The 10 Most Prominent Leaders in Cloud Computing Vol II by Mirror Review

www.mirrorreview.com October 2018 THE

MOST

in Cloud Computing 2018

Spirituality & Workplace

Age of Machines Fusion Robot: the Latest Revolution In The Field Of Collaborative Robots

VOL -I I

Beneﬁts of Spiritual Practices For Successful Professional Life

Co-founder & CEO

OpenBOM

Imparting Simpliﬁcation In Modern Technological And Business World

EDITOR’S LETTER Cloud computing is essential for the future of businesses Today, businesses are realizing the true potential of cloud computing. It has changed more than just how applications are bought, where they run, and how data is stored. In the coming years, cloud’s capability to store and analyze data will help to safeguard and manage smart cities. Driven by digital transformation, we will see numerous enterprises move to the cloud, which means challenges related to cloud will increase as well. In view of the future challenges and advancements in cloud, we, the team of Mirror Review welcomes nd you to the 2 edition of our magazine, “The 10 Most Prominent Leaders in Cloud Computing, 2018”, which covers leading entrepreneurs utilizing cloud technology for the betterment of their clients. On the cover, we have the privilege of featuring Oleg Shilovitsky, the Co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM. Building software products for data management, engineering, and manufacturing for the last 25 years, Oleg is on the mission to bring new cloud-enabled innovation to manufacturing companies. Going ahead, we have covered revolutionary cloud solutions by leading personalities, including Himanshu Varshney (Co-founder and CEO of HashedIn), Aditya Garg (Founder and CEO of Centilytics), Dimuth Samaranayaka (Founder and CEO of Ascension IT PTY LTD), Matt Cain (President and CEO of Couchbase), Gaurang Sudra (Founder of FluidX Creations), Shannon Hulbert (CEO of Opus Interactive), Stephen Hendry (CEO of ARTHA INFOTAMA), and Ian Finlay (CEO of Abiquo). From the CXO standpoint, we have Alan Neilson (Founder and CEO of VerseOne Group Ltd). The follower of customer-first approach, Alan gives an overview of digital transformation in the age of cloud computing. In our comprehensive magazine, we always delight our readers with out-of-the-box articles. This time, we have featured articles on the benefits of spiritual practices for a successful professional life and the latest revolution in the field of collaborative robots. We hope you like our magazine filled with best-in-class cloud solutions. Happy reading!

Mayur Shewale Assistant Editor

CREDIT PAGE Publisher : Archana Ghule Editor-in-Chief : Vikram Suryawanshi Managing Editor : Anuja Mulmule Assistant Editor : Mayur Shewale Contributory Writers : Bansidhar Tigga Gopal Khandelwal Project Managers : Anand Ghodke Jacob Eddy Anagha Acharya Rohan Yadav Art Director : Vinod Alhat Visualizer : Mark Davis Graphic Designers : Poonam Magdum Sumit Bonage Head of Distribution & Production : Aakash Mahajan Head of Operations : Robert Smith Research Analysts : Jacob Eddy Maria Smith David Thomas Advertising : James Adams

Mirror Review Media & Tech C-506, Wisteriaa Fortune, Opp-Silver Spoon Hotel, Laxmi Chowk Rd, Bhagwan Nagar, Wakad, PimpriChinchwad, Maharashtra- 411057

+1 (850) 564-8517 info@mirrorreview.com www.mirrorreview.com

tor

OLEG SHILOVITSKY

Imparting Simplication In Modern Technological And Business World Expert’s Insights

Digital Transformation Alan Neilson

Founder & CEO | VerseOne Group

Aditya Garg: Assisting Clients to Manage, Secure, and Optimize Their Cloud Infrastructure

Dimuth Samaranayaka:

Simplifying Adoption Of Public And Private Cloud Infrastructure

Gaurang Sudra: Offering Cost-Effective Creative Web And Cloud Solutions For Small And MediumEnterprises

Himanshu Varshney: Driving Digital Transformation With Intelligent SaaS

Ian Finlay: Enabling Clients To Create Superior Cloud Services With Abiquo

Matt Cain: Bringing Enhanced Cloud Solutions With Transparent Work Culture

Shannon Hulbert: Building Custom IT Solutions Hosted On High-Performance Infrastructure Through Opus Interactive

Stephen Hendry:

Offering Efcient And Productive Cloud Solutions To Clients With ARTHA IT

Articles 20

Age of Machines Fusion Robot: the Latest Revolution In The Field Of Collaborative Robots

Spirituality & Workplace Benets of Spiritual Practices For Successful Professional Life

STUNNING INSIDE AND OUT XPS 13

www.dell.com/en-us

COVER STORY

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

’’

OLEG SHILOVITSKY Imparting Simpliﬁcation In Modern Technological And Business World

I’m passionate about using technologies and building businesses that transform the way people work in engineering, manufacturing and enterprise.

Oleg Shilovitsky

Co-founder & CEO

’

’’

COVER STORY

ight after its emergence, Cloud Computing enabled a new approach in solving of IT setbacks and complexities. Instead of using local server or a personal computer, Cloud technology utilizes a network of remote servers hosted on the Internet to store, manage, and process data. More speciﬁcally, this “network” is the key element responsible for transforming and shifting the IT paradigm. To top it all, continuous and enhanced connectivity and virtualization combined with sharing of computing power, storage, and other resources facilitated new user experience and business models in the otherwise conventional IT ecosystem. Therefore, meriting these Cloud Computing based changes, data management, processing, and analytics has created new value by potentially uplifting the overall scenario of IT business for good. Working on these similar lines, Oleg Shilovitsky, the Co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM took upon the mission to bring new cloud enabled innovation to manufacturing companies. The Co-founder and CEO of OpenBOM has been building software products for data management, engineering, and manufacturing for the last 25 years. Throughout his professional career, he has developed PDM & PLM software and worked for companies such as Dassault Systems and Autodesk. Moreover, it was his true passion and

Our mission is to deliver cloud multi-tenant BOM and inventory management technology to meet the demands of modern manufacturing and digital habits.

fascination towards manufacturing industry and new technologies along with previous experiences of working with startups as well as large companies that led him to launch OpenBOM. Not only this, Oleg is also an accomplished author of Beyond PLM, a leading source of information and commentary about engineering and manufacturing software for the last 10 years. He also serves as a consultant and advisor to a number of startups and industrial companies. Trip down the Memory Lane Oleg was born in Soviet Union where he received academic schooling and started his professional experience in the early 1990s. It was his parents and family that truly helped him to form his belief that a combination of education and hard work can help to achieve everything one wants. The Co-founder & CEO of OpenBOM is a trained construction engineer with specialization in math, computers and CAD systems. During his academia and first professional experience, Oleg was fortunate to get exposed to some CAD technologies. Later, after immigrating to Israel in 1990s, he continued to work in the software engineering industry, which inspired and influenced him about the practical applications and visible results. This was the reflective platform where one can see a car, an aeroplane, a refrigerator, and a building right from its process of creation to actually becoming the refined products. Oleg was also fortunate as an engineer and a developer to get exposed to the end users and customers. Even today, many potential technologies are lost because people who created them cannot find a way to bring them to the end users. This was a crucial signpost that primarily helped Oleg to understand customer requirements and based on which he employed those insights to bridge the gaps between technologies and customers through his ventures. Seeds of Innovation Begins with Identification of Existing Gaps & Technological Fascination Oleg, being an intricate part of the software industry,

THE

’ MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

noticed an untapped problem, which was unsolved for a long time. Indisputably, it is known that Bills of Materials (BOM) is the lifeblood of every product development and manufacturing business environment, which is highly distributed. Furthermore, engineers, manufacturing facilities, contractors, suppliers, and customers are located everywhere. At the same time, one of the most popular tools is Excel, which creates many problems such as errors, manual BOM creation, bad visualization, inability to create rollups and calculations, inability to centralize data about BOMs, and impossibility to track history and revisions. This is only a short list of problems that manufacturing companies experience when working with BOM using Excel and old legacy tools. On top of this, communication between engineers, contractors, suppliers, customers, production is a big challenge. Emails with Excel attachments and separate databases and siloed information are not a good way to solve a problem of BOM management for modern manufacturing. Therefore, companies are looking for uniﬁed access to real-time information, sourcing, and production. The demand of every manufacturing company for accurate and up to date BOM, ease of BOM creation, and synchronizing of BOMs with engineering tools (eg. CAD systems). Understanding the depth of Cloud Computing along with its multiple advantages, Oleg was waiting for the right time and right place to explore and leverage this technology for simplifying the issues faced by hardware startups, manufacturing, and supply chain sectors related to BOM. OpenBOM: A Unique Online Tool to Create & Manage BOM & Part Catalogs Established in 2015, OpenBOM offers platform and applications for manufacturing companies to help them to manage BOM, part catalogs and other related data about product, engineering and manufacturing processes. OpenBOM is located in Boston, MA while its engineering team is widely distributed from California to Eastern Europe. Fascinatingly, simplicity and ease of use combined with a real-time collaboration and simultaneous

Cloud computing is the power of the network, connecting customers, businesses, data and computing resources to build a future.

editing paradigm (similar paradigm was pioneered by Google Docs and used by many cloud products these days) creates a unique user experience. Cloud technology allows simplified user adoption where it’s advanced data management and team collaboration features allows instant data sharing between teams located around the globe keeping everyone literally “on the same BOM” all in less than 15 mins. Presently, OpenBOM has thousands of users and customers worldwide. The leading BOM solutions provider’s expert development team uses latest agile product development methods and furnishes timely versions of OpenBOM with customer driven improvements, new features and capabilities, and bug fixes every month. They also offer the most responsive customer support available via product embedded tools and 24/7 online support. Rationalities for Becoming the Obvious Choice of Engineers and Manufacturers OpenBOM contains following mentioned features that make users’ BOM workflow easy. Likewise, anyone who needs to create a BOM from the smallest oneperson operation to a large enterprise with hundreds of members can find the right solution at OpenBOM. Ÿ

OpenBOM is easier to use than any PDM, PLM or ERP system and requires no special skills.

