Tata Communications Unveils Project ‘S.H.E.’ To Promote Entrepreneurship Education At The UNESCO World Conference

* Collaborates with The Better India; Aimed to reach out to one million women in India by 2024

Tata Communications, a global digital ecosystem enabler, announced the launch of the ‘School of Hope and Empowerment’ (S.H.E.) at the 2021 UNESCO World Conference on Education for Sustainable Development. S.H.E., a multi-media, multi-stakeholder impact communications initiative is designed in collaboration with The Better India, an impact driven Indian digital media platform, to support and educate women from small towns in India to overcome key barriers to entrepreneurship. By leveraging the power of digital connectivity and partnerships, Tata Communications will create enabling environments of, for and by women from marginalised communities to establish themselves as entrepreneurs and leaders in their communities.

S.H.E. includes a series of short films highlighting challenges faced by women in becoming entrepreneurs, such as gender stereotypes, family commitments, financial and societal constraints, and lack of self-belief. The trailer of the six-part video series, highlighting the inspirational journey of Hasrat Bano, a real-life rural woman entrepreneur, has been unveiled at the UNESCO event.

“When you decide to do a business, being a man or a woman does not make a difference, your brain and thinking does,” said Hasrat Bano. “S.H.E. is a milestone project in the journey of women like me who dream to become entrepreneurs. This initiative provides us with the knowledge and guidance to use technology, learn new skills and become financially independent. It creates opportunities for us at a local level that helps us run a business. We are grateful for this platform and hope women in rural India are able to benefit from this.”

Tata Communications aims to spotlight such stories of successful local entrepreneurs who are women, and offer them business grants, mentorship, digital training, amongst other key resources. Women, therefore, will be supported to embark on the path of financial independence to pursue their ideas and bring it to life. In addition to The Better India, the technical and knowledge partners will help strengthen the program implementation.

The aim of this project is to inspire at least a million women to realise their dreams of becoming entrepreneurs. In the first phase, S.H.E. is focused on aspiring women entrepreneurs aged 18-35 years from low-income backgrounds in the peri-urban areas of Dhanbad, Bokaro, East Singhbhum, Hazaribagh and Ranchi in Jharkhand. With just 25% of women in the labour force and limited employment opportunities in the region, this project will address the challenges of financial independence of these women. The next two phases of the project are aimed at including the entrepreneurial women in Odisha and Bihar.

Mamaearth Appoints Karan Bajwa As Vice President, Human Resources For Honasa

* Bajwa has 8 years of experience across talent functions like Total Rewards, Business Partnering and HR Shared Services in companies across telecom and FMCG

Mamaearth has appointed Karan Bajwa as Vice President, Human Resources for Honasa Consumer Pvt. Ltd. He has 8 years of experience across talent functions like Total Rewards, Business Partnering and HR Shared Services in companies across telecom and FMCG.

Mamaearth has grown exponentially over the past few years and is expanding at a rapid rate. Adding Karan to the team is part of their plans to identify and implement long-term strategic talent management goals. With a post-graduation from SCMHRD, Karan has years of experience at Airtel and Reckitt under his belt.

In accepting the position, Karan Bajwa stated, “Mamaearth is a brand that has made a difference, not just to the consumer market, but also to the way FMCG companies conduct business. I am honoured to be part of the management team and look forward to helping create an impactful talent strategy by streamlining existing processes in addition to  implementing new initiatives for the positive growth of the company.”

Commenting on the appointment, Varun Alagh, Co-Founder, and CEO, Mamaearth said, “Being the fastest-growing D2C brand, we don’t want to simply add to the volume of our workforce, but want to grow as a family. Mamaearth wants to ensure that our employees are well looked after, have access to benefits, and experience a happy company work culture. We’re excited to grow our family and are glad to have someone as experienced and able as Karan to help us achieve our goals.”

Mr. Karan Bajwa will be based out of the Gurgaon office and this appointment comes on the heels of other critical and strategic additions to the leadership team of Mamaearth. 

