Cisco Announces World’s First AI-Powered Voice Assistant for Meetings

AI-powered voice assistants are changing the way we live. Hundreds of millions of people use these assistants regularly to check the weather, wake up on time, and find their way around town. Yet there have been no virtual assistants to help us at work— until now. Today at Cisco Partner Summit, we announce Cisco Spark Assistant. It is the world’s first enterprise-ready voice assistant for meetings. It will be available first on the Cisco Spark Room Series portfolio, including the new flagship Cisco Spark Room 70, which we also announce today.

Cisco Spark Assistant is the latest innovation on the Cisco Spark platform. Unlike all-purpose voice assistants, Cisco Spark Assistant has one goal: to help you have great meetings that run more smoothly.  

“During the next few years, AI meeting bots will be joining our work teams. When they do, people will be able to ditch the drudgery of meeting setup and other logistics to become more creative than ever,” said Rowan Trollope, SVP and GM, Applications Group, Cisco. “The future of great meetings is Spark with AI and our partners have an incredible opportunity to help customers take advantage of this game-changing technology.”

We will release Cisco Spark Assistant in phases, starting early next year. In the first phase, a small group of customers will use select features.

Here is what you will be able to do in phase one:

·         Start your meeting without any typing or dialing:

o    “Hey, Spark. Join the meeting.”

o    “Hey, Spark. I want to start the meeting.”

o    “Hey, Spark. Let’s get started.”
 

·         Effortlessly join your own Cisco® WebEx® personal meeting room or one of your co-workers’ rooms:

o    “Hey, Spark. Call my meeting room.”

o    “Hey, Spark. Call Victor’s PMR.”

o    “Hey, Spark. Call Michael’s meeting room.”
 

·         Quickly call anyone in your organization without lifting a finger:

o    “Hey, Spark. Call Sydney.”
 

·         Control your Cisco Spark endpoint without getting out of your chair:

o    “Hey, Spark. End the meeting.”

Cisco Spark Assistant will use feedback from this trial to make itself smarter. Eventually it will be able to do much more; for example, it will be able to assign action items and create meeting summaries.

We know a lot needs to go right for voice assistants to be truly helpful in meetings. The response needs to be lightning fast and super accurate every time you say “Hey, Spark”. To make sure this happens we built Cisco Spark Assistant with:
Machine-learning technology from MindMeld, which we acquired earlier this year

·         Speech recognition technology

·         Natural language understanding

·         Question answering

·         Dialog management

Then we applied our deep knowledge of meetings, honed over time because we deliver 50 billion minutes of meetings every year. With this, we optimized the AI for the conference room.

Coming Soon to the Whole Portfolio, First on the New Room 70 
Cisco Spark Assistant will first be available on the new Cisco Spark Room 70, which replaces one of our top-selling video systems, the MX800. Just as Cisco Spark Assistant will take on more tasks over time, it will also be available across all Cisco Spark clients and hardware devices over time.

Part of the Cisco Spark Room Series, Cisco Spark Room 70 features:

- 70” 4K screens. We offer both single and dual screen models.
- Beautiful, award-winning industrial design and great audio and video.
- Quad 5k cameras. We have packed double the cameras into half the space (compared to the MX800). One of the cameras captures the entire room at all times, making intelligent framing and best overview highly responsive and human. The cameras also enable face recognition and people count.

- You can register the system on the premises or to Cisco Spark through the Cisco Collaboration Cloud.

At its heart is the NVIDIA Jetson platform. This lets our engineers use AI to build intuitive and intelligent capabilities.

Spark Assistant takes advantage of our meeting room endpoints’ industry-first advancements such as intelligent proximity, speaker tracking and real-time face recognition. These let it see and hear. As a result, Cisco Spark Assistant knows who enters the room, who leaves the room and who is speaking.

We are hosting an invitation-only event for media and analysts in San Francisco on November 13.  Attendees will hear more about our collaboration group’s AI vision; get a behind-the-scenes look at what we are working on; and meet some of the amazing engineers working on our AI strategy.

“As Cisco continues to innovate across its collaboration portfolio, it has significant and positive impact in how we expand our collaboration practice here at WWT.  Cisco Spark Assistant adds a lot of value to the meeting room experience, and will ultimately enable WWT to tap its extensive software and app development capability  to customize applications and use cases for enterprises. With the new Cisco Spark Room 70, Cisco has rounded out its collaboration portfolio and continues to provide us with the ability to expand customer choice in deployment models, both on-premises and in the cloud,” says Joe Berger, Collaboration Practice Director, World Wide Technology, Inc.

Genpact, Sequoya Team to Help CPG Cos Transform Trade Promotion and Pricing-Related Investments

Genpact, a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation, today announced a new strategic relationship with Sequoya, an analytics firm specializing in multi-source data modelling and predictive analytics solutions.  With this relationship, Genpact will integrate the Sequoya 20/20 analytics platform into its analytics and digital portfolio to optimize the trade promotion operations for its consumer packaged goods (CPG) and life sciences client base.

