The Weather Company, an IBM business, the leader in accurate weather forecasting and insights, hosted a first-of-its kind event, ‘The AgriTech Challenge 2018’ with the Agripreneurs Group, Smart Agripost and Graype.in.
Attended by ~200 agripreneurs, researchers, corporates and financiers, this event provided a unique platform to discuss and crowd-produce solutions to resolve issues affecting agripreneurs and farmers in India.
“This is The Weather Company’s humble attempt to involve the stakeholders, innovators and technologists to come together and address some of the challenges in the agritech ecosystem and contribute towards improving crop yield and output. We see ourselves as a facilitator providing hyper-local accurate weather insights to help deliver what farmers and others involved benefit from - to make the best decisions for their business.”, Himanshu Goyal, Sales & Alliances Leader, The Weather Company.
During the event, Himanshu Goyal addressed the audience on how crop production is becoming increasingly complex and the key role agronomists will continue to play in understanding the latest technology and interpreting those insights on the farm. Durjoy Mazumdar, Global Head of Enterprise Sales, IBM Watson Content & IoT, The Weather Company, also provided a bird’s eye view on why weather is such a difficult data-set to predict. Sriram Raghavan, Vice President, IBM Research & CTO, IBM India spoke about the steady progress the IBM company is making in transforming the agritech sector with new-age technologies including AI & Blockchain.
The panel discussions included various tracks of ideation jams to build a roadmap to a sustainable agritech economy. Dushyant Tyagi – Chief Business Officer, iKisan, Nagarjuna Fertilizers and Chemicals Limited; Sagar Kaushik – COO, United Phosphorus Ltd; Ramesh Ramachandran, SVP, Strategy and Precision Farming, Mahindra and Mahindra; Rajesh Srivastava – Chairman & Managing Director, Rabo Equity Advisors (a subsidiary of Rabobank) were also present at the event and provided their expert views on crowd producing solutions to jointly set in motion a roadmap for a sustainable agritech economy in India.
Even as the country’s second largest IT services exporter Infosys celebrates 25 years of its listing on Indian exchanges, its shareholders, who bought shares in 1993 and still holding have turned crorepatis.
Anyone who invested Rs 100 in Infosys shares way back in 1993 when it was listed on bourses are now owning Rs 6,80,000 as on date, according to an analysis by DH.
When stock splits and the bonus issues are taken into consideration, for every share that the stockholder has bought in 1993, he would end up having 512 shares right now, according to the analysis.
Its shares were listed in stock exchanges in June 1993 with trading opening at ₹145 per share.
As per the calculations by various analysts, for every 100 shares in the company back in 1993, it would be worth over Rs 6.44 crore as on June 12, translating to an annual growth of 42.3%.
Undersubscribed IPO
Incidentally, the public offer of Infosys was undersubscribed at the time of initial public offering (IPO) and had to be bailed out by US investment bank Morgan Stanley which picked up 13% of equity at the offer price. The stock was split in 2000 to maintain liquidity. The company has offered 1:1 bonus shares in 10 out of 11 years when it declared a bonus issue. In 2005, it announced a 3:1 bonus issue.
From being a Rs 10,000 company, that NR Narayana Murthy started, Infosys has gone on to redefine India’s corporate culture.
The company has shown strong growth since its listing. From $5.1 million revenues in 1993, the company has seen its revenues compound annually by 36% to $10.94 billion by 2018. The net income on other hand has been compounded by equal numbers, from $1.23 million in 1993 to $2.49 billion by 2018.
In Rupee terms, revenues over last 25 years have grown at a CAGR of 40.5%, while net profits have grown by 40.1%, according to the internal calculations of the IT major.
Prior to its listing the company’s revenues grew from Rs 12 lakh in 1981 to Rs 8.66 crore in fiscal ended March 31, 1992, the year of economic reforms in India.
But then this growth hasn’t been as smooth as it may seem. For most of its years of existence, save the previous four, the company was managed by its promoter founders.
No company can function as an island and as our eco system broadens it typically deals with many entities like customers, partners, affiliates and others. When organized together these entities form what we term as the “extended enterprise” which is closer to the core of business than ever before. Organizations that step up to the challenge of developing programs to better manage this risk can elevate their position in the market by unleashing with confidence the reach, expertise and relationships that third parties can bring.
Third party risk management has to become a top-of-mind priority for organizations. In this respect, our recent (third) annual EERM (Extended Enterprise Risk Management) survey, based on 975 responses from a variety of organizations across 15 countries of Asia Pacific, Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa region ,has highlighted some interesting findings. 70% of organizations in India recognize an increase in risk but remain ill-equipped to deal with it because of inadequate or absolutely no knowledge of sub-contractors engaged by their third parties. In fact, 14% of the respondents in the survey stated that third party-outsourced relationships are not identified, monitored or reviewed at all.