Palo Alto Networks 2021 Cortex Xpanse Attack Surface Threat Report

Palo Alto Networks (NYSE: PANW) today released the 2021 Cortex Xpanse Attack Surface Threat Report, which highlights lessons in attack surface management from leading global enterprises.

The Palo Alto Networks Cortex® Xpanse™ research team studied the public-facing internet attack surface of some of the world’s largest businesses to help enterprises. From January to March, they monitored scans of 50 million IP addresses associated with 50 global enterprises to understand how quickly adversaries can identify vulnerable systems for fast exploitation.

Key Reveals:

Adversaries are constantly scanning for weaknesses in the public-facing internet attack surface of enterprises, in the cloud and traditional data centers. Attackers scan for vulnerable systems once an hour on a typical day, but this activity picks up dramatically when new vulnerabilities are disclosed. 

Scans started within 5 minutes after disclosure of the high-profile zero-day vulnerabilities in Microsoft’s widely used Exchange Server. 

Scans started within 15 minutes after most vulnerabilities were announced.

Global enterprises are far behind the attackers. It takes weeks for such scans to begin. 

Vulnerabilities in the public-facing internet of global enterprises are widespread. One serious vulnerability turned up twice a day, or every 12 hours, in the global enterprises we studied. 

As global enterprises transformed their operations to support remote work, that created security gaps: 

79% of observed exposures were in the cloud, compared to 21% for on-premises data centers.

Nearly one in three vulnerabilities uncovered were due to issues with Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP), whose usage has soared to enable remote work. It can provide direct admin access to a server, which makes it one of the most common gateways for ransomware.

Concerns about digital transformation introducing security gaps not only proved grounded but also understated the impact.  

In reality, digital transformation has realigned the risk equilibrium in the attacker’s favor. Most tools in IT and security’s arsenal—namely asset and vulnerability management—focus on evaluation but not discovery. In other words, these tools manage known assets while remaining blind to unknown ones. Worse yet, the common methods of discovering unknown assets—such as pen-testing—take place on a quarterly basis (see figure 1).

These programs should start with the basics:

Global internet visibility: Implement a system of record to track every asset, system, and service you own that is on the public internet, including across all major CSPs and dynamically leased (commercial and residential) ISP space using comprehensive indexing, spanning common and often misconfigured port/protocols (i.e., not limited to the old perspective of only tracking HTTP and HTTPS websites).

In-depth attribution: Detect systems and services belonging to your organization using a full protocol handshake to verify details about a specific service running at a given IP address. By fusing this information with a number of public and proprietary datasets, match the full and correct set of internet-facing systems and services back to a specific  organization.

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Methodology

Using the externally available attack surface from global enterprises, Cortex Xpanse researchers examined and interpreted data to help defenders understand the attack surface in order to:

Quantify and remediate externally facing vulnerabilities.

Provide security teams with attack surface benchmark metrics.

Optimize threat modeling.

Convey the threat landscape to technical and nontechnical audiences.

Deploy proactive security measures.

Cortex Xpanse operates a proprietary platform that continuously collects more than one petabyte per day of information related to all systems on the public internet to ascertain how attackers view potential targets. We fuse this information to discover cybersecurity risks present on the networks of the world’s largest and most complex organizations, which no one else can find. Our technology helps our customers see the world through the eyes of highly sophisticated attackers. 

For this report, they looked at the attack surface and threat data coming from 50 global enterprises, including a subset of the Fortune 500, covering around 50 million IP addresses from Q1 2021 (January 2021 – March 2021) and representing 1% of total, global IPv4 space.

JK Tyre Records Excellent Growth Performance During Q4FY21

Consolidated                                    Q4FY2021                  

Net Revenue                                     2,945                                

EBIDTA                                           472                          

PBT                                                 281                           

Indian Tyre Industry major JK Tyre & Industries Ltd. (JK Tyre) announced its results today for Q4FY21 & FY21.

The Board has recommended a dividend of 100 % on its equity shares.

Performance Highlights (Consolidated) - Q4FY21 vs. Q4FY20

Consolidated net revenues stood at Rs.2,945 crore up by 63%.

EBIDTA at Rs.472 crore, recorded an increase of 119% with margin expansion of 400 bps.

