MeitY, Govt Of Andhra Pradesh And NASSCOM Launch ‘Centre Of Excellence Of IoT And AI’ In Visakhapatnam

* The initiative will encourage entrepreneurship and bring opportunities for Industry, Start-ups, and Academia to work together

National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), in a joint partnership with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) and Government of Andhra Pradesh, today inaugurated the ‘Centre of Excellence on IoT and AI’ at Andhra University Campus, Visakhapatnam, aimed at promoting innovation in emerging technologies of IoT, AI, robotics, etc. The centre was inaugurated by Sri. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship & Electronics and Information Technology and of Sri. Mekapati Goutham Reddy, Minister for Industries & Commerce, Information Technology and Skill Development, Government of Andhra Pradesh, in the presence of Sri. Ajay Prakash Sawhney, IAS, Secretary, MeitY, Government of India, Sri P. V. G. D. Prasad Reddy, Vice Chancellor, Andhra University & Smt. G. Jayalakshmi, IAS, Principal Secretary, ITE&C, Government of Andhra Pradesh.

The new centre advances Prime Minister Shri Modi's Digital India vision by providing open labs and infrastructure to create and validate solutions from design to prototype to democratise innovation. It also promotes entrepreneurship by providing an incubation facility for peer-to-peer learning and the benefit of an industrial environment. Start-ups in the state are also expected to benefit through the launch of the new centre with newer opportunities in areas of their development, mentorship, funding, and the adoption of their solutions in the industry. The COE is currently working with enterprises interested in collaborating with start-ups for newer innovative solutions.

The Centre of Excellence of IoT and AI is a step towards solving real-world challenges and creating an impact. It is designed to be a catalyst that will help the industry embrace technology and become globally competitive. The centre will focus on harnessing the power of Artificial intelligence and the Internet of things to bring unprecedented opportunities for Industry, Start-ups, and Academia.

Sri. Rajeev Chandrasekhar, Union Minister of State for Skill Development and Entrepreneurship & Electronics and Information Technology said, “Technologies like IoT, technologies like AI are going to deeply shape the future of technology landscape and the economy in general. It is absolutely essential that the Center of Excellence becomes not just academic extensions of university, but they become living, breathing growing centers of energy, dynamism, entrepreneurship, and technology development of the kind that we must deliver on in the coming months and years.”

Sri. Mekapati Goutham Reddy, Minister for Industries & Commerce, Information Technology and Skill Development, Government of Andhra Pradesh said, “We’re going to be creating the Andhra Pradesh government in itself as an incubation hub. We have 9 technologies, what we have said are going to be the sunrise technologies for world events. One is Artificial Intelligence & Machine learning, second is Robotic Process Automation, third is edge computing, which is an extension to Cloud computing, fourth is quantum computing, the fifth is virtual reality and augmented reality, sixth is blockchain, seventh is IoT, eighth is 5G and ninth is cyber security. If I can be a world-class leader in any of these nine technologies, then we’re talking about a trillion-dollar economy coming to the shores of Andhra Pradesh.”

Debjani Ghosh, President, NASSCOM, said “The COE’s, the Center of Excellence have become almost a melting point that beautifully connects the different ecosystems to understand the big problems that technology can solve, brainstorms the best use technology to address these challenges or problems, and jointly co-create solutions. A fantastic example was that during the pandemic, we realized that in order for us to successfully deliver remote healthcare to the last mile, to every single citizen in India, we needed solutions that would work in places that were very limited in resources like low-bandwidth, no power connectivity etc. and very quickly DBT, MeitY, NASSCOM, got together to bring together healthcare professions to bring together startups, to bring together tech industries and figure out ways that we could address this critical issue of ensuring that every Indian could have access to healthcare no matter where they were.”

About NASSCOM

The National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM®) is the premier trade body and chamber of commerce of the Tech industry in India and comprises over 3000-member companies. Our membership spans across the entire spectrum of the industry from startups to multinationals and from products to services, Global Capability Centres to Engineering firms. Guided by India's vision to become a leading digital economy globally, NASSCOM focuses on accelerating the pace of transformation of the industry to emerge as the preferred enablers for global digital transformation. Our strategic imperatives are to reskill and upskill India's IT workforce to ensure that talent is future-ready in terms of new-age skills, strengthen the innovation quotient across industry verticals, create new market opportunities - both international and domestic, drive policy advocacy to advance innovation and ease of doing business, and build the industry narrative with focus on Talent, Trust and Innovation. And, in everything we do, we will continue to champion the need for diversity and equal opportunity.

