Low Adoption of Industrial Cyber Security Measures: Honeywell Survey

Honeywell has released a new study showing industrial companies are not moving quickly to adopt cyber security measures to protect their data and operations, even as attacks have increased around the globe.

The survey – Putting Industrial Cyber Security at the Top of the CEO Agenda – was conducted by LNS Research and sponsored by Honeywell. It polled 130 strategic decision makers from industrial companies about their approach to the Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT), and their use of industrial cyber security technologies and practices. Among the findings were:

·         More than half of respondents reported working in an industrial facility that already has had a cyber-security breach.

·         45% of the responding companies still do not have an accountable enterprise leader for cyber security.

·         Only 37% are monitoring for suspicious behavior.

·         Although many companies are conducting regular risk assessments, 20% are not doing them at all.

“Decision makers are more aware of threats and some progress has been made to address them, but this report reinforces that cyber security fundamentals haven’t been adopted by a significant portion of the industrial community,” said Jeff Zindel, vice president and general manager, Honeywell Industrial Cyber Security. “In order to take advantage of the tremendous benefits of industrial digital transformation and IIoT, companies must improve their cyber security defenses and adapt to the heightened threat landscape now.”

The study suggests these three immediate actions for any industrial organization to capture the value of the new technologies:

1.    Making industrial cyber security part of digital transformation strategies;

2.    Driving best practice adoption across people, processes and technology, from access controls to risk monitoring, and tap external cyber expertise to fill gaps

3.    Focusing on empowering leaders and building an organizational structure that breaks down the silos between IT and OT.

“Cyber security needs to be part of every CEO’s agenda to ensure the effective, immediate and long-term deployment of strategies and technologies such as IIoT,” said Matthew Littlefield, president and principal analyst, LNS Research. “In short, in order for a business to succeed on its digital transformation journey, it needs to succeed with industrial cyber security.”

LNS Research is a global leader in research and advisory for digital transformation of industry, delivering technology insights for business executives. Its analysts focus on identifying the metrics, leadership, business process, and technology capabilities effecting change.

            Honeywell’s industrial cyber security technologies and expertise address many of the issues identified in the LNS Research study.

GE’s Sustainable Technology Helps Revive Bengaluru’s Clogged Kundalahalli Lake

General Electric (GE) has restored the clogged Kundalahalli lake in the city’s south-east suburb with the help of an NGO (United Way Bengaluru), the American multinational said on Wednesday.

“A new lease of life has been given to the lake at Whitefield with clean water after removing its pollutants through sewage treatment plant set up on its banks,” GE India Technology Centre’s Chief Executive Munesh Makhija said in a statement here.

The Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) partnered with GE and the non-governmental organisation to revive the lake, upkeep environment and create a cleaner and greener community.

“The treated water replenishes the lake. Our volunteer teams found that it (lake) had many inlets that allowed sewage to seep into it, forming silt and reducing its storage capacity by almost half.

The garbage pile-up had detrimental effect on the lake spread over 30 acres, environment and area people. Its restoration has increased water level by six inches in six months and helped flora and fauna florish, Makhija said.

The civic body (BBMP) will invest in cleaning, maintaining and fencing surrounding the lake.

GE and United Way have also built six eco-friendly toilets, including one for differently abled to prevent open defecation near the lake and maintain cleaner environment.

“We will maintain the lake for two years and plant 5,000 saplings in surrounding area,” United Way Chief Executive Manish Michael said.

As part of its ‘Wake the lake’ campaign, the NGO is working to restore/revive 15 other lakes across the city with the help of corporates like GE.

Netcore Solutions Forays into $2.03 Billion Indian Marketing & Customer Analytics Segment

Netcore Solutions, a leading marketing technology solutions provider has announced its foray into the marketing analytics and customer analytics segment.

Netcore Solutions is now the only Indian company to provide an integrated solution that combines customer analytics, cross-channel marketing automation and marketing analytics. With this strategic decision, Netcore Solution predicts to gain 15% YoY growth in the order book which will give a good fillip to overall revenue in the next five years.The Indian marketing analytics industry’s present annual revenue is pegged to be around $2.03 billion and it is predicted to grow at a healthy CAGR of 23.8% till 2020.