Multifold growth in PBT and PAT on y-o-y basis stood at Rs.281 crore and Rs.195 crore respectively.

Performance Highlights (Consolidated) - FY21 vs. FY20

Consolidated net revenues stood at Rs.9,145 crore up by 4%.

EBIDTA at Rs.1,349 crore, increased by 33% with margin expansion of 310 bps.

PAT stood at Rs.331 crore, an increase of 134%.

Commenting on the results, Dr. Raghupati Singhania, Chairman and Managing Director (CMD), said, “The year began with India in lockdown due to COVID-19 pandemic and the economy grinding to a halt with Q1FY21 almost a wash out.  Economy started opening up gradually from mid-May. As a result of several initiatives taken JK Tyre recovered fast and achieved highest Sales in Q3FY21 & Q4FY21 increasing its market presence. With high-capacity utilization, control on costs and reduced working capital, special focus on customer outreach and premium products offering, profitability improved significantly.  Similarly, JK Tyre subsidiaries - Cavendish Industries and JK Tornel also added to substantial overall improvement in the profitability of the Company.”

Dr. Singhania further said, “JK TYRE is fully geared to face challenges emanating from rising raw material prices and prevailing lockdowns under second wave of novel virus.”  

He further commented, “Despite these headwinds, the Company expects to continue capturing opportunities that are arising in this new environment in India and abroad.”

Nickelodeon Re-Imagines The Epic Game Of Ludo With A Little Help From Google

Of all the games we have grown up playing, Ludo is a crowd favorite. It spans across all age groups, feels more than a game where your friends can turn foes before at a single roll of a die. Despite the gamut of board games, the sheer joy of strategizing to win Ludo remains unmatched. The lockdown saw a resurgence of Ludo as we cocooned ourselves indoors and went virtual to make our pegs win. And now, it’s time for an upgrade. Bringing back the nostalgia, Nickelodeon, the pioneering kids’ brand and category leader for 7 consecutive years, in a collaboration with Google India brings to you Nickelodeon Ludo, an innovative format to play the game hands-free with your favorite Nicktoons’ pegs and their voice. Sounds amazing right?

Nickelodeon and Google have collaborated to ride on the burgeoning fondness and popularity of Nicktoons that have captivated young minds for years and an attempt to redefine the craze for Ludo through the kid’s most favourite characters thus making the game more fun to play. The game will enable the users to play just with their voice from the convenience of a device. Adding a tinge of spunk to the classic game from google, for the first time ever you'll be able to play Nickelodeon with a little voice help from Google. The game will have four houses with only two pegs each, with faces of your favorite Nicktoons on the pegs in each house and all you have to do is say ‘Ok Google, talk to Nickelodeon Ludo’. While teams with Green and Red colors will be renamed as Motu- Patlu, and Rudra Rangeela, that of Blue and Yellow will be re-named as Shiva- Reva, and Happy- Pinaki, respectively. 

Keeping in with the fervor, the game will be voiced over by your favourite Nicktoons. Upon launch, Nickelodeon Ludo will treat its users to a refreshing look and feel with its modern, yet minimalistic design as compared to the classic board. The game can be played hands free by a single player or 4 friends together present at the same place. The two pegs format instead of four, will give you a chance to reconnect with your friends, bond and help you unwind if you are looking out for a quick game! Nickelodeon Ludo will be available in English language and be open for all users.

Speaking on the initiative, Sonali Bhattacharya Head Marketing Kids TV Network at Viacom18 said “With a perpetual spirit to innovate we at Nickelodeon have always endeavored to engage with our young viewers by providing them unique and immersive experiences through multiple touchpoints that are unparalleled. This association with Google is yet another step towards collaborating with like-minded partners and creating a platform to experience different aspects of the media & entertainment ecosystem thus transporting them to the world of fun with their favourite Nicktoons.”

To proliferate the initiative further, the campaign will leave no stone unturned in reaching out to kids through all possible screens i.e. YouTube, on-air and digital mediums of the brand. From high rotation on air promotions on the Nickelodeon franchise channels and a robust digital plan across the Nickelodeon franchise social media and gaming platforms. The channel has also devised expansive influencer promotion and digital engagement through an array of exciting activities to keep them intrigued and drive their attention to Nickelodeon Ludo.

