SAP Labs India Ranked #1 in India’s Best Companies to Work for 2019 by Great Place to Work Institute

SAP SE has announced that SAP Labs India is #1 in the list of India’s Best Companies to Work for 2019. The survey, conducted by the Great Place to Work® Institute, marks the second consecutive year that SAP Labs India has nabbed the top spot by standing out for its inclusive culture that empowers continuous learning. The Great Place to Work® Institute’s annual list is one of the largest and most esteemed study of workplace excellence and people management practices globally. This year’s survey had 900 participating companies across 20 different industries. 

Dilipkumar Khandelwal, Managing Director, SAP Labs India said, “We are thrilled to be ranked #1 by Great Place to Work® for two years in a row. At SAP, we have made considerable investments to create a culture in which innovation, learning and intrepreneurship is encouraged and rewarded.”

Employees of SAP Labs India work in an environment which is non-hierarchical, fluid and flexible. The company has several best-in-class employee initiatives. These include peer-to-peer learning platforms, supporting women in different phases of their career and encouraging employees to consider entrepreneurship. SAP Labs India has also won several awards for its best-in-class diversity programs such as Autism at Work.

Shraddhanjali Rao, Head of Human Resources – SAP, India said: “At SAP we believe that our strength lies in differences, not in similarities. We have created a diverse and inclusive culture which in turn fuels our innovation, creates a greater customer experience helping us drive success for our business and enabling us to succeed in a rapidly changing world.”

SAP Labs India is a strong proponent of Sustainability and Social Responsibility. The key pillars of its corporate social responsibility include ensuring Education and Digital literacy to women and youth from the underprivileged sections of the society, Entrepreneurship development - focusing on creating social enterprises and helping engineering students embrace entrepreneurship, Technology donation for NGO's, Disaster relief support for devastations caused by natural calamities and Swachh Bharat (CleanIndia) campaign.

CSS Corp Join Forces with ICT Academy to Skill Youth of Tamil Nadu

CSS Corp, a new age IT services and technology support company today announced it has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with ICT Academy, a not-for-profit society, to jointly launch an extensive training program to skill the youth of rural, urban and low-income family groups in Tamil Nadu. Through this initiative, CSS Corp endeavours to help build the socio-economic conditions of underserved students through quality education and training in IT. The program was officially launched at an inauguration event held at Sri Sairam Engineering College, Chennai, Tamil Nadu on 3rd July 2019.

According to NASSCOM, the demand-supply gap for soft and technical skills have given rise to an urgent need to re-skill more than 50% of India’s IT workforce to meet the requirements of the industry. This has also led to a shortage in employment, specifically for entry-level jobs. With this collaboration, CSS Corp and ICT Academy aims to address the gap by imparting sector-specific skills through training and workshops that will lead to more employment opportunities.

The training program will be conducted in 20 colleges spread across Tamil Nadu. The program targets to provide 100 hours of intensive activity-based training in soft and technical support skills for 1,000 final year graduating students from engineering, arts & science colleges located in the rural and urban areas of Tamil Nadu. The module includes business communication, grammar, vocabulary, hardware & networking, operating systems, wireless technologies, and career counselling; all of which will be offered by professionals who have industry expertise. College students who aspire to
apply for the program should currently be pursuing their final year in Computer Science & IT and must secure an average score of 6 CGPA until the last semester. Volunteers from CSS Corp will be closely involved in the program through overall monitoring of the training program, mentoring of the students and conducting mock interviews and group discussions.

The program is also aimed to skill students from financially backward families with annual income of less than or equal to 2.5 lakhs. Girl students will be given preference during the selection process to keep in line with CSS Corp’s objective of empowering more women in the technology sector.

Speaking about the initiative, Manish Tandon, Chief Executive Officer, CSS Corp said, “One of the major challenges for the IT industry is re-skilling the present and future workforce to bridge the demand-skill gap. CSS Corp has been consistently institutionalizing a culture that promotes learning newer technologies and solutions to embrace the current disruption.

This year, through our CSR initiative, we look forward to imparting the skill expertise that we have curated to deserving students through quality education and proper training. We are privileged to partner with ICT Academy to design a program that will effectively empower students of Tamil Nadu to be truly future ready”.

Mr. M Sivakumar, Chief Executive Officer, ICT Academy said, "CSR comes as a big boon for the under privileged and the development of rural India. We at ICT Academy, being a not for profit organization continued partnering with several leading companies across India for implementing their CSR objectives in the areas of employability, skill development, youth empowerment, capacity development of teachers, digital empowerment, entrepreneurship development, literacy initiatives and women empowerment. Thanks to CSS Corp for coming up with such a high impact initiative under their CSR.

Through this partnership with CSS Corp, ICT Academy being the skill development institution, is delighted to train the students on latest technology skills and increase their opportunity to acquire a good job in the industry. This is a welcome initiative by CSS Corp, and I believe this would make a positive impact to the beneficiaries’ family as well as the industry by bridging the skill gap”.

