularly difficult to track because they often appear in targeted bursts in one geographic region before moving onto another in just a few hours. Big data is the key to fighting these criminals. With 567 million monthly active users, Cheetah Mobile's top-down view of mobile devices all around the world offers a much-needed perspective for the security industry. In India alone, the company found that there were almost a million devices infected with various malware in 2015.

SanDisk & IBM Collaborate to Deliver Software-Defined All-Flash Storage Solutions

SanDisk Corporation, a global leader in flash storage solutions, and IBM announced a collaboration to bring out a unique class of next-generation, software-defined, all-flash storage solutions for the data center. At the core of this collaboration are SanDisk’s InfiniFlash System—a high-capacity and extreme-performance flash-based software defined storage system featuring  IBM Spectrum Scale filesystem from IBM. The joint solution of software-defined all-flash storage addresses the escalating datacenter challenges of scale, performance, agility and break-through economics.

As bi-modal IT, traditional and cloud native applications become social, mobile and real-time, IT groups must address the mounting pressure to deliver best-of-breed storage. TheInfiniFlash for IBM Spectrum Scale Solution is a scale-out, ultra-dense system combined with IBM Spectrum Scale and allows private, hybrid and public cloud customers to enable Infrastructure as a Service (IAAS) by starting small and growing to multiple petabytes. InfiniFlash delivers best-in-class cost per IOPS/TB and the ability to scale compute and storage independently, while delivering the high reliability and low failure rate of flash, resulting in breakthrough capex and opex savings. The joint flash storage solution will address use cases such as clustered scale-out high performance NAS, Big Data In-Place analytics and OpenStack for files.

SanDisk InfiniFlash

Award-winning SanDisk InfiniFlash is a next-generation storage platform created by SanDisk offering 5x the density, 50x the performance and 4x the reliability, while consuming 80 percent less power than traditional hard disk drive (HDD) based arrays. InfiniFlash also delivers breakthrough pricing for an all-flash solution starting at less than $1 per gigabyte (GB) for an all-flash system before the additional effects of compression or de-duplication technologies are considered. With software stacks that offer data reduction schemes, the effective cost/GB goes down even more significantly to unprecedented levels (example: 20 cents/GB based on a 5X data reduction factor).

IBM Spectrum Scale

Award-winning IBM Spectrum Scale is a software-defined, distributed, parallel filesystem, for high performance, large scale workloads on-premises or in the cloud. Featuring the ability to automatically tier data based on application needs, the Spectrum Scale software-defined storage solution provides file, object, and integrated data analytics for:

·              Compute clusters (technical computing)

·              Big data and analytics

·              Cognitive computing

·              Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS)

·              Private cloud

·              Content repositories

“Our initiative with IBM brings the best of both worlds to data centers: breakthrough economics compared to traditional all-flash array deployments, and dramatically higher performance, improved reliability and lower power consumption compared to hard disk drive-based arrays,” said Ravi Swaminathan, vice president and general manager, System and Software Solutions, SanDisk. “These offerings enable customers to economically deploy flash at petabyte-scale, which drive business growth through new services and offerings for their end-customers.”

“The market-leading combination of IBM Spectrum Scale and SanDisk’s InfiniFlash solution delivers key differentiators for our mutual clients’ applications and workloads,” said Eric Herzog, vice president product marketing and management, of IBM Storage Systems Division. “These solutions will be designed to break new ground and make all-flash storage exceedingly cost-effective for a wide range of use cases, from high-performance databases to virtualized environments to big data oceans to extra-dense active archive repositories and more.”

“Next-Gen applications demand storage services which are high-performance, cost-effective, elastic and agile while providing break-through capex and opex,” said Ashish Nadkarni, Program Director, Enterprise Servers and Storage at IDC. “This joint solution between SanDisk and IBM that combines an all-flash storage array with a software-defined storage software effectively addresses the changing needs of the data center.”

