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.”
In line with its constant efforts to conserve the ecosystem it operates in, Amazon Cares the CSR initiative of India’s largest online marketplace, Amazon India, rolled out a campaign across its Community and Resource centers to celebrate World Environment Week 2018. Under the campaign, Amazon Cares conducted various initiatives from June 05th – June 10th to create awareness on environment conservation in the communities close to its Fulfillment centres.
In an endeavor to initiate impactful change, Amazon Cares in partnership with its implementation partner Foundation Of Rural Development (FORD) organized an awareness rally among students and Community on the impact of Global Warming, climate change and role of the Community in protection of environment. They educated over 300 students of the local community in the village of Anekal on the importance of conservation of energy resource, methods of proper waste management and discussed the hazards of pollution. This was followed by a sapling plantation in the school.
Commenting on the same, Srinivas, President, Gram Panchayat, Samethanahalli, said “We need to constantly create awareness and motivate action towards the protection of our environment. The World Environment Day gives us an opportunity to dedicate time and attention to do so. With the experience of Amazon India and the focus of our local community, I believe we can build a sustainable effort towards creating a better future for our children.”
Amazon India started the Amazon Cares – Community and Resource Centers initiative with the vision of ‘Creating opportunities and transforming lives’. The programs are designed to impact and enhance the lives of the local community in the areas of education, livelihood, environment, women empowerment, health and sanitation. The online marketplace uses its resources and infrastructure of innovation and technology to support India’s development. Besides, Bangalore, Amazon has conducted similar activities across India like awareness rallies, sapling plantation, lake restoration, village clean up, etc. across India ranging from Sonipat, Manesar, Tauru in Haryana to Ludhiana, Maharashtra, Ahmedabad, Hyderabad and Chennai.
Mashreq Bank, UAE’s leading financial institution, has announced the appointment of Santhosh Mahalingam as the Managing Director of Mashreq Global Services in India, Bangalore.
Santhosh brings with him more than 22 years of experience in the retail banking industry and his expertise spans over operations, projects, finance, process engineering, digitization and general management.
Prior to joining Mashreq in 2014, Santhosh held several senior positions with Qatar National Bank, Standard Chartered Bank and most recently, Standard Chartered Scope International as Head of Consumer Operations and Change Delivery where he was instrumental in setting out quality standards for various operational areas, as well as, establishing efficiency measures for evaluating performance.
Santhosh has been a consistent champion of digitization, taking the responsibility of heading the digitization of back office operations at Mashreq Bank.
Sandeep Chouhan, Group Head of Operations and Technology, said, “We are happy to announce the appointment of Santhosh as the Managing Director of Mashreq Global Services in India. India will be an integral part of the next wave of innovation for Mashreq. Therefore, Santhosh’s role as Managing Director for Global Services in India is extremely important for us, his rich wealth of experience and passionate leadership will certainly bring immense value to MGS.”
Santhosh Mahalingam, Managing Director Mashreq Global Services in India, said, “I am excited to be joining Mashreq Global Services. My passion for innovation and technology aligns with MGS’s commitment to leading with innovative solutions and services. For over 50 years, Mashreq has been powering the future of banking using the latest technologies in data, software, intelligence and robotics. I look forward to being part of their journey of constant innovation.”
Santosh holds an MBA in finance and marketing from the University of Calicut, India. He is also a qualified Executive Coach (PCC) and certified NLP Practioner.
A part of Al-Ghurair Group, Mashreq Bank is one of UAE’s leading financial institutions and the largest private sector bank with presence in London, New York, Honk Kong and Mumbai. In India, Mashreq, recently announced its entry into the non-bank financial institution (NBFI) space through an engagement with IL&FS Financial Services Ltd to offer external commercial borrowings (ECB) in Indian rupees.
Orion East Mall, Banaswadi Main Road celebrated its 2nd anniversary amidst much fanfare with famous South India actress Hari Priya along with 30 children from NGO APSA cutting a huge anniversary cake.The celebrations were on from 8th June itself. The mall wore a festive look all through the weekend. The Mall also had a 70feet Bouncy for its young customers who came over and it proved to be quite a welcome.
For the shoppers at the mall, there were a range of discounts available – while some stores offered a flat 50% discount on merchandise same, offered up to 50% on select products. This led to a shopping frenzy where customers were seen laden with some great shopping deals and new acquisitions for their wardrobe and homes.
Speaking on the 2nd Anniversary of Orion East Mall, Sunil Munshi, Senior General Manager, says, “Over the past two years we have seen Orion East Mall become an integral part of the social and cultural fabric of the people living around it. A place that has always looked at ensuring that there is something for everyone, you will find customers cutting across age groups here.
From the stores, to the activities and promotions, we have ensured that it is in keeping with the pulse of the people. The 2-year celebration is our way of thanking our customers for their sustained support”.Always attentive to their Corporate Social Responsibilities, Orion East Mall works towards the cause and care of the children from the NGO, APSA.
Speaking on the 2nd Anniversary of Orion East Mall, Celebrity actress, Hari Priya said, “It is a pleasure to be associated with the celebration activities for the 2nd anniversary of Orion East Mall. From the events organized for the public to the special cake cutting ceremony with the children of the APSA NGO, it is lovely to see the offerings at the mall are for everybody in the true sense of the term”.
“I have been visiting this mall since it opened two years ago and have always found something new on each visit,” says a young college student who was also a prize winner in the spot contests. “It is a place that I am comfortable with, both with my friends and my family. It has a lot of interesting options whether it is clothes, food, events or more” she concludes.