Accenture, Cisco and Quest Alliance Team to Skill Youth for the Digital Economy

Accenture, Cisco and Quest Alliance are teaming to equip 1.5 million youth across India with skills for the digital economy. As part of a year-long collaboration, the organizations have signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with the Directorate General of Training (DGT) within the Ministry of Skill Development and Entrepreneurship to offer a digital skilling program to all students enrolled in industrial training institutes (ITIs) via the government of India’s Bharat Skills portal.

The three organizations have also signed MoUs with the state governments of Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Bihar and Assam to roll out a comprehensive blended learning program, which will cover more than 100,000 students from 227 ITIs across these states. The training modules will include online self-learning via the Bharat Skills portal as well as in-classroom training.

The skilling program, which will be expanded in a phased manner to ITIs across other states in India, includes tailor-made curriculum with modules for digital literacy, career readiness, employability skills and advanced technology skills such as data analytics. The in-classroom program will deliver more than 240 hours of training to impart skills for digital literacy and fluency; workplace readiness, including creative problem solving and use of data in decision making; and career management skills, including the cultivation of a growth mindset and the ability to identify and plan career journeys. The online module is optimized for mobile phones to enable on-the-go self-learning, and the toolkit also includes training the trainer resources.

“The digital economy is creating opportunities — with artificial intelligence alone estimated to add more than US$1 trillion to the Indian economy by 2035 — yet an unintended consequence of advanced technologies is further marginalization

of people, as humans and machines work side by side,” said Kshitija Krishnaswamy, director of corporate citizenship at Accenture in India. “The key to continued socio-economic growth in the digital economy is large-scale skilling of those at the greatest risk of displacement, enabling them to use advanced technologies to further their growth. Our collaboration with Cisco and Quest Alliance is part of Accenture’s Skills to Succeed initiative, which aims to create employment opportunities by leveraging digital innovation. So far, we’ve skilled more than 500,000 people in India, and by partnering  with the ITIs, we hope to have a positive impact on lives that could be most disrupted in the digital economy.”

Harish Krishnan, managing director of public affairs and strategic engagements at Cisco India and SAARC, said, “Digitization is accelerating the transformation of every industry in India. With the majority of our skilled workforce coming from the vocational sector, we need to ensure that the students in ITIs are digitally fluent and well-equipped to enter the workforce. Digital skilling has been one of Cisco’s top priorities, and with this partnership, we are taking our portfolio and partnerships to the vocational sector. We look forward to expanding our partnership with Accenture, our global channel partner, to our social programs.”

Aakash Sethi, CEO of Quest Alliance, said, “Quest’s strategic goal over the next five years is to equip 1.2 million youth with critical life, work, and digital skills as they transition into the world of work. Linear job trajectories are no longer the norm, and our work with youth in ITIs serves to hone their 21st-century skills like digital fluency, self-learning, critical thinking, and problem-solving. It is these skills that will help youth thrive in the 21st century.

Building collaborations of this kind between the DGT, the government of India, Accenture and Cisco is an integral part of the Quest mission.”

Consolidation to Gather Pace Among Tier 11 Indian Technology Firms

CRISIL expects consolidation among Tier II1 information technology (IT) services firms (annual revenues of Rs 1,000-10,000 crore) to gather pace over the medium term as they strive to achieve scale and build digital capabilities to stay relevant.

This comes at a time when their legacy businesses – such as time and material contracts – have already become commoditised, posing significant growth and profitability challenges.

Another trend that’s also being witnessed is the exit of promoters of Tier II firms, capitalising on higher valuations in the past two years and better growth prospects.

CRISIL’s analysis of the top 22 listed IT service firms shows there is a potential consolidation opportunity among Tier II firms, which today have a combined market capitalisation of ~Rs 33,000 crore. Pertinently, consolidation moves worth Rs.18000 crore are already in progress among Tier II firms.

Such consolidation engenders manifold synergies, boosts profitability and builds capabilities to cope up with opportunities in the digital space.

Housing Sales to Remain Strong Despite Modest Launches in First Half: JLL Report

House sales are expected to remain strong despite modest new launches in the country witnessed during the first half of the year (H1 2019), according to the latest JLL report titled “Residential Market Update – H1 2019” that was released on Tuesday.

With Hyderabad being on top among the seven cities, residential real estate market witnessed an increase of 22 per cent in sales at a pan-India level during the period, it said.

Interestingly, the share of affordable and mid-income housing (ticket size of up to Rs 1 crore in Mumbai and Rs 75 lakh across other cities), has seen a hike of up to 58 per cent at the country level, the report added. Pune tops the list, with 91 per cent of the new supply falling in the affordable and mid-income category.