Having great partnerships with leading manufacturing software vendors, the Cloud-enabled platform is integrated with CAD, PLM and ERP systems.

Individuals & companies while working on a BOM in real-time with their respective teams can experience instant updates.

Using OpenBOM, it is now possible to connect complete users’ data from different sources in a single BOM.

Features such as thumbnail images of part catalogs and assemblies in the BOM can be generated.

All changes and revisions to users’s BOM are stored in a history log if needed.

Access to sharing of user data is allowed only after permission, and

Management of standard and custom parts for products in centralized Part Catalogs can be done by easily maintaining “quantity on hand” for each part in the catalogs.

Taking the World One BOM at a Time OpenBOM is at a very interesting period. Oleg and his expert team have created a technological foundation and are now focusing on adoption of their advanced tools. In future, the team of OpenBOM plans to take over the world “one BOM at the time”. They wish to develop a specialized, one-of-a-kind and customized triage for instance as Facebook is for photos, GitHub is for Software, similarly OpenBOM will become for BOM and part catalogs. Commenting on the role of Cloud-enabled OpenBOM and its assistance in the manufacturing companies, the Cofounder and CEO asserts, “In my view, OpenBOM will play a signiﬁcant role in helping manufacturing companies to work in a very challenging modern manufacturing environment by connecting everyone in a network and providing access to reliable truthful information including analytic and data intelligence.”

Subscription Form If you wish to subscribe for Mirror Review Magazine, kindly ďŹ ll out the below form and email/courier along with a cross check amounting USD $200 annual subscription including courier charges in the favor of Mirror Review Media & Technology.

Global Subscription Full Name: Designation: Company: Mailing Address: City:

Zip:

State:

Country:

Contact Details: Mobile No.:

OfďŹ ce No.:

Email ID: I enclosed a check/draft payable to Mirror Review Magazine: Check/Draft No.:

C-506, Wisteriaa Fortune, Opp-Silver Spoon Hotel, Laxmi Chowk Rd, Bhagwan Nagar, Wakad, PimpriChinchwad, Maharashtra- 411057

+1 (850) 564-8517 info@mirrorreview.com www.mirrorreview.com

The 10 Most Prominent Leaders in Computing, 2018

Leaders Name

Company Info

Aditya Garg, CEO & Founder Centilytics www.centilytics.com

Centilytics is an intelligent cloud management platform which helps organizations on public cloud to manage, secure and optimize their cloud infrastructure.

Dimuth Samaranayaka, Founder & CEO Ascension IT www.ascensionit.com.au

Established in 2014, Ascension IT PTY LTD is a Brisbane-based cloud service provider, which has extensively worked in the market to develop a suite of applications intended to deliver value and tackle broad range of business challenges.

Gaurang Sudra, Founder & CEO FluidX Creations www.ďŹ&#x201A;uidxcreations.com

FluidX Creations offers cost-effective creative web and cloud solutions for small and medium enterprises.

Himanshu Varshney, Co-founder & CEO HashedIn Technologies www.hashedin.com

HashedIn is a software development company that builds Intelligent SaaS (iSaaS) products with expertise in Analytics, Machine Learning, and Integrations, built upon learning from a decadal experience of launching 150+ products so far.

Ian Finlay, CEO Abiquo Europe www.abiquo.com

Founded in 2006 with headquarters in London and ofďŹ ces in Europe, Abiquo is a leading developer of Hybrid Cloud management solutions.

Matt Cain, Precident & CEO CouchBase www.couchbase.com

California-based Couchbase is disrupting the $40B database market with its data platform that revolutionizes digital innovation.

Oleg Shilovitsky, Co-founder & CEO OpenBOM www.openbom.com

Established in 2015, OpenBOM offers platform and applications for manufacturing companies to help them to manage BOM, part catalogs and other related data about product, engineering and manufacturing processes.

Shannon Hulbert, CEO Opus Interactive www.opusinteractive.com

Opus Interactive is a woman-owned cloud, colocation, and IT services company based in Portland, Oregon.

Stephen Hendry, CEO Artha Infotama www.artha-it.com

ARTHA IT is one of the fast growing IT companies and a Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider and Microsoft Gold Partner with 9 Gold competencies.

Vishnu Tambi, CEO Excellon Software www.excellonsoft.com

Excellon Software is renowned for its cutting-edge yet simple-to-use sales, distribution, and service management software.

Aditya Garg:

Aditya Garg

CEO & Founder | Centilytics

loud Computing was introduced with the simple idea of eliminating the cost and effort of maintaining a physical infrastructure. This reduction of manual work is useful to drive more business efﬁciency by focusing on strategic initiatives. Since then, Cloud Computing has been a pivotal enabler of digital transformation. Today, Cloud is not just a tool to leverage business infrastructure but is being used at an optimum level to organize business goals. A recent survey by Forrester predicts that more than 50% of enterprises will be adopting applications, platforms, and services powered by Cloud in order to drive a digital revolution by the end of 2018. Witnessing this rapid increase in the adoption of multi and hybrid Clouds within leading organizations, Aditya Garg, the CEO and Founder of Centilytics started the company with the idea to build a gateway that helps such organizations connect, analyze, and manage all their Cloud infrastructure within a single pane of glass. Aditya’s Expedition to the Foundation of Centilytics Aditya is an alumnus of Stanford University with a Master’s in Computer Science with an undergraduate

Assisting Clients to Manage, Secure, and Optimize Their Cloud Infrastructure degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology. During his internship, Aditya presented an automated Cloud project to the board and got the approval to start a completely new venture around his idea and established Centilytics in January 2017. Being a 24-year-old young entrepreneur, Aditya believes in the youth power. He knows that young people with a lack of experience can be easily molded according to the company’s requirements. At Centilytics, the average age of the entire team is 24 with almost all hiring is done out of colleges. Aditya with his committed team follows a philosophy of making frequent mistakes but never repeat the same, helping them to create fool-proof solutions. Fulﬁlling Clients’ Cloud Demands with Centilytics’ Productive Cloud Solutions Centilytics is an intelligent Cloud management platform which helps organizations on Public Cloud to manage, secure and optimize their Cloud infrastructure. Being a SaaS-based Cloud solutions provider, the leading Cloud solutions provider delivers 5 major solutions, including Cloud Visibility, Governance & Reporting, Optimization & Resource Allocation, Security & Health, and Cloud