Companies today have to rely on relationships that are multiple and third party in nature, and typically outsourced. These are like outliers on the risk periphery – even for organizations that place strong focus on risk. Our survey report highlights the below key areas where organizations could benefit from further effort:
Controlling heightened risk: Dependence on third parties continues to grow, with over 70 percent of Indian respondents stating that their dependence on extended enterprise has grown owing to business and macro- economic conditions. Impact of external events (42 percent) and increasing threat of their party related incidents and disruptions were the two most dominant factors contributing to the perception of heightened risk in the extended enterprise.
Enhanced board engagement: Board oversight and engagement with EERM programs continues to lag. At a global level, 78 percent of organizations suggest that the Chief Executive Officer (CEO), CFO, Chief Procurement Officer (CPO), CRO, or a member of the Board is ultimately accountable for this topic. In India, this decision rests with the Chief procurement or the Risk Officer. Boards in India are making relatively slow progress on this matter whereby 57 percent of the respondents suggested that their boards merely have a moderate level of understanding and engagement on this subject.
Technology platforms: In keeping with the trend of increased centralized oversight of EERM activities, technology decisions are now being taken more centrally and standard tiered technology architecture is emerging. Less than ten percent of our global respondents in our survey are currently using bespoke systems for EERM, a sharp drop from just over 20 percent last year.
Sub-contractor risk: Organizations lack appropriate visibility of sub-contractors engaged by their third-parties as well as the discipline and rigor to frequently monitor such fourth/fifth parties. 57 percent of survey respondents feel they do not have adequate knowledge and appropriate visibility of sub-contractors engaged by their third-parties and a further 21 percent are unsure of their oversight practices.
Reliance Industries Limited has said it has completed acquisition of close to 73 per cent stake in artificial intelligence-based education technology provider Embibe.
"RIL, Embibe and the other stakeholders have completed all the closing conditions and have successfully completed the sale and purchase of the shareholding of the existing investors in Embibe to RIL. With this transaction, RIL will hold 72.69 per cent (on fully diluted basis) in Embibe," RIL said in a BSE filing.
RIL in April had announced that it has entered into agreements to acquire close to 73 per cent stake in education technology provider Individual Learning Private Ltd (Embibe) and plans to invest USD 180 million into the company over the next three years.
Embibe will use the capital over the next three years towards deepening its R&D on AI in education, as well as business growth and geographic expansion, catering to students across K-12, higher education, professional skilling, vernacular languages and all curriculum categories across India and internationally.
"The founder and CEO of Embibe, Aditi Avasthi, will continue in her leadership role and will drive the growth of the business," RIL said.
YES BANK, India’s fourth largest private sector bank, announced the launch of yet another successful edition of its flagship YES BANK Natural Capital Awards 2018 at Natural Capital Forum organized by Natural Capital Coalition (NCC), World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and YES BANK, on the occasion of World Environment Day. The awards recognize individuals, organisations and educational institutes dedicated to spearheading ecological conservation and environmental stewardship.
An eminent jury panel comprising of nature conservationists, photographers, and environmentalists will select the final winners after on-ground site visits and rigorous evaluation of the applications. The winners will be felicitated at a grand award ceremony in New Delhi during October 2018. Registrations of the awards opened from June 6, 2018 at yesbank.in/nca
The YES BANK Natural Capital Awards 2018 consists of the following 7 categories:
Individual Contributions
Pixel Perfect (Photography)
Trailblazer (Photo essay)
Capturing the Ganges (New Photography Category)
Nature Leader (Individual recognition)
Organizational Contributions:
Eco Corporate (Manufacturing/Services)
Small Scale Organizations (MSMEs/Non-Profits)
Eco Campus (Educational Institutes)
Speaking on the launch of the YES BANK Natural Capital Awards 2018, Rana Kapoor, MD & CEO, YES BANK, said, “Integrating natural capital assessment and valuation into our economic system is critical to usher in a truly sustainable future for India. The Natural Capital Awards is a strategic platform to encourage and recognise the efforts of individuals, environmentalists and industry towards natural capital conservation and environmental leadership.”
Speaking on the occasion, Namita Vikas, Group President and Global Head, Responsible Banking and Climate Strategy, YES BANK, said, “Serving as the bed rock for socio-economic development, integration of natural capital considerations is the next sustainability frontier for businesses and individuals alike. YES BANK Natural Capital Awards aims to mainstream natural capital dialogue in India by showcasing and recognizing best practices in natural capital consumption, accounting mechanisms and conservation, accomplished by industry and civil society. Over the years, Natural Capital Awards has transformed into a launch-pad for impactful collaborative actions in natural capital to achieve multi-dimensional growth”
The competition has gained a lot of popularity and saw a wide participation of more than 10,000 entries from Government, corporates, international diaspora, wildlife & natural history specialists, sustainability professionals, and multilateral agencies last year. Senior ministers including Dr. Harsh Vardhan Singh (Minister for Science & Technology, Earth Sciences, Environment, Forests and Climate Change); Suresh Prabhu (Minister of Civil Aviation and Commerce & Industry); Prakash Javadekar (Minister of Human Resource Development); Jitendra Singh (Minister of State (I/C) for Development of North Eastern Region) amongst others have participated in previous editions of the YES BANK Natural Capital Awards, and shared their valuable insights.