While companies in India have shown a keen interest in adopting marketing analytics to make informed, data-driven decisions and effectively reach out to the target customers, the concept is still at a nascent stage. The market is largely serviced by the ‘pure play’ analytics companies. This has resulted in a vacuum whereby marketers were unable to get a unified view of the customer as multiple vendors would handle each marketing channels, which mostly resulted in data lying in silos.

With its intuitive solution and a team of analytics experts, Netcore’s smart and easy to deploy solution will empower marketers and analysts with the insights they need to make every customer interaction smarter. Netcore marketing data integration services will bring together relevant customer data and on top of it build summary data attributes to deliver a clever customer data mart which is necessary for a seamless and effective data driven marketing campaign.

Using analytics and customer data mart, marketers will be able to identify most profitable customers, most frequent customers, most responding customers as well as preferred products, channel of communication and much more. Different attributes attached to each engagement will allow marketers to closely analyse customer behaviour across every point of interaction. Consequently, this will have huge impact on the cost of acquiring customers, improve retention rates, and reduce customer churn.

Elaborating on the decision to diversify into analytics segment, Kalpit Jain, CEO, Netcore Solutions said, “India is currently witnessing a trend of ‘parallelism’ in consumer behaviour. Consumers today have multiple personalities depending on the time, place and platform they interact with a brand. The attention span and turnaround time are also shorter than ever before. Therefore, a holistic outlook of the customer – encompassing insights on customer demographics, digital activity, transactional data, key customer attributes, and behavioural data – is imperative for the brands to improve RoI as well as reduce customer acquisition and retention costs. With this strategic move, we will offer marketers the capability to marry expertise of our intuitive marketing automation platform (Netcore Smartech) with intelligent customer and marketing insights derived through this analytics service.”

In terms of sectors, presently, BFSI is the biggest adopter of analytics services in India. Of the total revenue earned by analytics industry in India, 37% of the total amounting to $756 million in revenues is contributed by the sector. This is a 31 per cent increase compared to last year. 

While Netcore has already started providing services to some of the key companies from the BFSI segment in India, it plans to roll out the analytics service in a phased manner to Malaysia, Singapore, and Nigeria where it has a strong presence in the marketing automation space.

Analytics important, say Indian CMOs

The Indian CMOs’ search for adding analytical capabilities along with the implementation of a full stack marketing automation solution was also highlighted in the first-of-its-kind B2C Marketing Automation Report India, 2017 launched by Research NXT and Netcore Solutions.

The report highlighted that about 29% of marketers believe that it is important to have the right marketing mix in order to gain better customer lifetime value.  In addition, 28% of marketers were considering using analytics, while 18% had already included analytics at the core of its marketing strategy.

The report also emphasized that analytics is going to play an important role in automating and improving customer engagement. This, in turn, is going to help the marketers get a better conversion rate optimization by enabling brands to engage in a personalized manner with their customers, leading to increased Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).

Rankings Not Destination, Is a Journey for Us, Says MAHE VC

Manipal: Rankings for Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) is not a destination. It is a journey. The improvement that we do in the rankings year after year, talks not only about what we have done better, but also talks about what we have done better in comparison with other universities. That’s what ranking is all about,” said MAHE Vice Chancellor, Dr H. Vinod Bhat while addressing media persons about the deemed to be university’s rankings this year at Manipal.

In his briefing, Dr Bhat spoke about the various aspects of rankings and how MAHE has been working on the different parameters. “It is a healthy competition among universities. And I am proud to say that our university is in the top one to two percentile of all universities across the world. This is the result of the hard work put in by the officials of the university, leadership, faculty and students in the last seven or eight years. So we are seeing the results now,” he said

“World rankings are being done by different agencies. QS is one, Times Higher Education is another and Shanghai yet another. We go with QS and Times Higher Education because these two are the most widely accepted ranking agencies in the world”.

He added; “The recent QS rankings, first the World in June, then Asia and followed by BRICS has not come as a surprise to me. We are the highest ranked private Indian university in the QS World Rankings, in the 701-750 band, and there is no other private Indian university better than that”.