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

Automation. Cloud visibility enables clients to know the Cloud cost, utilization, and events in a simple 5 click fashion. Centilytics Cloud Optimization and Allocation allows customers to decentralize cost by different cost centers and optimize them by over 40%. Moreover, its Health & Security Inspector helps with infrastructure performance and compliances like PCI, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001 etc. through an automated console. In addition, Centilytics Governance & Reporting removes any manhours spent in creating reports or monitoring clients’ infrastructures. Furthermore, Cloud Automation enhances the business efficiency by allowing workload scheduling, lifecycle management, automated backups etc., which in turn reduces human effort on operational activities. Achieving Success Peaks with Inspiration from Mentors Aditya worked as an intern in one of the largest Cloud MSPs. While pursuing his internship, he found that most of the engineers were putting a lot of manual effort in managing their client’s infrastructure. To eliminate time consumption, Aditya developed a project to automate these manual tasks. During his project work, Prateek Garg and Dr. Madan Mohan helped Aditya. Prateek Garg has been in the IT industry for a significant time and understands the cloud ecosystem inside out. Likewise, Dr. Madan Mohan’s experience of teaching in IIM, Bangalore and his expertise in marketing has helped Aditya to build an effective marketing strategy for Centilytics. Enhancing Client’s Cloud Experience with Future Proof Solutions Aditya with Centilytics team is putting extraordinary efforts in the clients’ IT infrastructures, which reduces redundancy wherever possible and increases business efficiency. According to him, the future is to elevate clients’ Cloud experience by delivering smart technology on the Cloud. Furthermore, Centilytics is rolling out a really strong go-tomarket driving value at the heart of the sell. With its dedicated team, the US-based company has put together a dedicated customer adoption team, focused on showcasing value to every individual customer and makes Cloud costeffective, secure, and easy to manage for every client. Having a high-resolution lens that provides a complete and granular visibility into clients’ ever-changing cost and usage of the Cloud is the cornerstone of making cost-efficient decisions and knowing how to control the Cloud costs becomes a breeze when the right data comes together in a

single dashboard. Centilytics’ Cloud management platform helps organizations using public Clouds to manage, secure, and optimize their entire Cloud system under one roof. It builds a meaningful picture of all clients’ Cloud expenses and breaks down the complex Cloud billing into actionable insights. Aditya’s Dynamic Advice for Young Entrepreneurs While considering the huge landscape of Cloud Computing, Aditya advises young entrepreneurs that they should not be scared by the size of Cloud industry. Today, most of the companies are working in Cloud Computing; however, an entrepreneur needs to bring better products to the market. While focusing on the actual idea, he should give equal or more attention to the working team. Entrepreneurship is all about motivation and focus, and having a team that keeps each other motivated, and helps employees stay focused. These are the most important values for an early stage startup.

We help you save time and money with our intelligent cloud management

Dimuth Samaranayaka:

Dimuth Samaranayaka Founder & CEO | Ascension IT

stablished in 2014, Ascension IT PTY LTD is a Brisbane-based cloud service provider, which has extensively worked in the market to develop a suite of applications intended to deliver value and tackle broad range of business challenges. By moving ahead with time, the leading cloud service provider company has updated its offerings to meet the increasing demands of the cloud industry. Ascension IT’s efforts into cloud computing have resulted in creating a Platform as a Service (PaaS) product called Cloudshed. It is a cloud orchestration and deployment tool designed to enable organizations adopt public and private cloud infrastructure with minimal complexity.

The Founder and CEO of Ascension IT PTY LTD, Dimuth Samaranayaka, is a multi-talented technology leader who runs his own consultancy practice with Ascension IT and has been engaged as a Consulting CTO/Advisor by a number of startups and mature organizations seeking to take advantage of emerging technologies. Dimuth strives to develop technology solutions that meet the rapidly changing business environment. In a special interview with Mirror Review, Dimuth chats about his personal journey, the birth of Ascension IT, company’s future plans, and the challenges he faced while leading the Brisbane-based company.

Simplifying Adoption Of Public And Private Cloud Infrastructure From its introduction to dominance, how far has cloud computing technology changed the conventional IT scenario? I would say cloud computing technology has given rise to much of the acceleration of application growth over the last 3-4 years. It definitely has fueled the ability for many startups to run and operate cost effectively. In addition, Software as a Service (SaaS) has provided many businesses with solutions that have only been limited to blue-chip companies previously. The new wave of digital transformations is being enabled with cloud computing capabilities. Many organizations are adopting a ’cloud first’ to their conventional IT spending and procurement plans. There are some downsides too, many organizations lack the ability to cost solutions, initial adoptions of cloud computing have increased costs which could potentially overrun budgetary numbers. Increased adoption of cloud computing solutions with poor security controls makes organizations vulnerable to cyber-attacks. The ability to purchase software as a SaaS model is also giving rise to increased ’Shadow IT’ capabilities that are difficult to control and sustain for internal IT teams. What type of solutions and services does Ascension IT offer? Elaborate its highlighting features. The spaces that Ascension IT offers has many names; PaaS and Cloud Management Platforms are a few of them. Our

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

main advantage is the ability for any organizations regardless of their size to adopt cloud computing with no vendor lock-in and they have freedom of choice to move between cloud computing vendors such as Amazon, Google Cloud, and Azure seamlessly. We also provide hybrid computing capabilities that offer cloud computing features like, cloud automation, cloud workﬂow, and cloud spend analytics. Every business has different challenges like the adoption of cloud computing, integration points, legacy software challenges, licensing challenges, size of systems and system performance requirements etc. Our expertise is the ability to customize a solution that achieves these outcomes, which are commercially viable and have ﬁxed cost exposures. What attracted you to start a venture in this everexpanding technological industry? Who mentored and guided you during your initial career days? The concept of PaaS solution started just after the Global Financial Crisis (2008/09). Taking a step back, we noticed the teaching content being delivered by many educational institutes from IT and found that some of these universities were diverting the programs to multi-media, gaming development, and web application development, where traditional IT practices about management and skills required to manage complex ERP or Enterprise needs were being missed. Therefore, we started the bold venture to develop a PaaS solution to standardize the IT practices and simply the journey. This is how Ascension IT was formed in 2015 and our offering of Cloudshed was launched. Since then we have been expanding the platform to offer ’as a service’ capabilities. From a mentoring point of view, we found that we were on a journey that no one really understood or have been through before. As a result, things such as how to commercialize the software, develop differentiator capabilities to Amazon, Azure and Google including VMware’s solutions was more a learning process and many lessons were learned. The mentoring we used to seek was more for helping us understand how to break the market so that traditional bluechip enterprises would bet on our solution and that was the key to our success. We are still learning to deal with this journey on daily basis by consulting with our customers. Our readers would like to know about your faiths, beliefs, and philosophy for life and success. I have some fundamental beliefs and I believe that hard work always pays off; being patient and humble helps win customers. Understanding customers and helping them grow through both sales and sustained growth will help both companies establish partnership for future success. I always say, take pride in the work you do, celebrate success and learn from failures.

The future is unclear, the direction of IT being crafted by the likes of Amazon, Azure, and Google can change how we operate and the robotic processes would also change the nature of workforce in the future. As an individual, it is your responsibility to develop your own career path. I have found that continuous learning of both business and technology skills is highly invaluable. Many years ago, I read an article that said on an average, individuals will change career three times in their lifetime and I think that is so well predicted. To succeed in this era, one has to play more than a single role. To elaborate, you need to understand technology extremely well and at the same time; you also need to be able to understand customers’ perception. Today, being commercial minded is must to close out the opportunities. I believe that success can be measured in many ways; we offered our solutions to a not-for-profit organization for free, as they were doing extraordinary things for the society, and that felt so satisfying. What are your future plans for the company? What role will Ascension IT play in the coming future? The IT landscape is altering rapidly as traditional models are changing and it is causing traditional service providers to revisit their offerings to the market. Our focus to provide a solution that has no vendor lock-in and provides customers the flexibility of moving between cloud platforms seamlessly, have not changed. Our platform is an enabler, when understood and used as designed, will also assist traditional IT companies to transform their market offerings and be more competitive in the marketplace. Our focus will remain the same, which is to expand the ’as-a-service’ capabilities to offer complementing solutions for cloud computing options currently available in the market. What would you suggest to an aspiring entrepreneur willing to enter in this industry? Embarking the startup journey is difficult; there is no prescribed ’playbook’ for success. If you believe, your idea is good and has value, back yourself and build up till the startup accelerators exist, while the competition is immense and sharing your idea is a risky business. If you start something to be sure, know what success looks like and drive towards it. The good things in life are too difficult to achieve, self-belief and hard work will always bring success.