Important Dates:
Registrations open from – June 08, 2018
Last date for Submissions – July 31, 2018
YES BANK Natural Capital Awards 2018 ceremony – October, 2018
Creating environments for data to thrive, Western Digital Corporation has disclosed that Dropbox Inc., a leading global collaboration platform, has qualified and is the first to deploy the Ultrastar Hs14 host-managed shingled magnetic recording (SMR) hard disk drive (HDD) at exabyte scale in its custom-built storage infrastructure, Magic Pocket. Staying on the leading-edge of data technology advancements, Dropbox completed qualification and is deploying SMR for its cloud storage environment. Leveraging the 14TB Ultrastar Hs14 HDDs and the company’s custom-built storage architecture, Dropbox is taking advantage of greater storage density and increased power efficiency, at the same level of reliability for primary storage in its cloud data centers.
“The launch of Magic Pocket was an industry-defining milestone for cloud infrastructure that provided Dropbox the foundation for delivering value to our customers and business through ongoing innovation and cost savings,” said Akhil Gupta, vice president of Cloud Engineering, Dropbox. “As we enter the next phase of Magic Pocket’s evolution, our strategic partnership with Western Digital is enabling us to scale effectively as more and more customers adopt our collaboration platform. Our deployment of SMR technology was supported by Western Digital’s service, collaboration and drive capabilities—and we’re excited to continue redefining what’s possible for cloud infrastructure together.”
“Dropbox’s Magic Pocket is an innovative deployment, and this is another proof point that our host-managed SMR HDDs deliver value in scale-out cloud environments,” said Mark Grace, senior vice president of Devices, Western Digital. “Our customers recognize the benefits of SMR HDDs and are adopting the technology to contend with the massive growth in data. When considering exabyte-scale needs, and associated capital and operating cost of the data center, the long-term value they receive in terms of lower cost-per-TB, higher density, low power and high reliability can help benefit the bottom line.”
Juniper Networks, an industry leader in automated, scalable and secure networks, today announced its new MX Series 5G Universal Routing Platform along with several software innovations to provide the needed programmability, performance and flexibility for rapid service deployment in the cloud economy now and for years to come. Leveraging its vast experience with leading global cloud and service providers, Juniper is unveiling its fifth generation of the MX platform, which is now the industry’s only platform to deliver near-infinite programmability, cost efficiency and versatility with performance at scale. It combines the best of software- and hardware-based networking to equip carrier, cloud and enterprise customers for the evolving technological and business demands of next-generation services delivery.
Service providers are at an inflection point where the costs of operating a complex network that can host the new era of resource-intensive applications like 5G and secure SD-WAN-based managed services are overwhelming their ability to monetize them. Also, with the additional influx of machine data coming from IoT sensors, distributed telco edge and cloud computing, networks will become overextended if they remain static, particularly as current infrastructures have become too complex, expensive and vulnerable to cyber threats for service providers to manage the distributed scale and agility required for these new services.
A poll among Juniper service provider customers about the top challenges in being able to offer next-generation services like SD-WAN, IoT and 5G, found:
More than half (55 percent) of respondents ranked the cost of infrastructure build-out as the No. 1 or 2 challenge.
Nearly 40 percent of respondents ranked the complexity of orchestrating a distributed network at No. 1 or 2 challenge.
More than half (55 percent) of respondents ranked investment protection with data-plane programmability as the No. 1 or 2 desired feature set to solve those challenges.
To address these challenges and herald the next generation of routing for the coming wave of 5G, IoT and business services, Juniper designed its MX Series 5G Universal Routing platform with new silicon for near-infinite feature programmability, as well as open hardware-accelerated 5G Control and User Plane Separation (CUPS) for unparalleled performance, scale and freedom of choice, with additions to its universal chassis designed for operational simplicity, improved economics and increased agility.
With Contrail’s comprehensive automation and rich software management overlay capabilities, along with MX’s subscriber management, SPRING, and enhanced real-time performance monitoring telemetry data, the new capabilities enable customers to create and scale any type of service across a secure automated distributed cloud in a simplified way.