Giving details of the rankings, Dr Sandeep Shenoy, Director Quality and Compliance also Head Department of Commerce, MAHE said, “The University has moved up two places to 198 in the Quacquarelli Symonds University Rankings, Asia Region’s 2018 edition. In the domestic ranking, the University is placed 16th overall and third among the private Universities.

Elaborating he said, “This is the ninth edition of this ranking and the largest yet, featuring 400 institutions from 17 countries. Over 600 institutions across the continent were evaluated and 450 provisionally ranked. Of them, 400 were included in the published tables. In this edition, the University performed among the top 47% in the QS Asia University Rankings. Considering there are approximately 11,900 Universities regionally, MAHE is one of the top 1.7% universities in Asia. The Faculty Student indicator, with a rank of 86 in the region, is the strongest parameter for MAHE.

“As for the 2018 QS BRICS Region University Rankings, MAHE performed in the 119= rank range, which is among the top 31% in the QS BRICS Region University Rankings. Considering there are approximately 9,000 universities regionally, this makes MAHE one of the top 1.3% universities in BRICS. MAHE is placed second among private universities ranked in India,” Dr Sandeep said.

The key indicators for the methodology used for the BRICS ranking are; Academic Reputation, Employer Reputation, and Faculty to Student Ratio, staff with PhD, Citations per paper, international faculty and international students. Also present at the media briefing were MAHE Registrar, Dr Narayan Sabhahit and Dr Director, Quality and Compliance, Dr Christopher Sudhakar.

Consumers Want Privacy, Better Data Protection from AI, Finds New Genpact Research

Despite massive corporate investments in artificial intelligence (AI), nearly three-quarters of consumers are concerned about AI infringing on their privacy, according to a new study from Genpact, a global professional services firm focused on delivering digital transformation. The survey of more than 5,000 people across the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia also reveals that 59 percent of respondents think their government should do more to protect personal data from AI.

Disconnect in corporate and customer views

Consumers’ wariness of AI contrasts significantly with optimism expressed by corporate management. According to a previous Genpact study conducted earlier this year, 88 percent of senior executives at companies that are leaders in AI expect the technology will drive better customer experiences within three years.

The consumer survey released today is the third in a three-part Genpact research series that offers a comprehensive view of AI adoption, readiness, and impact across three critical and disparate communities – the C-suite, workforce, and consumers. The first study, published in September 2017, explores the C-suite and senior management’s perspective, and the second survey, released in November 2017, looks at workers’ views.

In the consumer research released today, only 12 percent of people surveyed say they would prefer to be served by a chatbot, even if the service they receive is faster and more accurate than that of a human. Yet over three times more executives (38 percent) think their customers will prefer service by a chatbot in three years, according to Genpact’s senior management study. Companies need to lay the groundwork now to address this disconnect and pave the way for smooth AI adoption.

Building trust with cautious consumers

Although companies continue to embrace AI (for example, 82 percent of senior executives say they plan to implement AI-related technologies by 2020), many potential customers still have substantial fears. Nearly two thirds of respondents in the consumer study worry that AI will make decisions that will impact their lives without their knowledge. Moreover, 58 percent of people surveyed do not feel comfortable with companies using AI to access their data to personalize and improve their experiences with a brand.

“AI is a game-changer to improve the customer experience, yet real challenges remain regarding trust and privacy,” said Sanjay Srivastava, chief digital officer, Genpact. “To encourage adoption, the key is to have visibility into AI decisions, and be able to track and explain the logic behind them. Companies need to break through the ‘black box’ to drive better insights for their business and give consumers the assurance they need.”

Meeting consumer expectations today, and tomorrow

Even with explosive growth of home digital assistants, chatbots, smart sensors, etc., consumers still perceive they have little contact with AI. Less than half of those surveyed say they interact with some form of AI regularly. In addition, two in five (41 percent) believe that AI has made no difference to their lives.

However, the study also shows that younger generations interact with AI more frequently and cite its benefits. They are twice as more likely than older people surveyed to say AI is making their lives better. Younger generations also don’t need the human touch quite as much: Only one third of Gen-Z and millennials strongly agree that they prefer human interaction rather than AI, compared to 57 percent of baby boomers.