By offering our cloud solutions, we support our customers to rise with us. 19

Age of Machines

Fusio

The Latest R of Colla

ollaborative robots, in short cobots are coming in the demand across the globe. According to World Robotics Report 2017, there was a 16% increase i.e. 294,312 units in robot sales in 2016, making it a new peak for the fourth year in a row. The cobot market is now estimated to touch the $95 billion mark by 2024. The report states that Collaborative robots, IoT and Machine Learning/AI will lead robotics in the coming years. Collaborative robotics have been receiving continued mainstream media coverage, therefore, bringing this new robotics area to a wider public audience. In every environment, robots are clearly on the rise because the ability of machines to work as well as coordinate with humans accurately and safely is fueling the demand for collaborative robots. The conventional collaborative robots are lacking additional capabilities due to improper utilization of sensors and rigidity while performing industrial operations. A Robotics team led by Yamen Saraiji from Keio

University, Japan, has developed a new kind of collaborative robot thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s designed to remotely inhabit the body of someone else in order to assist them with manipulation tasks. It is called the Full Body Surrogacy for Collaborative Communication: Fusion Robot. The Fusion has a pair of robotic arms that can be worn like a backpack and controlled by a remote operator. The main parts of this amazing robot include a 3-Axis head with an integrated Stereo camera, a Portable Backpack with battery, and control units connected to two Anthropomorphic Arms having attachable hands. All these components are integrated with the backpack, which is wearable and a mobile robotic platform. This article deals with a revolutionary collaborative robot: the Fusion robot. Fusion consists of an operator and a surrogate that are spatially separated. The operator uses Oculus CV1virtual reality headsets, which enables him to access the surrogate body. The surrogate mounts a backpack that consists of three axes robotic head with stereo vision and binaural audio, and two anthropomorphic robotic arms

Revolution In The Field aborative Robots with removable hands. The system is mobile and allows the surrogate to freely move and walk while wearing the backpack, enabling outdoor applications.

different point of view in remote conditions when the participants are physically separated. Fusion allows sharing the same point of view for two individuals simultaneously, out of which, one person is the surrogate 1. Remote operation body and another is an operator. Operatorâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s motions are Remote operation of fusion is done by Telepresence transmitted to the two robotic arms mounted on the technology. Telepresence is a sophisticated form of surrogate body. These arms can work independently or remote-controlled robot, in which a human operator has they can be attached to the human arms for collaborative a sense of being in the place where the actual operation scenarios. Fusion realizes bodily driven communications is going on. The Telepresence system uses virtual reality and actions by embodying one person into another body. (VR) headgear and headphones that reproduce the audio- The operator can effectively communicate and video experience of the actual site. The system collaborate remotely using verbal and physical actions. incorporates Binocular machine vision, which allows a sense of depth. 2. Three levels of communications: Directed, Enforced and Induced Effective communication is a key factor in collaborative operations for sharing skills and actions of more than one Ĺ¸ Directed Actions: Direct actions utilize the body person. One can learn these skills by making a video call language based communication, which can share to the other person, but it limits the actions because it intentions through the motions and gestures of the doesn't share the point of view of the actual conditions, surrogate body itself. The actions of the surrogate which also affects the productivity of the process and body are copied by Fusion arms, which work slows it down. It is very difďŹ cult to cooperate from a independently. For instance, a surrogate person can

Age of Machines

direct Fusion’s arm to punch on someone’s face or lift a glass of water from a table. The user has total four hands while performing the direct actions.

Enforced Actions: When Direct Actions fail to communicate the required motions and postures of the surrogate body, it is possible to enforce these new postures. When the surrogate body is unable to perform a task, the enforced posture will help it to achieve new skills. In these actions, the Fusion arms are attached to the surrogate wrists by removing and replacing the robotic hands with straps. Enforced actions include physical based communication using force feedback from the remote operator to the surrogate body. Imagine a trainer enters your body to train new skills.

Induced Actions: Fusion can control the entire motion of the surrogate body by inducing new direction to the surrogate. These motions are achieved by moving surrogate hands beyond their physical reach, stimulating hand grasping effect. The surrogate doesn’t have to make any movement; induced force will be enough to guide the hands.

3. Independent control system The limbs or arms are controlled by a PC, which streams data wirelessly between the Fusion's arms and the person controlling them in VR. The PC is connected to a microcontroller, which has the posture data of the robotic arms. The robotic arms with seven joints also connect with the head. The head has two cameras, showing the live feed of surrogate to the remote operator wearing VR. Motion tracking sensors are used to track the motions of the operator. When the operator moves his head in VR, sensors track that motion and the control system move the robotic head in response. The camera head can turn left or right, tilt up and down, and pivot from side to side. The battery lasts about an hour and a half weighing in at nearly 21 pounds. There are different buttons on the Oculus Rift 22

controllers, which move three fingers of both the robotic hands simultaneously. With such distinct and useful features, the collaborative robots provide interactive two-way audio and video communication. For the people with special needs, an individual's quality of life may get impacted whenthe person is not able to perform their everyday activities. For such persons, a Fusion robot with induced actions and some modifications according to the type of disability can be of great help. The upcoming generation of robots will greatly mix the physical and the digital world together. These cobots are not meant to replace human labor; in fact, they help people achieve higher output with improved efficiency. They have the potential to ease the human life, while ensuring precision and accuracy which will enhance the quality of life.

Gaurang Sudra:

Gaurang Sudra Founder & CEO | FluidX Creations

ontinuously striving to revolutionize the way of conducting business by delivering innovative web services, Gaurang Sudra, the Founder, CEO of FluidX Creations believes that it’s very important to develop a website that’s creatively appealing and at the same time informative, catering to the needs of all types of visitors. Considering the comprehensive web and cloud solutions offered by FluidX Creations, Mirror Review interacts with Gaurang to gain complete insights of his journey towards establishing the creative web development company. Gaurang also shares interesting solutions provided by FluidX Creations. Following are the excerpts. From its introduction to dominance, how far has cloud computing technology changed the conventional IT scenario? Cloud computing has been around for approximately two decades now. Approximately 60 percent of businesses are already using cloud technology in one capacity or another, and 20 percent say they plan to implement cloud-computing solutions at some point in near future. Cloud computing has completely changed how the old traditional way the businesses worked and according to some reports, it says

Offering Cost-Effective Creative Web And Cloud Solutions For Small And Medium Enterprises that companies that invest in cloud computing & big data can increase its revenue by up to 53 percent. Cloud technology is clearly dominating as more & more businesses are investing in cloud instead of setting up their own hardware. I would say cloud computing has developed a lot since its introduction, but there’s a long way to go and we would be seeing a lot more advancement in cloud technology in the coming years. What type of solutions and services does FluidX Creations offer? Elaborate its highlighting features. FluidX Creations is a new-generation, award-winning IT Consultancy based in India, which is solely dedicated and committed to providing creative solutions. We are a small team of young professional developers and designers that are dedicated, having expertise in offering quality rich services. Fluidx Creations provides services like: Ÿ Web Application Development Ÿ Software Development Ÿ Cloud Application Development Ÿ Cloud Strategy Ÿ Cloud Implementation Ÿ Digital Marketing

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

We offer custom services based on clients’ service requirements and what is well suited for them. As our target clients are small to medium size enterprises, we consult them to understand how getting digital can grow their businesses. A good website design needs to be visually appealing, navigation friendly, highly content rich, and search engine optimized in order to attract and retain visitors. We ensure your website works for your business because mere presence is no presence on the web; users should actually know your existence, visit your website, and appreciate you, which will translate to leads or sales for the growth of your company. A website is ﬁnally an online marketing tool, so our aims should be directed towards getting the right information towards the right kind of people using the website. At FluidX Creations, we’re obsessed with quality. We rely on our portfolio to do business and always ensure that each of our web or mobile deliverables is unique and world-class. We offer costeffective solutions for companies and individuals seeking the best quality for their professional website design and customer service. What attracted you to start a venture in this everexpanding technological industry? Who mentored and guided you during your initial career days? Started as an individual consultant, I felt there was demand for the IT services in the small and medium enterprises and that’s how I incorporated Fluidx Creations as a web technology service provider. As we grew, we started offering cloud, big data, and other services which are in high demand. IT is a very booming sector with lots of players already in the market. But, we started with a new approach by targeting the small and medium-size enterprises who were working with old traditional way and helped them to get digital and on cloud. In my early days, my friends and family were the biggest motivation as they supported me in bad days and cheered me up when I was doing well. Also, few of my early clients were like mentors to me, because they taught me how to be in business and grow. I am really grateful to them for supporting me in the initial days. Our readers would like to know about your personal journey. Share your faiths, beliefs, and philosophy for life and success. Entrepreneurship can be a tough and long journey for many people. Some get lucky and succeed at the ﬁrst time. For me, that wasn’t the case. I continued to learn and grow. I learned by doing continuous improvement in my portfolio.

That’s been a core belief both in my personal and professional life. My initial days of starting up were full of ups and downs, but I believed that there are many paths to success; there is no just one path. Realizing this philosophy frees you to move fast and get things done in the best way possible. Once you start executing and realizing that you can make reasonable decisions that can lead to successful outcomes, you will be able to tackle any challenge coming your way. What are your future plans for the company? What role will FluidX Creations play in the coming future? We are continuously adopting new technologies and making their use in the services we provide. We are planning to use AI and Machine Learning (ML) to automate the process of in-house marketing, which will help us efﬁciently in marketing campaigns. Also, we are planning to expand our reach in more countries. Our company always focuses on understanding all of our clients’ needs to provide them with the best feasible solutions, assisting them to grow their businesses. In the future, we want FluidX Creations to be a trusted name in the industry and we are striving to become one. What would be your suggestions for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start a new venture in this industry? If you want to start a business and become successful with it, you need to solve meaningful and genuine problems. Execution is everything in business. Keep your eye on the latest industry trends and technologies to be in the ﬂow of business. I would like to give few tips to the new entrepreneurs to achieve success in their lives. You should challenge yourself, take risks, believe in yourself, have a long vision, and build a good team.