Accenture Announces Extended Relationship With AWS And Joint Investments To Help Organizations Get To Cloud Value Faster

* New accelerators will harness the power of the Cloud Continuum — from public to edge and everything in between — taking companies further, faster in an era of compressed transformation

Accenture (NYSE: ACN) today announced the renewal of its joint business group with Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS). Building on a 13-year relationship, Accenture and AWS will make an additional joint investment over the next five years to help clients spur innovation on the Cloud Continuum and accelerate business value at scale by delivering solutions through the Accenture AWS Business Group (AABG).

On the heels of thousands of cloud projects, the extended AABG relationship announced today will help organizations address the technology, human and business dimensions of cloud change at scale with greater speed and certainty. Accenture’s investment with AWS brings timely resources for Accenture Cloud First, a multi-service group providing the full stack of cloud services created specifically to help clients become cloud-first businesses so they can accelerate their digital transformation, innovate faster and create differentiated, sustainable value.

Over the next five years, Accenture will develop a range of new accelerators to address the biggest challenges in cloud migrations with the goal of enabling AWS innovations to be adopted up to 50% faster. As part of this investment, Accenture will also continue to invest in data-driven solutions for talent development and organizational change, which are critical and often cited as a key barrier to realizing cloud value.

The extended relationship will help clients achieve industry differentiation by tapping into the unparalleled AABG joint portfolio of 175 assets and 20,000 cloud specialists who hold 24,000 AWS certifications – making Accenture among the top systems integrators in the world with vast AWS resources. To date, Accenture and AWS have co-created nearly 40 solutions for 16 industries with proven use-case relevance in order to jumpstart client value.

In today’s hyper-competitive era of compressed transformation, organizations must implement change under tremendous time pressure. For Generali Vitality, a subsidiary of one of the largest global insurance and asset management providers, their wellness business group needed to scale quickly to reach new customers. Working with Accenture and AWS to tap into cloud-native technology, Generali Vitality is now able to roll out new features at the push of a button to continuously improve their products and engage customers.

“We have successfully launched in multiple European markets and our user base is constantly growing. Part of this journey has been enabled by smart use of cloud native technology and Accenture’s outstanding software engineering capabilities,” said Simon Guest, CEO of Generali Vitality.

“We’ve learned through experience that our customers’ success often hinges on two key factors: speed and the ability to adopt new ways of working,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of sales and marketing at AWS. “Our investment to create reusable accelerators and mechanisms with Accenture is intended to make cloud transformation and change programs easier and more predictable — so customers can continuously innovate and lead their industries.”

“On the Cloud Continuum, breakthrough innovations will continue at a rapid pace. Harnessing those innovations for competitive advantage will require a commitment to permanent reinvention,” said Karthik Narain, global lead of Accenture Cloud First. “Together, we’re investing with AWS to help companies prioritize and invest in people transformation as much as tech transformation, which yields an average of 60% higher cloud return on investment.”

Launched in 2015, the Accenture AWS Business Group combines the resources, technical capability and industry knowledge of Accenture and AWS to help enterprises unlock innovation, drive business value and support growth through cloud adoption and transformation. Accenture has been recognized by AWS with several awards, including 2021 AWS Global System Integrator (GSI) Partner of the Year for US.

About Accenture

Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized skills across more than 40 industries, we offer Strategy and Consulting, Interactive, Technology and Operations services—all powered by the world’s largest network of Advanced Technology and Intelligent Operations centers. Our 624,000 people deliver on the promise of technology and human ingenuity every day, serving clients in more than 120 countries. We embrace the power of change to create value and shared success for our clients, people, shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

Mindtree Ltd Shows Strong Operating Performance To Sustain In Q2'21

CMP: Rs4445  |  

Target Price: Rs4450

 *  MTCL's simple and focused 4*4*4 growth strategy, investments in partnerships and whitespace opportunities led to superior growth in the last few quarters. Though Q2 performance will be difficult to replicate, we expect revenue growth momentum to sustain.

*  In the mid-cap space, MTCL benefitted from its better footprint among F500 clients amid a strong rebound in technology spending. The sharp recovery in TTH and deferral of uptick in travel & other expenses also led to strong operating performance and earnings upgrade.

* The company is confident of delivering industry-leading double-digit revenue growth on the back of strong deal wins, a healthy deal pipeline and broad-based revenue growth. MTCL remains confident of delivering 20%+ EBITDAM in FY22 and aspires to maintain it.

* We raise our FY22-24E EPS by 2-9%, factoring in secular demand trends. We roll forward TP to Dec'22 and upgrade the stock to Hold with a revised TP of Rs4,450 at 36x Dec'23E EPS (Rs3,300 earlier), considering higher medium-term growth assumptions (Exhibit 7) and the correction in the stock price (~10% correction from peak).

Indian IT Revenue Growth Accelerates, Supply-Side Challenges Persist

 * IT companies reported strong revenue acceleration in Q2FY22, driven by cloud adoption, digital transformation, cyber security and analytics. We believe that robust broad-based demand and a healthy deal intake/pipeline provide good near-term revenue visibility.