So, no more downloads, no more installation, with just their voice, users can play the game by just saying "Ok Google, talk to Nickelodeon Ludo”. This is hands down a perfect reason for the fans to try this game! 

About Nickelodeon:

Nickelodeon India has established itself as a thought leader by being the No 1 channel in the kids’ category with a household availability in about 120+ million households. The franchise boasts of a bouquet of channels like Nick, Sonic, Nick Jr and Nick HD+ catering to kids across all age groups from tots to teens. The franchise today has the largest original content library in the country with over 500+ hours of content and plans to add over 200 hours this year. The franchise is a home to the most legendary iconic characters like Motu Patlu, Rudra, Golmaal Jr, Pakdam Pakdai and Shiva on Nick and Sonic; and Dora The Explorer, Paw patrol , Peppa pig on Nick Jr and marquee international properties like Kung-fu-panda, Avatar, Penguins of Madagascar etc on Nick HD+. The channel continues to engage and entertain kids across India through large scale experiential formats, consumer product range and with digital and online presence.

Happiest Minds Partners With Coca Cola Bottling Company United In Their Robotic Automation Journey

Happiest Minds Technologies Limited (NSE: HAPPSTMNDS), a ‘Born Digital. Born Agile’, digital transformation and IT solutions company announced, it has successfully executed a digital transformation project for  Coca Cola Bottling Company United for streamlining its order management with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate.

Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United) has a long history of supplying Coca-Cola products directly to retailers and restaurants. But when Coca-Cola introduced its new Freestyle vending machine, Coca-Cola United, a privately owned company that isn’t owned by Coca-Cola, was challenged to streamline its order and invoicing procedures. It rose to the occasion quickly, using Microsoft Power Automate robotic process automation (RPA). Coca-Cola United is advancing the strategic Freestyle initiative with process automation that matches the individuality and innovation that the product represents.

“While building this solution, we resurrected high-value strategic projects that we couldn’t tackle before because of the constraints of legacy apps. We feel empowered to take advantage of any future opportunities that the business provides us.” Says Bob Means: Director of Business Solutions

Helping every customer with Power Automate RPA

The company faced two challenges as it explored solutions.                                

“It was too costly to create APIs for our legacy applications like SAP and others, and we also had to navigate a third-party website,” explains Allan McDaniel, Manager of Development for BI and Master Data at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United. “We used Power Automate RPA bots to fill these gaps and automate the process.”

Desktop flows in Power Automate automates repetitive processes in Windows and web applications—a perfect fit for high-volume but mundane data entry and transfer. Coca-Cola Bottling Company United collaborated with Happiest Minds to create a master automated service agent they’ve dubbed “Asa,” which consists of several bots. Built on Microsoft Azure and Microsoft Power Platform, “Asa” uses Azure Key Vault to help secure and control passwords and other sensitive data, and it relies on Azure DevOps for continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD).

The new, simplified process frees the dedicated CRM agent, allowing orders from all channels, such as inbound and outbound call center agents, field service sales representatives at customer sites, and via a customer self-service portal.

“We avoided having to hire 10 full-time employees. Better still, the existing CRM agent is now free to work on other projects.” - Allan McDaniel, Manager of Development for BI and Master Data, Coca-Cola Bottling Company United.

“Our team collaborated well, and the synergies led to the deployment of one of a kind solution, leading to realization of business benefits for our customers. We at Happiest Minds work as a partner with each of our customers in their digital journey and deliver solutions tailormade to the requirement of the respective customers.”  - Huzefa Saifee, Chief Technology Officer, Digital Business Services, Happiest Minds.

Using Power Virtual Agents,  Happiest Minds helped the company developed a bot that served as an intelligent front end to the new solution. Power Automate was used to drive the entire process. And by interoperating with other Azure services, such as Azure Key Vault, the system was able to securely access both internal and external systems and orchestrate the entire order process, from purchase order to reconciliation, in SAP.