We focus on enhancing the growth of our customers’ businesses by providing them with best possible creative solutions.

Himanshu Varshney: Driving Digital Transformation With Intelligent SaaS Himanshu Varshney

CEO & Co-founder | HashedIn Technologies

ver the last few years, cloud computing has gained a massive popularity as its applications continue to soar in Big Data and ArtiďŹ cial Intelligence. The cloud has revolutionized the IT sector by pushing companies to opt for remote storage instead of costly local infrastructure and maintenance.

With a unique combination of management and technical skills coupled with international exposure in the IT industry, Himanshu Varshney, the CEO and Co-founder of HashedIn, brings in business transformation with his iSaaS expertise, AI/ML knowledge, and customer-centric approach. In an exclusive chat with Mirror Review, Himanshu shares the latest offerings of HashedIn and expresses his faiths, beliefs, and philosophy, which has made him a successful entrepreneur. From its introduction to dominance, how far has cloud computing technology changed the conventional IT scenario? Cloud computing has essentially changed the complete landscape by improving the setup capabilities, introducing continuous integration and development process, and encouraging the functioning of remote agile teams to launch better products at a faster rate. With cloud computing, application architecture can be cloud-native, making it

deployable globally across servers with a click of a button. In parallel, it has reduced the load on Security, DevOps, and Infrastructure, signiďŹ cantly easing the operations for IT teams. Financially it has converted the traditional Capital Expenditure into Operating Expenditure (Pay-as-you-go billing model), supporting enterprises with their IT budget, particularly on complex applications. This led to the advent of the subscription economy as a counterpart of the traditional licensing economy. Our readers would like to know about your personal journey. Share your faiths, beliefs, and philosophy for life and success. Before starting out this venture, I had more than 10 years of experience in the software industry. I started my career with Trilogy Software, and over a period of time, I moved up to the role of the Director, Global Services. It was during this time, I had the privilege to head delivery for Versata (aka Trilogy Inc), where I worked with 50+ vendors from 10+ countries, delivering technology solutions for Fortune 500 enterprises. I always believed that one has to take ownership and accountability in whatever they do. In an organization, if every employee acts as an owner and uses their judgment to make right calls for themselves, their team, the company,

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

and society as a whole will become better leaders. They will also contribute to the success of an organization as a whole. What type of solutions and services does HashedIn offer? Elaborate its highlighting features. HashedIn is a software development company that builds Intelligent SaaS (iSaaS) products with expertise in Analytics, Machine Learning, and Integrations, built upon learning from a decadal experience of launching 150+ products so far. While bringing in a solution-oriented approach and understanding the business nuances, HashedIn has become their extended technology arm. This is in line with the efforts to create impactful solutions for customers.We have also developed reusable modules, proprietary tools, and processes that help quickly realize the client’s idea, giving them a competitive advantage. Our company’s product portfolio includes MeetNotes, a meeting assistant, and RDB Tools, an application used for optimizing Redis (in-memory cache) consumption.

My vision was always clear. I wanted to build things that could potentially make life better for society. My seniors & colleagues from school, colleges, and Trilogy have been a pillar of inspiration. They have acted like a “rubber duck” in many discussions. This has not only helped me take better business decisions but has also helped me grow as a person with a strong penchant to learning and growing. What are your future plans for the company? What role will HashedIn play in the coming future? The future is looking pretty bright for the iSaaS delivery paradigm, as more businesses, both enterprise customers and SMBs are moving beyond early experimental implementations and into more prolonged deployments of mission-critical applications. As the iSaaS market gets more and more competitive with each year, it becomes more challenging to get more people interested in any product. I believe the major competition for iSaaS is still expensive, slow-moving, and legacy incumbent. The SaaS advantages of low upfront investment and better customer experience is and will always be the winning factor.

One of the main challenges for many enterprises today is to modernize existing software assets. HashedIn solves this by adopting reinvention strategy in alignment with the digital business needs. This is done with SaaSifying and Cloudifying the product, which enhances the Agility through DevOps automation, transforming UI/UX, and completely rewriting the application code by leveraging HashedIn’s RAPiD framework when required. HashedIn’s Product Innovation offering enables customers to partner with them. Here, our company brings in the value of product Design Thinking, Agile Delivery, Modern Software Engineering, and DevOps best practices. These steps are coupled with a lot of experience in crafting digital products for customers via an “Agile squad as a Service” to help conceptualize, launch, and scale great products.

My vision is to have HashedIn as the go-to company for building and managing iSaaS Product and Platforms for businesses. This is 5 steps ahead of existing SaaS space. Our iSaaS vision is built on 4 pillars, namely Integrations, Analytics, AI/ML, and Modern UI/UX. The world is all set for iSaaS in another few years.

What attracted you to start a venture in this everexpanding technological industry? Who mentored and guided you during your initial career days? A seed of an idea can germinate anytime, anywhere. This was something that I learned during the initial phase of my career at Trilogy, an Austin based tech-company. The most brilliant of ideas would come up during a brainstorming session while having a cup of tea or a bottle of beer. As an individual aspiring to be an entrepreneur, I learned that success can be shared if one is open to change, encourage ideas from everyone, and empower people to act like owners.

Follow your passion. If you are doing something you are extremely passionate about, you are deﬁnitely going to succeed. There are so many opportunities out there in the market, be ﬁrm about what you wish to do, take ownership of all the tasks you carry out and give the best in whatever you do.

What would be your suggestions for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start a new venture in this industry? Three simple things that anyone and everyone can do, Ÿ Be curious and keep learning throughout your journey Ÿ Be happy and create a positive environment around you Ÿ Be physically active as that not only keeps you ﬁt but energizes you a lot

HashedIn possess a decade experience of building deep technology products. 27

Expertâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Insights

Alan Neilson Founder & CEO, VerseOne Group

Transformation B

oth within the private and the public sector rightly there’s a healthy interest in properly and effectively embracing what is labelled “Digital Transformation”, in order to reap the very real beneﬁts that this approach does bring.

Listening to and reading about what is being said about Digital Transformation, it is abundantly clear that there isn’t a clear definition and understanding of this important and truly business transformative strategy. VerseOne as the market leading provider of web based technology platforms and Digital services has been championing and leading the proper adoption and deployment of this methodology over the past 10 years, which has benefited over 150 customers of VerseOne. As such we believe we have a thorough understanding of this, which has been well honed through practical deployment at our customer orgainsations; be it within the Social Housing, The NHS or the broader commercial sectors. Let’s be clear, Digital Transformation isn’t about user friendly or great looking websites, or setting up some social media channels, or integrating some of the key enterprise systems. Though all of these do form a part of the bigger picture which needs to be kept in mind, in order to effectively to deploy and gain the most from Digital Transformation. So what is our definition of Digital Transformation? Digital Transformation is a “whole organisation approach” and a way of life that places the customer

at the very heart of the business and concentrates on making all aspects of the customer’s interaction simple, clear, fast and as cost effective as possible. This means a customer ﬁrst culture, supported by a joined up process and integrated technology systems across the whole organisation. Simply put, Digital Transformation is all about people (our customers and the team within our own business), collaborating to create fruitful and amazing experiences that engage and wow the customers, ensuring continuous delivery of better business outcomes for them, leading to real competitive advantage for the business.

This means everyone within the organisation needs to be involved by adopting and applying a whole of the business approach and mindset to customer interaction and service delivery. This needs to be supported by Digital tools and methodologies that actively support a deliberate move away from operating in silos. Services need to be reusable and interconnected, supported by platforms that can be leveraged and shared by everyone across the whole business in the quest to give the customer the best and most joined up experience of your organisation. Coming back to VerseOne one of the founding principles of the business was to focus on what we affectionately call the “3Ps”. These have remained as one of the pillars of the business over the past 10 years, signiﬁcantly setting the business apart and contributing to the growth and success achieved. In essence the business was founded and has concentrated on delivering Digital Transformation solutions right from the start and arguably we can claim we do know a thing or two about this.