“Younger generations’ rapidly changing views underscore how AI, even in these early days, is the single biggest shift that is transforming how people interact with businesses and the world around them,” continued Srivastava. “The companies that will win in this new world are ones that seize AI’s potential in a way that deeply understands and solves for consumers’ concerns.”

ABB’s Flash-Charging Technology Goes Live in Commercial e-Buses

ABB’s 20-second flash-charging technology was a hot topic today as two articulated electric buses, the first of their kind in the world, went into service on bus line 23 in Geneva. It takes less than 1 second to connect the bus to the charging point on an overhead high-power charging contact when it pulls into selected stops and tops up its batteries while passengers embark and disembark. 

The complete fleet of 12 emission-free buses links the airport with the city’s suburbs. Through optimal energy management, the system can save as much as 1,000 tons of carbon dioxide on a line covering 600,000 kilometers per year.

·         Picture note: http://new.abb.com/news/detail/2694/ABBs-innovative-flash-charging-technology-goes-live

·         Video: https://youtu.be/UbLwD1z-ubU

Samsung Shop Christmas Carnival from December 08-15; Exciting Deals and Offers Coming to Town

Samsung, India’s biggest and most trusted consumer electronics and mobile phones brand, has announced the Christmas Carnival on its official online store ‘Samsung Shop’, from December 08-15 2017.

Samsung Shop will bring in exclusive deals on a range of Samsung mobiles, speakers, audio accessories, wearable devices and televisions during this period.

Newly-launched products such as Gear Fit2 Pro and Gear Sport wearable devices will be available on Samsung Shop (https://shop.samsung.com/in) during the Christmas Carnival at attractive no-cost EMIs on leading credit cards.

“We are happy to spread the joy this festival season with a week-long sale on the Samsung Shop. During the sale, we will have exciting offers, EMI and exchange schemes that will allow consumers to purchase and enjoy their favorite Samsung product,” Sandeep Singh Arora, Vice President, Online Business, Samsung India, said.

Partner offers

Bajaj Finserv Offer: No-cost EMIs for multiple tenures from Bajaj Finserv on all products above Rs 10,000.

Exchange & assured buyback with Cashify: When customers buy a new device on Samsung Shop during the period of sale by exchanging an existing device (any model/brand), they will receive the following benefits from Samsung’s partner Cashify:

·         Best exchange value

Customers can exchange their existing mobile phones and get the best market rate.

·         Assured buyback

There is also an assured buyback guarantee on popular smartphone models purchased from Samsung Shop during the period of sale. Get up to 40% value of the device when the customer upgrades to the next Samsung device.

·         Free 1-year accidental damage cover for smartphones

-       Zero depreciation, accidental and liquid damage cover for the smartphones

-       Assured repair at Samsung Authorized Service Centres by Cashify

-       Home pickup and delivery with 100% cashless transaction

LazyPay Offer: Customers using LazyPay can start paying for their purchase up to 15 days later.

SuperCash discounts with MobiKwik: During this period, users of MobiKwik wallet will get a flat 10% SuperCash discount on Samsung Shop products that are on sale if they buy using their wallets.

Cashback on Paytm: Rs 8,000 cashback on Galaxy S8 and S8+ and Galaxy Note8 smartphones when the payment is made using Paytm.

“We have a strong ongoing partnership with Samsung and are pleased to participate during this sale to offer customers best value on their existing devices and special deals on purchase of new Samsung smartphones,” said Mandeep Manocha, Chief Executive Office, Cashify.

“Our partnership with Samsung Shop will enable millions of MobiKwik users to benefit from the best deals and gain great value for their spends on Samsung platforms. MobiKwik is the fastest way to pay on Samsung Shop and delivers the best payments experience,” said Daman Soni, Head of Growth, MobiKwik.

Samsung Shop, the official online shopping destination for consumers, offers a wide portfolio of Samsung products covering smartphones, televisions, home appliances, memory and IT products with richer content, detailed product information and pan India delivery.