CPG and life sciences companies are under increasing pressure to optimize their return on their investment in promotion and pricing-related activities to provide an exceptional customer experience.  Most continue to struggle to generate the insights from data that can best determine future outcomes and generate positive returns. To help clients leverage advanced and predictive analytics, Genpact will augment its automation to artificial intelligence (AI)-based Genpact Cora platform with the Sequoya 20/20 application. The net results for clients will be the ability to generate pricing algorithms faster and more accurately, allowing better pricing strategy and decision making.  This new relationship will also dramatically increase Genpact’s speed of data-to-insights-to-action, leveraging both technology and a managed service analytics center of excellence.

“Trade promotion spending for CPG and life sciences companies has moved far beyond cost, and is now focused on driving outcomes that create a competitive advantage, by way of optimizing trade spend, getting better return on sales impact, improving forecast accuracy, and providing outstanding customer service,” said Ajay Kapoor, growth leader, CPG, Genpact. “This strategic relationship with Sequoya allows us to better harness data flows and leverage our automation to AI-based Genpact Cora platform along with our analytics capabilities to make the algorithms far smarter and more real time to provide deeper insights and a better user experience for our clients.”

“Successful Revenue Growth Management (RGM) is driven by optimal trade and pricing strategies. CPG companies are building global RGM organizations to harness these strategies and build consistent analytic processes and capabilities across markets,” said Richard Althoff, Founder and CEO, Sequoya. “This strategic relationship with Genpact gives us the global reach to deliver and execute these strategies locally.”

Mamaearth Partners Kalki Koechelin, Sumeet Vyas Starrer ‘Ribbon’ to Strengthen Consumer Connect

India’s 1st Madesafe certified brand Mamaearth, today announced its partnership with upcoming Hindi film‘Ribbon’, starring Kalki Koechlin and Sumeet Vyas, becoming the film’s ‘Official Mama's Partner’.The film is releasing across the country as well as in USA and Singapore this Friday (November 3).

The partnership is part of the brand’s philosophy to constantly seek and use new, engaging ways in order to strengthen the connect with its partner moms and consumers.

Directed by Rakhee Sandilya, ‘Ribbon’ stars Kalki Koechlin in the lead, along with the millennial heart throb Sumeet Vyas.  They play a career oriented, loving and happy couple whose life gets completely transformed after they find out about their pregnancy. Ribbon is the journey of a young couple living the great Indian urban dream who discover that it takes a lot more than love and commitment to stick together through all of life’s knotty turns and loose ends.

Welcoming the alliance, Ghazal Alagh, Co-founder and Chief Mama, Mamaearth, stated: "The partnership with Ribbon marks a great start to an exciting new journey that will help us to promote Mamaearth's well-differentiated product and service offerings in innovative ways, via the silver screen."

Commenting on the association, the producers of the film - Swathi Mondal & Prakash Mondal said, “The mutually beneficial arrangement will allow Mamaearth to leverage the power of a new age family film about the young and new parents. It'll help us communicate important aspects of its brand story, while allowing the producers to access and directly promote the film to a wider audience."

Vivo Opens India’s First Experience Centre of 36,000 Sqft in Bengaluru

Marking another important milestone in Vivo’s India journey, the premium global smartphone brand, today announced the opening of its first ever offline Experience Center in Bengaluru. Sruthi Hariharan, a popular name from the Kannada film industry was present at the grand opening of the Experience Center along with the Vivo management in the heart of this bustling city.

Spread across 3600 sq. ft. with two floors, the Experience Center is located at Brigade Road, one of the most popular high-street retail hub and business district of the city. Both the floors of the Experience Center have retail community zones that provide customers access to the entire range of Y and V series of Vivo smartphones. The maiden Experience Center will offer customers an opportunity to gain first-hand experience of the entire portfolio of Vivo products in an engaging and stimulating environment.

Commenting on the occasion, Kenny Zeng, Chief Marketing Officer, Vivo India said, The launch of our first Experience Center in India demonstrates our commitment to create compelling and immersive opportunities for our customers to experience our products before making a purchase decision. We will be launching additional Experience Centers across key markets in India in the coming months.

The company has over 80,000 retail stores across India and sells through all Vivo exclusive stores, e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Amazon, and all the modern retails stores.

Vivo, a premium global smartphone brand, entered India in late 2014. With a strong focus on "Camera and Music", Vivo has established itself as one of the top smartphone brands in India. Manufacturing in Greater Noida, the company has a robust distribution network across the country both online and offline, catering the best in class quality services to over 400 cities, in 22 states backed by 400 service centers in India.