The report added, with gradual revival in homebuyers’ confidence and improved affordability, markets witnessed a resurgence in sales in 2018. The resurgence continued in H1 2019.

During H1 2019, Hyderabad recorded the highest growth in sales at per cent, followed by Delhi NCR (42 per cent) on a year-over-year (YoY) basis. In Chennai, sales grew by 24 per cent over H2 2018, however it is yet to match the levels of H1 2018.

Sales are likely to receive a further fillip with progressive policies of the government, JLL said. During the first quarter this year, the Government further lowered goods and services tax (GST) rates on affordable homes to one per cent from the earlier eight per cent, without input tax credit (ITC). The GST on projects under construction, which are not under the affordable housing segment, was reduced to five per cent from 12 per cent. The rate revision augurs well for homebuyers as the process of claiming the ITC under the former system was complex.

“Series of reforms and rising buyers’ interest in the segment have propelled the sector to align itself to the market demand. Interestingly, in most cities, homebuyers continue to focus on ready to move in projects and projects nearing completion. As a result of this shift in buying preference, developers too are focused on completing their ongoing projects,” said Ramesh Nair, Chief Executive Officer (CEO) & Country Head, JLL India.

With developers focusing on delivery of already launched projects, new launches of residential units decreased by 11per cent on a YoY basis across the top seven cities, the report added. With the exception of Mumbai and Bengaluru, where launches grew YoY, all other cities saw a dip during H1 2019. Mumbai, Delhi NCR and Bengaluru continued to dominate launches and formed three-fourth of the overall launches during this period.

“Limited number of launches by developers, in a way, is helping the sector to balance the demand supply scenario in the country. This will act as a cushion and help the sector revive. As a result of the reform measures more specifically RERA and GST, we expect more transparency in the sector which in turn will bring back buyers’ confidence. ” said Siva Krishnan, Managing Director (MD) - Residential Services, Developer Solutions and Strategic Consulting.

The report added that a substantial decline in launches combined with a strong growth in sales in H1 2019 has brought a parity between year-to-sell (YTS) and average construction period across cities. “With Delhi NCR and Kolkata being the exception, the average YTS at 3.4 years across the seven cities compares favourably with the average construction period for a typical residential project across these cities at 3-4 years,” said Samantak Das, Chief Economist and Head of Research & REIS, JLL India.

Edelweiss Tokio Life Brings “Health Shield+, an Innovative Heart + Cancer Insurance” Solution

In light of the rising healthcare costs and incidences of critical illnesses, Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance brings an innovative “Heart and Cancer insurance” solution called Health Shield+ with one-of-a-kind feature – Term Trigger benefit.

The product provides cover for all types of Cancers and 17 cardiac conditions. Depending on their needs, a customer can opt for a cover only for Cancer or only Heart or both the ailments.

Commenting on the development, Sumit Rai, MD & CEO, Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance said, “We have an unmoving focus on innovation. We want to be anticipative and recognise the unarticulated needs of our customers. The Term Trigger benefit is in line with this aim, and seeks to provide a comprehensive protection to our customers.”

Term Trigger benefit is an optional feature available under the Cancer variant of the plan. In case of detection of a major condition of cancer, the insurer extends a term cover to the policyholder, in addition to the lump sum pay out.

Cancer has a severe impact – emotionally and financially – on an individual and their family. A recent study conducted by Edelweiss Tokio Life Insurance (click here to see the report), shows that survival rate of patients while promising in the first year post late stage detection, declines drastically following 5 years of diagnosis. While 45% patients survive post one year of diagnosis of a major condition, only 11% live beyond 5 years.

When one is fighting with a critical disease like Cancer, buying an insurance is typically not a priority. Additionally, buying an insurance at that stage becomes a cumbersome process. The Term trigger benefit is aimed at providing a sense of financial security to the individual’s loved ones and alleviate any financial concerns the policyholder may have for their loved ones.

Another unique feature is the Return of Premium, which allows the policyholder to recover all unclaimed premiums from the insurer on maturity.       

“With incidences of critical illnesses increasing, we don’t want customers to stay away from buying critical illness plans on account that they would lose their money in the event that they do not have to claim it,” Rai added.

The study also showed that cancer care can cost anywhere between Rs. 4 lakhs and Rs. 14 lakhs, depending on the stage of detection. More importantly, a whopping 75% of patients are either uninsured or inadequately insured to meet these treatment costs. With incidences of cancer likely to rise by about 25% over the next five years, a disease-specific insurance plan is essential.

Health Shield+ offers a fixed payout on diagnosis of minor and major conditions of Cancer and Heart disease, and a waiver of premium for 5 years from the date of diagnosis of both, the first and second minor condition of these ailments.