Kaylan Cannon, Customer Service Manager, Coca-Cola Bottling Company United, is enthusiastic. “We are very excited about this solution,” she says. “It will dramatically reduce labor costs, minimize the various points of error in our current solution, and will allow us to rapidly expand the local Freestyle campaign to better support our customers.”

“It has been a very innovative and productive journey for us to work with Coca Cola Bottling Company United to automate their order management with RPA. Happiest Minds always strives to use technology as a tool to enable businesses to accelerate adaption of digital technologies and help modernize and transform their current environment.” – Rajiv Shah, Chief Executive Officer, Digital Business Services, Happiest Minds.

About Happiest Minds Technologies:

Happiest Minds Technologies Limited (NSE: HAPPSTMNDS), a Mindful IT Company, enables digital transformation for enterprises and technology providers by delivering seamless customer experiences, business efficiency and actionable insights. We do this by leveraging a spectrum of disruptive technologies such as: artificial intelligence, blockchain, cloud, digital process automation, internet of things, robotics/drones, security, virtual/augmented reality, etc. Positioned as ‘Born Digital . Born Agile’, our capabilities span digital solutions, infrastructure, product engineering and security. We deliver these services across industry sectors such as automotive, BFSI, consumer packaged goods, e-commerce, edutech, engineering R&D, hi-tech, manufacturing, retail and travel/transportation/hospitality.

A Great Place to Work-Certified™ Company, Happiest Minds is headquartered in Bangalore, India with operations in the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia and Middle East.

About Coca Cola Bottling Company United

Founded in 1902 and headquartered in Birmingham, Alabama, Coca Cola Bottling Company United is the third largest bottler of Coca-Cola products in the United States.  Our 10,000 associates located across the southeast are engaged in the production, marketing, sales and distribution of some of the world’s most refreshing and recognized beverages.

Coca-Cola UNITED is one of the largest bottlers and distributors of Coca-Cola products in the United States. It has also been one of the fastest growing. While the company has been around for almost 120 years, most of its growth has occurred within the span of just four years. Microsoft Power Platform has turned out to be a key tool in helping Coca-Cola UNITED navigate this amazing growth.

Wastewater Management Is A Matter Of Survival For Textile Industry In India: Secretary, Ministry Of Textiles

* A national multi-stakeholder consultation organized by The ReFashion Hub and Centre for Responsible Business to encourage wastewater reuse and water conservation in the textile industry

The ReFashion Hub is a collective that aims to raise awareness and drive conversation about water stewardship in India’s textile industry for long term positive climate impact. As a part of this initiative, a national level multi-stakeholder consultation was organized by Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) with support from Alliance For Water Stewardship and Water Management Forum (under Institute of Engineers India), on 18 May 2021, to build consensus on establishing wastewater as a resource and dealing with it in a sustainable way by the textile industry.

Shri Upendra Prasad Singh, Secretary, Ministry of Textiles delivered the keynote address and subject matter experts such as Mr. Rijit Sengupta, CEO, CRB, Er. Narendra Singh, President, Institution of Engineers of India, Dr K Ramesh, Senior Manager - Process Engineering/R&D, Tamil Nadu Water Investment Company, Chetan Kumar Sangole, Head, Sustainability Desk, Mahratta Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture, Ankur Khanna (Owner, Khanna Industries), Dinesh Chopra (Member, Indian Chemicals Council and Ex-Director, Honeywell) and Archana Datta, National Coordinator, for India, Switch Asia - RPAC, United Nations Environment Program, discussed various aspects of wastewater reuse, policy interventions and incentives as panelists of the workshop.

During the virtual conference, industry leaders, textile industry bodies, government and development agencies addressed various aspects of wastewater reuse, holistic perspective of wastewater as a resource, policy recommendations, scheme incentives, and built a collaborative approach towards long-term and sustained action on waste management by the textile industry in India. 