News highlights:
Juniper Penta Silicon: At the heart of the new MX Series 5G Platform is the new Juniper Penta Silicon, a next-generation 16nm service-optimized packet forwarding engine that delivers a 50 percent power efficiency gain (0.5 watts per gigabit) over the existing Junos Trio chipset, which leads to a 3x bandwidth increase for the MX960, MX480 and MX240. Juniper Penta enables end to end secure connectivity at scale with native support of both MACsec and an IPsec crypto engine – an industry-first – that can originate and terminate thousands of IPSec sessions without sacrificing performance. Additionally, Juniper Penta supports flexible native Ethernet support (FlexE). Juniper Penta silicon family will power the new MX Series 5G Platform for years to come by exponentially increasing performance, power efficiency and maintaining industry-leading hardware programmability that can address future innovative protocols.
MX 5G Control User-Plane Separation (CUPS) Hardware Acceleration: As service providers prepare for 5G deployments, the 3GPP CUPS standard allows customers to separate the evolved packet core user plane (GTP-U) and control plane (GTP-C) with a standardized Sx interface to help service providers scale each independently as needed for added flexibility and investment protection. The MX Series 5G platform is the first networking platform to support a standard-based hardware accelerated 5G user-plane in both existing and future MX routers to enable converged services (wireless and wireline) on the same platform while also allowing integration with third-party 5G control planes. Juniper expects this will lower total cost of ownership by as much as three to four times over software-based user plane implementations for MXs deployed in the field.
MX10008 and MX10016 Universal Chassis: Continuing service-scale innovation to usher in the next era of cloud, enterprise and carrier networking, the previously announced PTX and QFX Universal Chassis gains two new MX variants with today’s announcement: MX10008 and MX10016. Juniper’s Universal Chassis family reduces inventory management complexity by 80 percent and extends use-case versatility for operators with a revolutionary single-chassis design. The 13-RU MX10008 and 21-RU MX10016 Universal Chassis bring industry-leading and space-saving scale for edge routers at 19.2Tbps and 38.4Tbps, respectively. These new additions to Juniper’s Universal Chassis family improve per-slot economics for service scale at ~0.6 watts per gigabit, enabling customers to do more with less while simplifying network design and reducing opex. A variety of line cards and software are available to satisfy specific networking use-cases across the data center, enterprise and WAN.
The MX10008 and MX100016 will be available during the second half of 2018. Juniper Penta Silicon-powered line cards for the MX960, MX480 and MX240 will be available in Q1 2019. New CUPS support will be available in the first half of 2019.
Manoj Leelanivas, Executive Vice President and Chief Product Officer, Juniper Networks says, “Cloud is eating the world, 5G is ramping up, IoT is presenting a host of new challenges and security teams simply can’t keep up with the sheer volume of cyber attacks on today’s network. One thing service providers should not have to worry about among all this is the unknown of what lies ahead. That’s why we’ve continued innovating our flagship MX platform to deliver more speed, flexibility, programmability and security capabilities, giving our customers the peace of mind they need as a variety of demands continue to put pressure on the network. We are building on our heritage of eliminating the biggest barriers to routing that have emerged over the past decade and providing a platform that can grow whichever way the world does. Our commitment to removing complexity from routing has made it possible for our customers to connect in ways that have changed the world.”
Mike Altland, Director, Network Infrastructure Planning, Verizon says, “The rise of next-generation wireless and wireline services is having a profound impact on the underlying networks needed to make them a reality. We’ve been a longtime partner with Juniper Networks since the first MX more than a decade ago and are excited to see the unveiling of its next generation MX platform.”
David Roy, IP/MPLS NOC engineer, Orange remarks, “As a major service provider looking at the future of how we connect our customers with evolving use cases, it’s important to have a routing platform underpinning it all that’s flexible enough to accommodate the unpredictability of the industry right now. 5G, IoT and SD-WAN all present great opportunities for us to create new revenue-generating services but they can also bring many infrastructure challenges. We’ve been longtime MX users and are excited to see that the new MX 5G platform leverages new silicon with programmability and integrated security, and supports control user-plane separation to provide greater flexibility for certainty in an uncertain networking environment.”
Amit Tiwari, Vice President, Strategic Alliances and Systems Engineering, Affirmed Networks says, “Affirmed Networks is committed to providing operators with flexible deployment options as service providers continue to embrace virtualized architectures. Telco operators will be able to deliver higher performance customized 5G, IoT and business services that cater to the unique requirements of different end-user applications, with freedom of choice through open standards-based solutions from Affirmed Networks and Juniper.”
Heidi Adams, Senior Research Director, IP & Optical Networks at IHS Markit says, “While the industry is gradually transitioning to cloud-based deployments of network functions and services, high-performance routing hardware and custom silicon continue to be critical elements to address network services at scale. With the announcement of the Juniper Penta Silicon, Juniper continues to advance its routing silicon and platforms in order to ensure network operators can support existing services and applications more efficiently today, and be well prepared for the future.”