Hatch Uses Bentley Technology to Solve Complex Designs on Keeyask Dam

Through a collaborative effort with Hatch Ltd, Bentley created new technology to quickly and accurately quantify design options of the Keeyask Dam, a CAN$ 6.5 billion challenging and innovative project in Manitoba, Canada. The Keeyask Generating Station at the dam will be a source of renewable energy providing approximately 695 megawatts of capacity and producing an average of 4,400 gigawatt hours of electricity each year. The renewable hydroelectric energy produced will be integrated into Manitoba Hydro's electrical system for use in Manitoba and for export. As a concrete structure, design and placement of reinforcing steel is critical.

Collaborating with Bentley on new enhancements to MicroStation, Hatch was able to model the inside face of the draft tube and the centerlines of the rebar along B-spline curves. Each B-spline curve was composed of a complex chain of constant radius arcs and line segments. Furthermore, calculations split the bars automatically at 60-foot increments, inserting a lap-splice at every split. Once the B-spline curves were converted into centerlines that could be fabricated, ProConcrete was easily able to add rebar along the path. 

ProConcrete has built-in information for each bar diameter which includes the maximum bending radius possible. Any bars that have a larger radius are flagged automatically as “ship-as-straight” bars with instructions to the installer to drape the bars in place. Hatch used ProConcrete to create these bar schedules for the fabricator, 2D drawings for placement, and i-models for construction team.

Charles McGowan, at Hatch, noted, “The complex shapes and sheer complexity of rebar placement in hydro projects made the design process more labor intensive with significant manual design and checking required. ProConcrete handled parametric standard rebar requirements quite well and automated this process considerably.”

In addition to ProConcrete and MicroStation, Hatch used a full range of Bentley software including AECOsim Building Designer, Bentley Navigator, Bentley Raceway and Cable Management, gINT, ProjectWise, ProStructures, and STAAD, as well as mobile apps such as ProjectWise WorkSite, Navigator Mobile, and ProjectWise Explorer Mobile.

Using 3D modeling on this project enabled the team to easily manage the design changes necessary during the construction phase. Accurate 3D models were provided to contractors early in the project, and then updated on a regular basis. This enabled the contractor to increase the quality of planning and estimating. Using ProConcrete and involving the contractors early in the project also reduced the traditional turn-around time for approval of detail drawings.

Nivruti Rai Succeeds Kumad Srinivasan; Appointed Intel India Site General Manager

Intel has announced the appointment of. Nivruti Rai as Intel India Site General Manager. Rai succeeds Kumud Srinivasan who is relocating to the U.S. after the completion of her assignment in India.

Nivruti Rai has been with Intel for over 20 years and has held several technical and business management positions across different functions both in the US and India. Based in Bengaluru, Ms. Rai is Vice President and Director of RandD, in Platform Engineering Group (PEG), Intel Corporation.

“Intel India has been witnessing remarkable growth over the last few years. Today, it is a key design site for Intel with state-of-the-art facilities in Bengaluru and Pune involving advanced engineering capabilities across the computing spectrum from servers to IoT and wearables.  India also presents us with opportunity to innovate and design relevant products and solutions to grow technology adoption in the country. Having worked here at Intel India over the last ten years, I am excited about the opportunities for Intel to lead and redefine the boundaries of technology to make new amazing experiences possible,” said Ms. Rai.

Ms. Rai holds a Master of Sciences degree from the University of Lucknow, India, and a MS Degree in Electrical Engineering from Oregon State University (OSU), Oregon, US.

Ms. Srinivasan plans to relocate to the U.S. “I’ve had the privilege of leading Intel India for the past three years.  I have seen the site grow, innovate and contribute significantly to Intel’s success worldwide.  We are fortunate to have a strong and stable leadership team at the site with a vision for innovation and growth.  I am confident that under Nivruti’s leadership, Intel India will attain its next level of growth”, said Kumad Srinivasan.

Ms. Rai will partner closely with Debjani Ghosh, Vice President Sales & Marketing Group, Managing Director, South Asia to represent Intel in India. Ms. Ghosh will continue to be responsible for establishing new growth areas for Intel in the South Asian region. Ms. Ghosh will continue leading strategic engagements with governments and industry in these countries to establish policies and initiatives that help accelerate the adoption of technology in the region, especially as an enabler of inclusive growth and development.

With over 7,500 employees, Intel India is Intel’s largest non-manufacturing site outside the US and the presence of two senior leaders at the helm in the country reiterates Intel India’s strategic importance to Intel Corporation.