Expert’s Insights

So what are the 3Ps? Process – this is ensuring the existence of joined up processes across the whole business with exceptional customer engagement and experience at the forefront of everyone’s mind. This will lead to efficient and cost effective service delivery which again “everyone” needs to understand and practice. Issues such as usability, user experience, service design and other customer transformative experiences and flow of customer critical interactions throughput the business need clearly to be thought through, streamlined and communicated internally and externally. We of course practice this within VerseOne and ensure our customers have a similar focus within their own organisation when rolling out Digitally Transformative solutions. People – this is intended to highlight that “all stakeholders” within the organisation need to be bought in, engaged and involved and actively lead by example. Digital Transformation would only deliver real benefits if a “whole business” approach is adopted. This means everyone within the business having deep understanding of the customer - their sector wide and specific issues -, being trained, empowered and passionate about handling customers, their needs and issues. Platform – This is where most people focus on when thinking about Implementing a Digital Transformation strategy. Whilst this indeed is an important component, as mentioned above, to get the most from the overall strategy the other “2P’s” would also need firmly to be in place. Here the focus absolutely should be all about the right technology platform(s) that underpin the Digital Transformation agenda, facilitating a true interconnection of all vital areas of the business (back and front office, including 3rd party partner organisations) in order to provide a seamless, rapid and fruitful experience for the customer. As mentioned earlier we’re in the age of the Customer as our customers expect and demand more. More channels, more devices, more options, more content. With the lines between the physical and digital

becoming ever more blurred and meshed into one, our customers expect to be able to move seamlessly between these and just have access to “the right content” that they need anytime and on any device. We therefore need powerful, designed for purpose, flexible and truly interconnected platforms to meet this ever evolving challenge. With this in mind it is more than fair to say that Digital Transformation is in VerseOne’s DNA. For over a decade we have created and deployed innovative and robust solutions that seamlessly integrate with our customers’ existing platforms across disparate devices, systems and processes. This has been made possible by the incredibly powerful, flexible and open standards based technology platforms that we've created and continue to create that makes us to be the partner of choice when it comes to implementing an effective Digital Transformation strategy. So the key message is that effectively to gain the many real benefits of Digital Transformation a well thought out and tailored strategy for “your specific needs and circumstances” needs to be devised. It has to be recognised that the strongest drivers of change in today's digital landscape are the rapidly evolving expectations and behaviours of our customers. Only by keeping pace with this could the battle for engagement, loyalty and relevance be won, ultimately creating an effective competitive advantage and thus a real Return on Investment (ROI) for implementing a Digital Transformation initiative. In short you need to ensure your Digital Strategy aligns to your business goals, and as importantly to the needs of your customers and your employees, all underpinned by powerful and interconnected technology platforms that meet the needs; not only now but in the future too.

Ian Finlay:

Ian Finlay CEO | Abiquo

hile using the traditional IT model, a user has to face long waiting times and tedious processes to develop IT resource products like IT infrastructure, databases, networks, and software packages. Moreover, traditional IT model hinders the agility in the go-to-market process of any product. Now, with the combination of cloud technologies and cloud philosophy, the traditional IT model has transformed to a great extent, where the modern IT department works as an enabler of the go-to-market process and innovation within the company. Furthermore, as digital transformation becomes the prime approach to all businesses, cloud computing will also continue to grow with dominance in most of the industries. The CEO of Abiquo, Ian Finlay is an experienced leader in cloud computing, helping his clients to build extraordinary cloud services with Abiquo’s software platform. With a proven track record of project delivery, Ian is a master leader in sales growth and stakeholder relations within cloud, hosting, ISP and managed service providers, and corporate B2B markets.

Enabling Clients To Create Superior Cloud Services With Abiquo purchased and implemented the Abiquo cloud management platform to offer cloud services to his clients. Ian decided to invest in Abiquo because he could see the big potential in it. Since then, the dynamic leader has been working at Abiquo to focus on delivering value to clients. During his vast career, Ian has been fortunate to have worked for some great people with a wonderful group of co-workers. Ian believes that every interaction with clients, positive as well as negative, can be a useful experience for a passionate leader. Implementing this strategy, the outstanding CEO of Abiquo learnt that integrity is the key to gain clients’ trust. According to Ian, a leader should be honest and open about the great qualities of his product. Further, he asserts that a true businessman should have a straightforward attitude towards admitting mistakes, which helps a person to rectify and correct them easily. This is because clients’ value honesty, therefore improving their user experience is the best way to build good client relations. Attractive Cloud Solutions at Abiquo

Ian’s Incredible Journey in Leading Abiquo As a well-versed CIO of a reputed MSP in Europe, Ian 32

Headquartered in London, Abiquo is a leading developer of Hybrid Cloud Management solutions. Established in

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

2006, Abiquo offers the industry’s leading cloud orchestration software for clients, allowing them to quickly build and monetise cloud services across multiple clouds. Additionally, these Hybrid Cloud Management solutions are used to handle private or public cloud infrastructures, adding value to clients’ services through greater efﬁciency, visibility, simplicity, and control.

Abiquo’s resellers and partners in the growing markets across the world. At the product level, Abiquo have developed a roadmap, which includes new functionalities aimed at turning Abiquo into the best supply chain and control center at the IT and service level. With his tremendous experience, work ethics, skills, knowledge, and personality, Ian strives to keep the cloud solutions provider company ahead of its competitors.

Many leading managed service providers have created cloud services based on Abiquo’s software to differentiate their services with integrations to network, storage, and backup solutions. This is because Abiquo’s enhanced simple user interface consists of a familiar drag-and-drop method to deploy VMs. Supported by built-in tutorials, users can get started within minutes with little or no training. Moreover, clients can view monitoring information, onboard their own Amazon and Azure accounts, and even perform VM migrations. All these features are available through Abiquo’s Representational State Transfer (REST) API for endless automation and integration opportunities. In addition to supporting all major hypervisors and public clouds, users can use OpenStack and vCloud Director Infrastructure.

Ian’s Inspiring Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Exceptional Role of CEO in Helping Abiquo Gain Clients’ Trust

Ian has a deep and broad experience in network technology, enterprise architecture, and the functional domains of OSS/BSS, Finance, and Supply Chain. While stating about overcoming the current business scenario, the vigorous CEO of Abiquo gives his precious advice for the aspiring entrepreneurs, he asserts, “I would recommend not to waste time in getting to know the sector in depth and mostly focus on the really important issues that will solve the current problems of their customers. The cloud, as a concept, opens doors to discuss and bring up requirements of all kinds and only the ones being able to separate the wheat from the chaff, recognise and distinguish the genuine, will meet success within the cloud industry. In the end, the only thing that matters is delivering value to customers.”

Ian is leading the prominent cloud solutions provider company to deliver value to customers and shareholders. He brings unique insight to Abiquo from his previous experience at Claranet, where he held the role of CIO. Currently, Ian is responsible for overall company’s operations, including P and L, sales/pre-sales, marketing and PR, partnerships, and ﬁnancials. Moreover, while working as a responsible Board member and Director of Abiquo, Ian focuses on key customers, analysts, and investors to help the London-based company develop reputation and trust within its clients. Expanding Abiquo’s Presence with Powerful Business Strategies At Abiquo, Ian and his team of dedicated members aim to consolidate its presence in key sectors such as the telecom sector, and key markets like the US and China. To achieve this, Ian and his team work together with 33

Cain:

Bringing Enhanced Cloud Solutions With Transparent Work Culture Ma

Cain President & CEO | Couchbase

he explosive growth of the digital economy is driving a profound transformation in the way data is managed and user experiences are delivered. California-based Couchbase is disrupting the $40B database market with its data platform that revolutionizes digital innovation. As the President and CEO of Couchbase, Matt Cain is parlaying nearly 20 years of leadership experience to steer the company’s upward trajectory by helping its customers create amazing experiences for their own customers. A Global Leader with History of Building Teams With nearly two decades of experience in leading global organizations, Matt is a proven technology executive and general manager. Prior to Couchbase, he served as the President of Worldwide Field Operations for Veritas Technologies LLC, where he led a 4,200 person team responsible for all aspects of sales, customer retention, channels, services, and support. Before that, as the Chief Product Ofﬁcer for Veritas’ $2.5B business, he led strategy, product management, product marketing, engineering, support, hardware operations, and cloud delivery. During his tenure, he revitalized the company strategy, increased operational efﬁciency, delivered growth across the portfolio, and was instrumental in the separation of Veritas from Symantec. Matt previously held a variety of senior 34

leadership positions at Symantec Corporation and Cisco Systems. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Northwestern University and a master’s degree in Business Administration from the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Handling Couchbase with Unique Leadership Style Matt believes that everything he does is in service of creating the best company for his employees, customers, partners, and shareholders. Having deep love and passion for teamwork, Matt committed himself to setting up at least 100 one-on-ones and team meetings with employees of all levels, customers, investors, partners, vendors, and analysts. Likewise, the energetic CEO of Couchbase set expectations on his first day about this agenda so people would be ready with their feedback and surprisingly, he got a good response. It’s critical for employees to consistently have a good level of visibility into where the company is thriving, as well as areas that require improvement, and it’s equally important that they have the confidence to voice their opinions. To bring such visibility, Matt has implemented the open-door policy in the office and also pushed open the “virtual door” by communicating activities and progress at an early stage which set precedence for transparency.