* Except for HCLT, Tier-1 companies' margins remained largely flat QoQ. HCLT's margin was down 60bps QoQ due to the weakness in the Products business. Despite supply-side challenges, Tier-II firms' margin performance remained resilient.

* Tier-II companies outperformed Tier-I peers in sequential revenue growth as well as margin expansion. Margin expansion was aided by revenue growth-led operating leverage, offshore shift, and productivity improvement which offset salary inflation and supply-side challenges.

* We roll forward target prices to Dec'23 and align our expectations of higher growth longevity for coverage companies. We upgrade TCS (TP: Rs4,100) and MPHL (TP: Rs3,730) to Buy, considering the recent stock underperformance. Our pecking order is INFO, TECHM, HCLT and TCS among Tier-1 names, and PSYS, FSOL, MPHL and BSOFT in mid-caps.

Indian's Can Pay For All Metro, Bus And Rail Travel, Parking, Payments At Online & Offline Stores With Paytm Transit One Card

Offers the NCMC inter-operable physical mobility card, which drives the government’s One Nation, One Card initiative, bringing convenience to millions of Indians  

Having established leadership in the FASTag category, the card linked to the Paytm Wallet can be used for all transactions of a user — from travel in metros, buses and trains, to pay toll and parking charges, payment at offline and online stores to even withdrawal of cash from ATMs. 

Users can simply top up the Paytm Wallet account to use the card and do not need to maintain any separate account.  

First phase of rollout is being launched in collaboration with Hyderabad Metro Rail, Ahmedabad Metro and the Delhi Airport Express Line, where users can leverage the power of seamless transactions 

Paytm Payments Bank Limited (PPBL), which is India’s homegrown payments bank, has announced the launch of the “Paytm Transit Card”, bringing together the power of One Nation, One Card. The Bank aims to equip millions of Indians with one physical card for all their everyday needs — from travel in metro, railways, state-owned bus services, toll & parking charges to payments at offline merchant stores, online shopping and more. The card also enables the withdrawal of money from ATMs. With this launch, users won’t have to worry about carrying multiple cards for different purposes and just use the Paytm Transit Card for all their payments.  

The launch of the Transit Card is aligned with the Bank’s initiatives to bring out products that make banking and transactions seamlessly operable for all Indians. With the Bank’s robust technology and vast user base, PPBL will enable large-scale adoption of the ‘Paytm Transit Card’ that would help promote NCMC and the Digital India initiative further.  

It has also created a completely digital process to apply, recharge & track all transactions of the cards on the Paytm App itself. The physical card will be delivered at the doorstep of the user or can be purchased at designated sales points. The prepaid card is directly linked to the Paytm Wallet, where users can just top-up the wallet to use the transit card and do not need to create any separate account. 

The Paytm Transit Card rollout is being launched in collaboration with Hyderabad Metro Rail. Users in Hyderabad can now simply purchase the transit card, which can be displayed at the Automatic Fare Collection (AFC) gates to proceed for the journey. This service will help over 50 lakh riders who use metro/bus/train services every day and experience seamless connectivity. The card is already live in the Delhi Airport Express line and Ahmedabad Metro. With the Paytm Transit Card, people can use the same card in metros as well as other metro stations across the country.  

Satish Gupta, MD & CEO of Paytm Payments Bank Ltd said, “The launch of the Paytm Transit Card will enable millions of Indians with the power of one single card that takes care of all transportation as well as banking needs. This will drive financial inclusion and accessibility for all. We are glad to be a part of the NCMC initiative and will continue to work towards the digitization of the transit ecosystem in the country while driving the adoption of smart mobility solutions.” 

Paytm Transit Card is the bank’s second product in the mass transit category after the success of PPBL FASTags. Paytm Payments Bank is the first bank in the country to achieve the milestone of issuing more than 1 crore FASTags. Besides this, It is also India’s largest acquirer of Toll Plazas for the National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) program offering an interoperable nationwide toll payment solution. The bank has enabled over 280 toll plazas across the National & State highways to collect toll charges digitally. 

HDFC ERGO Introduces A Web-Based Self-Help Portal For Farmers Across India

HDFC ERGO General Insurance, India’s leading non-life insurance company in the private sector has introduced a web-based self-help portal for farmers to help farmers intimate their localized & post-harvest claims to the company. HDFC ERGO is a leading company that provides Insurance coverage to over 6.9 million + farmers under the Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojana (PMFBY), initiated by the Government of India.

The operational guidelines of PMFBY necessitate a farmer to intimate their claims from losses incurred due to inundation, hailstorm and landslide on the field. Until recently, these claims were intimated either through HDFC ERGO’s call centres, branches or PMFBY portal / application. But, with increasing number of farmers enrolling for PMFBY and the rising awareness on insurance, many were unable to register their claims leading to dissatisfaction.