Dedicated to the youth, Vivo became the title sponsor of the Indian Premier League (IPL) for 2016 & 2017 and recently bagged the title sponsorship of Pro Kabaddi in 2017 for five years. Conquering the global stage, Vivo became the official sponsor of the 2018 and 2022 FIFA World Cups.

B2B, Advanced Tech Leading the Growth for the Indian Start-Ups Ecosystem During 2017

Strengthening its position as the third largest startup ecosystem across the world, amidst intensifying competition from countries like UK and Israel, India continues its momentum of being one of the most vibrant landscape for start-ups. Adding over 1000 tech start-ups in 2017, taking the total number of tech start-ups to 5000-5200, 

India is witnessing a rapid rise in the B2B tech start-up landscape, focused on verticals like healthtech, fintech, and ecommerce/aggregators. While Bengaluru, Delhi/NCR and Mumbai retained their position as the key start-up hubs in India, 20% of the start-ups emerged from tier II/III cities. These trends were discussed at the launch of the 2017 edition of the NASSCOM-Zinnov report on the ‘Indian Start-up Ecosystem – Traversing the maturity cycle’, released on the sidelines of the of the annual flagship NASSCOM Product Conclave 2017. 

Sharing his thoughts, Raman Roy, Chairman, NASSCOM, and CEO and MD, Quatrro Global Services, said, “The Indian technology industry is renowned globally for its pioneering innovation and the start-ups arena is no different. India is one of the fastest growing start-up landscape in the world and every major accelerator, investor, angel group, is participating in becoming a part of this growth journey. Today, Indian ecosystem is flooded with innovative ideas and needs the right channel and guidance in terms of acceleration, scaling up and funding to continue to disrupt.”

ECOSYSTEM RIPE FOR HEALTHY GROWTH THROUGH VERTICALIZATION AND INNOVATIVE BUSINESS MODELS

With 40% of startups in the B2B segment, B2B’s share in the overall tech start-up funding is over 30%. Corporates are playing a vital role in supporting these with over 50+ collaboration programs, 20+ corporate accelerators (recording a 33% YoY growth), and 30-40 active corporate investors, thus increasing their role in the rise of the start-up ecosystem.

Fin-tech start-up base is estimated to be 360 in 2017 indicating at 31% YoY growth with over $200 mn funding received in H1-2017, recording a growth of 135% since H1-2016. Sub-segments like digital payments and lending are maturing, while wealth management and insur-tech emerging as growth areas. Implementation of advanced technology also becoming prominent, with 33% of fintech funding towards advanced technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Analytics.

Witnessing a 28% YoY growth in 2017, Health-tech vertical has an estimated total base of 320 start-ups. The vertical also garnered a total funding of $160 mn in H1-2017, up by 129% since H1-2016. Areas like health information management, aggregator/ecommerce have continued to mature with growth in areas like anomaly detection, disease monitoring, and tele-health/tele-medicine. As for advanced technologies, 31% of health-tech funding went towards Artificial Intelligence, IoT, and Analytics.

With over 60% start-ups, the B2C tech start-up segment focused on creating innovative business models and taking the vertical approach, securing close to 70% of the overall tech start-up funding in H1 2017. Leading vertical in the B2C segment are travel and hospitality, food-tech, fin-tech, and health-tech.

Speaking on the occasion, R Chandrashekhar, President, NASSCOM, said, “The Indian startup ecosystem is maturing, driven by young, diverse and inclusive entrepreneurial landscape. This is leading to emergence of focused domain solutions for verticals like healthcare, agriculture, and education. Findings of the report is a testimony to the potential of the start-up landscape and the scope of growth and opportunity that India presents. NASSCOM will continue its drive towards catalysing deep tech start-ups, build category leaders and support start-ups to create for India.”

RISE OF NEW-AGE ADVANCED-TECH START-UPS

Growing at 5-year CAGR of 30%, advanced tech start-ups focused on creating solutions in segments like Artificial Intelligence, Analytics, Augmented Reality / Virtual reality, Blockchain and Internet of Things, among others. Enterprise and SMB-focused horizontal solutions start-ups, 90% of which is SaaS-based, are also witnessing significant inflow of funding.

GROWING FROM STRENGTH-TO-STRENGTH: DRAMATIC RISE IN UNICORN FUNDING AND M&A

Unicorn funding took centerstage with big deals announced in the year. Investors from non-US countries expanded their investments in Indian startups. Indian unicorns in the B2C space continue to garner global funds and stir-up the competitive landscape. With a growth of 167%, the funding of entire Indian start-up ecosystem (led by unicorns) amounted to $ 6.4 bn in H1-2017. The average funding for B2B tech start-ups in 2017 saw an increase of 5% while B2C tech start-up average funding saw a decline of 10%.