Assuring his support to the campaign, Shri Upendra Prasad Singh, Secretary, Minister of Textiles, said, “Wastewater management is critical for survival of the textile industry in India and not a subject of charity. It is the responsibility of all stakeholders including the government, textile bodies and industries to invest in green technologies that conserve water.” Underlining the need for such initiatives he further said “There is enough knowledge on the supply side of water and wastewater management but not on the demand side. Efficient water and wastewater management can help suppliers/buyers engage brands/consumers.” Further, he suggested ‘condition assessment of clusters’ to generate baseline about need for water and wastewater management in textile and other high water-use clusters. Finally, he opined there is not as much awareness and information about water footprint of industries as is there on carbon/energy footprint and hence there is a need to raise awareness and knowledge about its importance.

A 2019 World Resources Institute (WRI) report ranked India as the 13th most water stressed country globally. The Indian textile industry alone uses 425,000,000 gallons of water daily and approximately 500 gallons of water are used in the production of just one pair of jeans[1]. Globally, by 2050, the textile industry is expected to double its water contamination, making it the second-largest polluting industry on earth. One of the major causes of concern is the high usage of water and the excessive water pollution that is caused especially in dyeing and processing. Fatal contamination of water sources has led to a gamut of regulations for the treatment and discharge of wastewater. Set up of common effluent treatment plants (CETPs) and, in some cases, ZLD systems has become a norm in India.

Mr. Rijit Sengupta, CEO, CRB said, “Centre for Responsible Business has the mandate to promote sustainability, sustainable businesses and also oversee how businesses integrate sustainability in their core operations. In a country like India, when we talk about sustainability there is a need to strike a balance between the three aspects - economic, social and environmental, which involves trade-offs and compromises. In case of water, this implies striking the balance between – water as a key industrial input, societal need for equitable access to water and ensuring conservation of water as a resource. In our quest to find solutions to help strike this balance, CRB advocates for applying the principles of circular economy/resource efficiency in industrial/sectoral strategies to enable water use efficiency. Finally, the process of finding solutions is also critical and needs to be co-designed locally based on multi-stakeholder collaboration.”

During the multi-stakeholder consultation, it was discussed that there is a need to raise awareness on water stewardship, existing incentives and policies that aim to address the issue of water conservation in the textile industry. Experts also urged the industry to adapt sustainable business practices and ensure that they look at wastewater as a resource. It was highlighted that the model used in Haridwar and Sarai which is hybrid annuity model-based sewage treatment plant has been successful and the textile industry can apply learnings from there for wastewater treatment. A key point for consideration was that current and updated data will underpin any intervention that is planned. Moreover, the Ministry of Textiles can facilitate awareness programs and enable cross location learnings to develop a sustainable roadmap for the sector in consultation and collaboration with other ministries.

There is a need to enable the textile processing industry for process optimization by adopting best clean techniques, incentives for automation and up-gradation of machinery and effective mechanisms to reuse water. Industries should be apprised of clear policies and how it can provide cost benefits. Cross sectoral learnings are essential to track technological developments in other sectors and customize those for the textile industry to ensure best possible and sustainable wastewater treatment. The industry and governments at various levels are collaborating on solutions to address this crisis. Moreover, consumers are being more conscious of sustainable production and consumption. It is evident that a long term, collaborative approach towards better water management in the sector is required.

About The Refashion Hub:

The ReFashion Hub is a collective working to bring together multiple stakeholders invested in wastewater reuse and management in the textile industry with long term positive climate impact. The stakeholders include fashion businesses, textile bodies, industry leaders, young designers, artisans and consumers. The Fashion Hub will collectivise and engage stakeholders in 4 states - Maharashtra, Gujarat, Punjab and Karnataka to raise awareness and drive conversations about water usage and wastewater generated by the fashion industry, call for commitment from textile bodies and fashion businesses to reduce the fashion water footprint and for treatment of textile wastewater and engage with government departments on reuse or management of textile wastewater.

About Centre for Responsible Business:

Centre for Responsible Business (CRB) was established in 2011 as a think-tank to pursue its vision, ‘businesses integrate sustainability into their core business practices’. Given that sustainability is a multi-dimensional problem especially in the context of India and other emerging economies, CRB has adopted a model of engaging multiple stakeholders to develop action plans for promoting sustainable/responsible business, across various sectors in India.