Manufacturing Industry Looks to Outpace Hybrid Cloud Adoption

Nutanix, Inc., a leader in enterprise cloud computing, today announced the findings of its Enterprise Cloud Index results for the manufacturing sector, measuring manufacturing companies’ plans for adopting private, public and hybrid clouds. The report revealed that the manufacturing industry’s hybrid cloud usage and plans outpace the global average across industries. The deployment of hybrid clouds in manufacturing and production companies has currently reached 19% penetration, slightly ahead of the global average. Moreover, manufacturers plan to more than double their hybrid cloud deployments to 45% penetration in two years; outpacing the global average by 4 percent.

The manufacturing industry is at an “innovation impasse,” 1 meaning manufacturers have a desire to innovate and drive transformation, but legacy IT systems have the potential to constrain their ability to do so. The opportunity for manufacturers to embrace digitization efforts including “Industry 4.0” initiatives can break the impasse, but executives must focus on new opportunities to create value and not only prioritize traditional business operations. Manufacturing organizations face the constant challenge of trade-offs: they are under pressure to meet current productivity and operational goals in an increasingly global and highly competitive marketplace, but they also need to invest in future growth.

This challenge has created a demand for new technology solutions that can help balance the trade-off between current and future goals. IT leaders in manufacturing must avoid the beaten path of finding short-term fixes for increasing revenue; instead, they should look to long-term solutions that enable automation, enhanced use of data and improvements in customer experience. The Enterprise Cloud Index findings indicate that manufacturing leaders are aggressively adopting new technology to embrace modernization instead of getting left behind with legacy systems. The distributed cloud model offers a solution that delivers speed, flexibility, and localization, allowing manufacturers to improve efficiency without compromising quality.

While 91% of survey respondents reported hybrid cloud as the ideal IT model, today’s global average hybrid cloud penetration level is at 18.5% — the disparity due in part to challenges of transitioning to the hybrid cloud model. Manufacturing industries reported barriers to adopting hybrid cloud that mirrored global roadblocks, including limitations in application mobility, data security/compliance, performance, management and a shortage of IT talent. Compared to other industries, manufacturers reported greater IT talent deficits in AI/ML, hybrid cloud, blockchain, and edge computing/IoT.

Other key findings of the report include:

43% of manufacturers surveyed are currently using a traditional data center as their primary IT infrastructure, slightly outpacing the global average of 41%
However, manufacturers currently use a single public cloud service more often than any other industry. 20% of manufacturing companies reported using a single cloud service, compared to the global average of 12% — a testament to the fact that manufacturers are starting to turn to the cloud as a solution, given that they deal with legacy IT systems and cannot handle workloads on-prem.

Manufacturers are also advancing the movement to private cloud: 56% of manufacturers surveyed said that they run enterprise applications in a private cloud, outpacing the global average by 7%.

Manufacturers are struggling to control cloud spend. One motivation for deploying hybrid clouds is enterprises’ need to gain control over their IT spend. Organizations that use public cloud spend 26% of their annual IT budget on public cloud, with this percentage predicted to increase to 35% in two years’ time. Most notable, however, is that more than a third (36%) of organizations using public clouds said their spending has exceeded their budgets.

Manufacturers chose security and compliance slightly more often than companies in other industries as the top factor in deciding where to run workloads: while 31% of respondents across all industries and geographies named security and compliance as the number one decision criterion, 34% of manufacturing organizations chose security and compliance as the top factor.

The bullish outlook for hybrid cloud adoption globally and across industries is reflective of an IT landscape growing increasingly automated and flexible enough that enterprises have the choice to buy, build, or rent their IT infrastructure resources based on fast transforming application requirements.

“Manufacturers are investing in modernizing their IT stack, and adopting industry 4.0 solutions to keep up with ever-changing business demands in areas like production and supply chain management,” said Chris Kozup, SVP of Global Marketing at Nutanix. “A hybrid cloud infrastructure gives manufacturers a fresh approach to modernizing legacy applications and services, enabling manufacturing IT leaders to focus on their long-term investments in big data, IoT, and next-generation enterprise applications. While the manufacturing industry is still facing obstacles in transitioning to multi-cloud use, this study shows us that manufacturing organizations are ready to accelerate growth and take the lead in IT innovation in the future. Indian companies have already taken the lead in this respect and we are quite proud of our association with these visionary companies.”

Mr. Muthukrishnan G, GM-IT, Ramco Cements, commented “Technologies such as Automation, Cloud, IoT, AI and ML, are being used by manufacturers in production, supply chain management as well as in customer and employee experience management. Like most manufacturers, the traditional infrastructure at the core of our datacentre operations was too complex. We moved to Nutanix HCI to remove the complexity, silos and friction from our IT operations, and build a next-gen infrastructure, in our journey towards digital transformation and Cloud adoption.”

To create this report, Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey more than 2,300 IT decision makers, including 337 worldwide manufacturing and production organizations, about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud challenges are and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities. The survey included respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.