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

Building Healthy Employee and Customer Relationships While working in any company, positive motivations like encouragement, development, teamwork, etc. beat the fatigue and negative motivations. Believing in these positive energies, Matt ensures his employees that they are a part of a team that works together and empowers each other. According to Matt, openness, actions, and follow-ups are keys for building relationships with customers and partners as well. His employees know where to find him to share their ideas, thoughts, and feedback, whether positive or negative. At Couchbase, people work for one another and celebrate collectively, because everyone believes that it’s in the best interest of the company, and it creates a place that allows them to be fulfilled in their work. It’s the energy and positive belief of employees in Couchbase that makes Matt most proud. The positive CEO of Couchbase tells people about his ideas, goals, and what he learned from his past experiences. This open thinking enables his co-workers to see what can be possible with a team’s collective efforts, which makes them believe that communicating transparently about the objectives and goals is very crucial for the company’s productivity and overall development. Wide-Ranging Cloud Offerings at Couchbase Couchbase’s mission is to be the data platform that revolutionizes digital innovation. To make this possible, the leading cloud solutions provider company created the world’s first Engagement Database to help deliver ever-rich and personalized customer and employee experiences. Built with the most powerful NoSQL technology, the Couchbase Data Platform is architected on top of an open source foundation for the massively interactive enterprise. Additionally, its geo-distributed Engagement Database provides unmatched developer agility and manageability, as well as unparalleled performance at any scale from any cloud to the edge. Couchbase is powering a broad range of business applications and solutions, including Customer 360, Catalog & Inventory Management, Field Service and IoT Data Management, across a wide range of industries, from retail & e-commerce, to travel & hospitality, healthcare, financial services, telecommunications and media & entertainment.

Ease of Managing Distributed Databases Distributed databases are hard and the team at Couchbase makes it easy. Couchbase’s comprehensive platform integrates storage, access, transport, and enterprise-grade security on premises, across multiple clouds, as well as mobile devices. Moreover, administration and maintenance is abstracted from the application behavior. Users can scale out, in, or up, replicate around the globe, upgrade versions, and recover from failures with zero downtime or application changes accompanied by features like global deployment, full stack security, and consistent performance when adding microservices. Facing Challenges in Fast Changing World Today, the rate of change in technology is unmatched. Companies are constantly being funded, getting acquired and, unfortunately, some are going out of business. These dynamic conditions create perpetual challenges, and opportunities, that can feel like insurmountable obstacles. In times of change, leaders are ultimately responsible for driving the company forward, but teams make the big difference. When it comes to overcoming business obstacles, Matt believes in tackling challenges alongside his world class team. His culture of openness, transparency, and trust play a big role deliver positive results. One Who Respects Others Opinions and Views Makes a Good Leader Matt emphasizes on the importance of letting others speak and express their views. He listens to his employees and respects their opinions. The open-minded CEO of Couchbase says, “While many leaders are often prominent communicators, the importance of listening is often undervalued, overlooked, and underused. Listening gives you a sense of the existing culture, and ultimately informs your strategic agenda of moving forward. It’s important to deal with the world the way it is, not the way you want it to be. Humility is a critical asset in doing this well.”

We provide a data platform to fuel digital innovation for today’s business 35

Spirituality & Workplace

Beneﬁts of

Spiritual Awakening Successful

Life

pirituality in the business is a movement that began in the early 1920’s and has emerged as a grassroot movement with individuals practicing spirituality in the workplace. Most recently, employees have started looking beyond the jaw-dropping salary packages, and for them money is not the only prominent motivator of good job performance, because they want mental satisfaction from their work as well. The feeling of fulfillment, in other words, is called as spiritual fulfillment, which is a major motivator for delivering a better job performance. Spirituality involves the attempt to seek one's ultimate purpose in life, and spirituality in business involves developing a strong connection with oneself and one's coworkers, having ideal beliefs and spiritual values. The spiritual values include values of work ethics, a good cause to work for the company, empowerment, and expression of emotion, which plays an important role in the employee’s life. Sometimes, spirituality is confused with religious tradition, but it does not involve a connection to any specific religion, rather it is based on the individual's own personal values and philosophy. The present article elaborates how the business and spirituality work together for a successful professional and personal life. Ø Daily morning spiritual practices:

The spiritual practices balance the life. The practices such as meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises help people to connect with themselves. According to a book

on spirituality written by Florence Scovel Shinn, the subconscious mind needs programming, and if it’s not done then someone else will program it. Nowadays, without spiritual practices, people let others do the programming through the social media, news, and other informative mediums filled with a mixed type of expressions, which disturbs the focused thought process of an individual. The morning practices make the mind more focused and program it in such a way that the employee can sustain the new work challenges and unexpected events throughout the day. The start of the day with these spiritual practices awakens the individual and makes him realize the happiness and peace within by detaching him from the deep dreams of other attractions. To make the mind feel great and alert throughout the day, starting the spiritual practices early in the morning after a complete 8 hours of sleep is beneficial as it is very peaceful and quiet in the morning. After starting to wake up early in the morning, it becomes a supplement for the healthy expansion of the entire life. Committing few spiritual rituals every day can absolutely change the life in a positive way. Sometimes, it's difficult to meditate just after waking up, because many people go back to sleep while meditating. Taking a simple tea can change the entire ritual, because the caffeine in the tea is a perfect wakeup call so that one can work without dozing off. Those who don't like tea can sit and write something to regenerate the energy. Writing opens the thoughts and ideas in the mind. If an employee is going through a tough time, writing is the best solution to find out the best solutions. 37

Spirituality & Workplace Ø Time to connect spiritual source during work:

Most of the successful professional individuals schedule a break during the day to do walking, meditation and jog while concentrating on breathing, or they sit quietly away from everyone and everything to meditate. Sitting quietly with eyes closed, along with the focus on breathing will help to clean the mind which is continuously thinking and analysing about something or the other. Even if these thoughts come and go, and one must not be taunted by them. With consistent practice, they will vanish keeping the mind a quiet place. These procedures generate the conscious power within and bring the inner bliss to come out and cherish. An alarm and a timer will be beneﬁcial for doing such practices. This small time taken for connecting with oneself simpliﬁes and makes the workday more successful. Organizations should promote these practices and create a calm and healthy atmosphere for them because employees desire to work in an organization that seeks to have a high sense of ethics or integrity and makes a good contribution to the welfare of employees, customers, and society than the typical company. Ø Trashing out the negative thoughts:

If the employee is filled up with negative thoughts and emotions, which are not serving him, then there won't be enough space available for receiving the desired outcomes. Imagine a glass of dirty water filled to the brim. If one needs to add pure water in it, then it's not possible to add pure water in an already full glass. The same is true for the mind. When the mind of an employee is full of worries, anger, grudges, judgments towards co-workers or himself, he won’t be able to utilize and think about pure thoughts of contentment, because the mind is already engaged in thoughts related to other negative feelings. It is essential to trash out such negative feelings to welcome positive things to happen. Finding a practice which releases negative emotions is the best way to deal with the negative thoughts because only a calm and happy mind can understand the inner intuition or the gut. A clear and happy mind helps employees understand how they feel about new tasks, projects, and organizational activities. There is a close relation between good thoughts and job satisfaction, because, in work, the positive organizational purpose is significantly associated with job satisfaction. With an increase in workplace spirituality, employees’ commitment increases towards the organization.

Ø Spirituality for leadership:

For many years, spirituality and leadership were worlds apart. While spirituality concerns with intangible ideas and emotions, leadership is a practical area of scientific inquiry. However, a large number of evidences from studies show that these fields are much closer, and there is a transition between the two figures. A good leader needs to evaluate the situation and act accordingly. The key elements of modern leadership involve cooperation, consideration, agreement, and social quality. The new adaptability culture requires a leader to be autonomous, take initiatives for improvements and emerge with new objectives and strategies. There is growing interest in the issues related to the spirituality in the workplace. The spiritual values such as integrity, honesty, and humility have a great effect on leadership success. The practices which have been emphasized in many spiritual teachings, and found crucial for leadership development are: showing respect for others, demonstrating good treatment, expressing caring and concern, actively listening, recognizing and appreciating the contributions of others, and engaging in reflective practice. Leadership and spirituality play an essential role together in terms of ethics and values. Value-based leaders have the ability to utilize employee efforts and organizational goals more effectively by connecting them to the deeper values inside them. They motivate employees and improve their performance and commitment towards the organization by making them imagine a better tomorrow. The spiritual rituals have an uncanny ability to set the human mind for the rest of the life. These spiritual practices also give a loud and clear message that the professionals in organizations should be versed with their core values through a positive vision and personal actions. People commonly believe that there is a conflict between the values and practices included in spirituality and those required for successful business, but the above article explains the huge similarity between elements of success in both fields. Therefore, by incorporating these spiritual practices in professional life, employees can align good values with the strategy and roadmap to achieve massive success in the business.