The challenge led HDFC ERGO to come up with a tech-based solution to facilitate claims intimation in a simplified & convenient way through the web-based self-help portal. To file the intimation through this portal, farmers simply need to enter the PMFBY application number or bank account details, followed by 6 specific details to complete the process, which takes less than a minute. The self-help portal also offers farmers with additional benefits such as:

Timely reconciliation through instant Mapping of Claim no. with PMFBY Application

Customer convenience through one Minute claim registration for farmers

Delight due to instant claim no. generation and SMS confirmation to farmer

Commenting on the introduction of the self-help portal, Mr. Anuj Tyagi, Deputy MD, HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company “Processing all the claims and providing solutions to customer queries is our top most priority and, as a digital-first insurer, we ensure that all our solutions have a blend of technology. The amalgamation of technology with all that we do ensures that the customers get a quick turnaround time for claim settlements. The launch of this user-friendly portal, we have simplified and streamlined the claims intimation and tracking process of the farmers.”

A digital-first Company, HDFC ERGO is focused on digitally enabling consumers across the country and ensuring their services are made easily available & understandable. Currently, 33% of the claims intimated have been registered through the self-help portal. Farmer can access the self-help portal by logging on to: https://customersupport.hdfcergo.com/selfhelp/RABG_Claim.aspx

About HDFC ERGO:

HDFC ERGO General Insurance Company is a joint venture between HDFC Ltd. and ERGO International AG; the primary insurance entity of the Munich RE Group of Germany. HDFC ERGO is one of India’s largest non-life insurance company in the private sector. A digital-first company, transforming in to an AI-first company, HDFC ERGO is a leader in implementing technology to offer consumers the best-in-class service experience. The company has created a stream of innovative & new products as well as services using technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), Machine Learning (ML), Natural Processing Language (NLP), Robotics and IBM Watson. HDFC ERGO offers a range of general insurance products and has a completely digital sales process with ~93% of retail policies issued digitally. The self-help tech platform developed by HDFC ERGO has empowered the customers to avail 58% of the services virtually in a self-help mode on a 24x7 basis with ~40% of the customer requested services digitally.

The Company offers a complete range of General Insurance products including Health, Motor, Home, Travel, Agriculture, Credit, Cyber and Personal Accident in the retail space along with Property, Marine, Engineering, Marine Cargo, Group Health and Liability Insurance in the corporate space. Be it unique insurance products, integrated customer service models, top-in-class claim processes or a host of technologically innovative solutions, HDFC ERGO has been able to delight its customers at every touch-point and milestone to ensure consumers are serviced in real time.

Signify In Partnership With SRF Foundation Lights Up 15 Rural Government Schools In Nuh, Mewat

* The initiative was inaugurated by District Commissioner of Nuh, Captain Shakti Singh (IAS).

* Each school is powered by a 3 to 7 KW solar mini grid system that also assists in running smart LED TVs in digital classrooms

Signify (Euronext: LIGHT), the world leader in lighting, in partnership with SRF Foundation recently illuminated 15 rural government schools in the Mewat District of Haryana under its CSRprogram called ‘Jagmag Pathshala’. This initiative has positively impacted more than 7000 students in the district and aims to provide an improved learning environment for young students by upgrading their school infrastructure through solar powered lighting.

Each school is powered by a 3 to 7 KW solar mini grid system that provides clean electricity to run the lights and fans in the classrooms. Additionally, these grids are also powering the smart LED TVs in the digital classrooms and equipment for water management, thereby enabling a holistic improvement in the school infrastructure.

Inaugurating the event, District Commissioner of Nuh, Captain Shakti Singh (IAS) said, “In today’s world, education is incomplete if students are not adequately taught about the importance of clean energy. It’s no more a bookish literature but a real time issue that requires adequate attention from everyone in the country. Clean and green energy is an important tool that can bring about holistic development in schools, and I am glad that corporates like Signify and NGO’s like SRF foundation are stepping up to do their bit and making meaningful contributions towards the society.”

Natasha Tandon, Head of CSR, Signify India, said, “At Signify, our vision is to unlock the extraordinary potential of light to create brighter lives and a better world. Though this program we can achieve both these objectives, as we offer the students a bright and welcoming classroom that is powered by sustainable energy. We hope that this will enable them to perform better in school and also help them learn more about solar energy.”

About Signify

Signify (Euronext: LIGHT) is the world leader in lighting for professionals and consumers and lighting for the Internet of Things. Our Philips products, Interact connected lighting systems and data-enabled services, deliver business value and transform life in homes, buildings and public spaces. With 2020 sales of EUR 6.5 billion, we have approximately 37,000 employees and are present in over 70 countries. We unlock the extraordinary potential of light for brighter lives and a better world.