Driven by the need to enhance tech capabilities, expand markets and portfolio, global corporates are now drawn towards the Indian tech start-up arena. H1-2017 saw 50+ M&A deals, indicating at a growth of 25% since H1-2016. Over 325 start-ups emerging, with YoY growth of 18%, catering to social challenges in the areas of healthcare and education, and are thus building solutions for India, creating social impact.

BUILDING A ROBUST WAY FORWARD FOR GROWTH

Continuing the ‘By India, For India, Of India’ movement, the Indian tech start-ups will continue to innovate enabled by technology and newer business models and will have a long-lasting impact in improving the quality of start-ups arising from India, in the coming years. NASSCOM with continue to catalyze and support deep tech Startups, and help build category leaders who can create solutions for India.  The top priorities for the various other stakeholders will be as follows:

·         For start-ups: Building products that address need-gaps and challenges, defining a full-bodied go-to-market strategy to scale-up, while building a team in the technology, domain, sales, and customer experience.

·         For incubators / accelerators: Provide deep mentoring, help start-ups internalize organizational best practices, and help establish global connects

·         For corporates: Accelerate start-up partnerships and help identify white spaces for innovation

·         For Government: Enable ease of doing business by minimizing regulatory impediments, remove asymmetry in policies, provide access to government projects, and help secure early stage funding

Epicor, Redington Partner to Target SME Manufacturers for ERP Solutions in India

Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of industry specific software to promote business growth, announced today the appointment of a country-wide distributor to accelerate business growth and meet demand for enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions across India. The partnership will see Redington India, one of the country’s largest technology distributors, selecting and training specialist resellers from its network of over 20,000 business partners to grow the Epicor customer base.

Anand Chakravarthy, President at Redington commented, “Epicor ERP is a great fit for midmarket manufacturing companies in India looking to grow. Adding Epicor ERP to our portfolio will enable us to capitalise on the currently untapped market potential. The modern architecture of Epicor ERP will not only work today, but will enable customers to successfully deal with future challenges such as preparing for Industry 4.0, as more and more smart technologies are adopted.”

Sabby Gill, executive vice president, international at Epicor Software commented, “Whilst India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world, it is also a digitally advanced market. As one of the largest technology distributors in India, Redington has an experienced and dedicated team on the ground that can enable local manufacturers to digitally transform their companies and grow their businesses. Thiru Vengadam, regional vice president, will spearhead the strategy to grow our footprint and help companies thrive through ERP.”

As a distributor Redington will identify, appoint, train and equip resellers, taking full responsibility for effectively managing the delivery and deployment of Epicor ERP solutions in India. In return, Epicor will provide Redington with the necessary support to deliver its solutions to the market, including marketing, professional services, training, and access to Epicor University with certification for partners.

SBI Takes its Employees to the Cloud with Microsoft Office 365 in India

The State Bank of India (SBI), the largest public-sector bank of India has chosen Office 365, the cloud powered productivity solution from Microsoft to improve communication and collaboration among its workforce, addressing the banking behemoth’s requirement of transforming it into a modern workplace.

This is one of the largest deployments of Office 365 in India, spanning SBI’s countrywide network of 23,423 branches, enabling 263,000 employees and servicing more than 500 million customer accounts.

SBI employees will now experience a modern digital workplace platform that will empower them to collaborate effectively from any device anywhere (Android, iOS, Mac and Windows), provide an integrated experience and reduce complexity. Employees will be able to use familiar and easy-to-use tools naturally in everyday work, while addressing key aspects of data security and sovereignty. Microsoft has also consolidated SBI’s messaging and collaboration server infrastructure in 17 countries, helping it save more than USD 200,000 annually.

“We are excited about our partnership with Microsoft. As India’s economy continues to grow, the BFSI sector needs to be well-equipped to address dynamic market pressures and rapidly evolving industry needs. It has become imperative to transform technologically to sustain a competitive edge. A digital culture shift, designing a modern workplace that harnesses digital intelligence and enabling mobility are key aspects. As the Digital Banker to the Nation, Microsoft’s cutting-edge technology is helping us lead this digital transformation by making it part of our DNA.”, said Rajnish Kumar, Chairman, State Bank of India.

Expressing his view, Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft had stated, “We are thrilled to partner with State Bank of India on their digital transformation as they harness the intelligent cloud and build new digital capability to empower their employees; engage customers in new ways and transform their products and services, while maintaining security, trust and compliance with industry regulations.”

SBI will derive benefits from this digital transformation in three phases; making itself agile by rapidly upgrading to cloud based technology, focusing on user adoption by identifying use cases based on work profiles, and transforming business by process alignment with the new tools, all of which together will ultimately enhance, both, branch and customer experience.

Microsoft is committed to fuel the digital transformation of the BFSI sector with the best-in-class cloud services like Office 365, that are not only efficient as a productivity solution but also highly robust, secure and scalable.