Shannon Hulbert:

Shannon Hulbert

CEO | Opus Interactive

ver the recent years, there has been a signiﬁcant growth in four key areas of cloud technology, including hybrid-cloud, VDI, Object Storage, and Multi-Cloud Monitoring. With hybrid-cloud, demand comes from enterprises that are beginning to migrate toward multi-cloud solutions which distribute workloads using a mix of on and off-premises solutions to achieve the best optimization, security, and performance. As hybrid and multi-cloud continues to grow, the ability to easily map, monitor, and manage through a single pane of glass gets critical. Shannon Hulbert, the CEO of Opus Interactive (OI) brings excellent cloud services and solutions, being utilized by leading enterprises to simplify availability, management, and security across their workforce devices. In an exclusive conversation, Shannon shares her journey in the cloud industry with Mirror Review and explains unique range of solutions offered by Opus Interactive. Also, Shannon discloses her future plans about Opus and expresses her views towards the future of this ever-transforming cloud industry. Here are the engaging answers by Shannon. From its introduction to dominance, how far has Cloud Computing technology changed the conventional IT scenario? IT used to be an on-premise solution serviced by a single department with licensed software and hardware costs,

Building Custom IT Solutions Hosted On HighPerformance Infrastructure Through Opus Interactive managed internally by a single department. Cloud computing is changing that model to one where IT can now scale software and infrastructure through a mix of hybrid cloud offerings that distribute workloads and data storage to where they’re most efficient. And in this model, the hardware and software costs are month-to-month as operational costs instead of capital expenditures. This new delivery of infrastructure, platform, and software opens up the landscape for Enterprise IT to get the most for their IT spend and simplifies scaling. What type of solutions and services does Opus Interactive offer? Elaborate its highlighting features. At Opus Interactive, connecting people to technology is our life’s work and our opus. And today, people all over the world are streaming and utilizing connected devices more than ever. Business Insider reported that more than 22.5 billion devices are expected to be connected to the internet by 2021, yielding more data and insights than ever. In response, every business is in some form of digital transformation, whether it’s to meet the connectivity demands coming from customers, workforce, and modernization or maximizing the performance, security, and scalability of their enterprise. New technologies like cloud migration, IoT, AI, Big Data, and Big Data Analytics provide great opportunities, but the journey through digital transformation is difficult to navigate and finding the right partner is the key to success. That’s where OI comes in. We

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

specialize in building custom IT solutions hosted on highperformance infrastructure inside of world-class facilities. There is no one-size-ﬁts-all solution. Every customer has different goals and different requirements that are needed to reach those goals along with ensuring business continuity. OI offers more than two decades of experience in hosting and managing critical IT infrastructures, as well as strong partnerships to ensure delivery across the board. Whatever the requirements, our approach is to engineer the best solution that delivers where, how, and when the enterprise needs it. Our services include cloud (public/private/hybrid) and IaaS, Colocation, Disaster Recovery and Backup, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI), Object Storage, and Multi-Cloud Monitoring Services. What attracted you to start a venture in this everexpanding technological industry? Who mentored and guided you during your initial career days? It goes back to connecting people; Opus Interactive began as an IT department in a creative agency in 1996. Back then, we were hosting projects and sites. We evolved to serve as an ISP also and then took on colocation in response to demand from our customers. Our private cloud offering, OpusCloud was launched in 2005, and in response to customer demand, that was the same year, we joined the HPE and VMware partner programs. Today, we offer custom IT solutions available from state-of-the-art facilities that enable our customers to enjoy connectivity from coast to coast with global access. We never really ventured to begin, we just responded to the needs we heard from our customers and the market. We’ve found ourselves in the middle of this ever-expanding technology industry, where hyper-scale giants are dominating the space. Yet, here we are and growing 30% year over year because we continue to listen to the customer and build them the best solutions we can to meet their evolving connectivity needs. For guidance and mentorship, each member of our leadership team was part of the original company that OI spun out of and we’ve all been fortunate to work closely with a range of experts through our partners and industry organizations. The access to information has always been a conversation away, and we’re forever grateful for that. Our readers would like to know about your personal journey. Share your faiths, beliefs, and philosophy for life and success. I’m a little bit of a unicorn, slashing statistical anomaly. I’m a Native American woman in tech. I grew up on the Hoopa Yurok Reservation without connectivity or power.

Statistically speaking, my being included in the list of ‘The 10 Most Prominent Leaders in Cloud Computing, 2018’ is highly improbable. The percent of women in science, tech, engineering, and math jobs (STEM) was 24% in 2017, and less than 10% in leadership positions. For women of color, the percentages are 5% Asian women, 3% African American, and 1% Hispanic women. Native Americans represent approximately 2% of the US population. Percentages for Native American women in tech jobs are so low that they aren’t included in most reports on the subject. So, my faith, belief, and philosophy for life and success are best represented via Shannon coding, an information theory, which is simply this….it’s in the realm of possible outcomes, until proven otherwise. Dare mighty things, especially if there is any probability it will lead to cool stuff for humanity. What are your future plans for the company? What role will Opus Interactive play in the coming future? Our goal is to continue what we’ve always done, connecting people to technology. We’re currently operating in 4 facilities, but our cloud node is easily packaged and we see partnering with more facilities to expand cloud computing from data center to the edge. What would be your suggestions for the aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start a new venture in this industry? Business is not just business. Integrity and ﬂexibility are keys to survive for long-term. It means something to build the “right” solution and not just a solution. And being able to adjust that according to the needs of your customers is necessary, because every business is different and constantly evolving. Always be learning and always do the right thing for the right reason.

We work with you to understand your unique business requirements, goals, and design custom solutions that deliver outstanding results. 41

Stephen Hendry: Offering Efﬁcient And Productive Cloud Solutions To Clients With ARTHA IT Stephen Hendry

CEO | Artha Infotama

aving a deep experience 17+ years with demonstrated history of working in the information technology and services industry, Stephen Hendry, the CEO of ARTHA INFOTAMA (ARTHA IT) is helping the Indonesian IT industry and global companies with his skills in Business Process, Solution Architect, Audit Management, Microsoft Dynamics GP, Dynamics 365, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Business Intelligent, Cloud solutions (Azure, Ofﬁce365, Microsoft 365), and Management. Mirror Review talks with Stephen to know more about his professional life at ARTHA IT. The well-versed CEO of ARTHA IT also shares exclusive solutions offered by his company and gives a precious guidance to young entrepreneurs who are aspiring to build a successful career. Following are the excerpts. From its introduction to dominance, how far has modern IT changed the conventional IT scenario? Conventional IT is old-world because that period has passed and it has lagged very far with scarce information, static hierarchies, and traditional transactional systems. Conventional IT practices cannot compete with the current IT world, which is ﬁlled with many digital technologies as well as abundant information, dynamic networks, collective value creation, experiments, and advanced learn and 42

responding technics evolving at a rapid rate. Due to these advancements in IT, our life patterns have changed dramatically. What type of solutions and services does ARTHA IT offer? Elaborate its highlighting features. ARTHA IT is one of the fast growing IT companies and a Tier-1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider and Microsoft Gold Partner with 9 Gold competencies. We provide end-toend solution to our worldwide customer base for Enterprise Resources Planning (ERP) including Microsoft Dynamics GP, Dynamics 365, Ofﬁce365, Azure, Power BI, IaaS, SaaS, mobile solutions, Implementation, and Support. Also, we are mostly focused on solutions such as Plantations Management, Activity Based-Costing, Property management, Project Costing, Textile & garment, Point of Sales Retail solutions (Electronics, Food & Beverage, Fashion, mini mart), Portal Management, and Business Intelligence. With our single gate high-end solutions, we provide knowledge and experience to our customers with the right solutions. In February 2002, PT. ARTHA INFOTAMA was established to focus on Enterprise Resources Planning Microsoft Dynamics Software, implementation of ERP, consulting, customization, support, upgrade, and

THE

MOST

Prominent

LEADERS in

CLOUD COMPUTING

2 0 1 8

maintenance. And today, ARTHA IT has become a unique solution provider. In October 2014, we had incepted ARTHA IT Malaysia Sdn. Bhd to cover business at Malaysian market, thereby expanding our business region. In January 2015, PT. ARTHA IT Indonesia was introduced to emphasis on solutions like worldwide ISV, recruitment partner, selling & support vertical industry, as well as upgrade & maintenance. It is noteworthy that one thing about our companies that have not changed over the years is our vision of providing the best solutions with best products, updated technologies, and fast return on investments for our customers and today, our companies continue to serve our customers even better. What attracted you to start a venture in this everexpanding technological industry? Technology is something that has never disappeared from this world and always amazed people with its new forms. Technology is a tool for every process in daily life, this is what makes us challenged to focus on this industry. We started this business from zero with only two employees in the ﬁrst year and continuously grown year to year with three digits of employees and thousands of customers. This is because, we run a business by keeping up with the latest technology developments from time-to-time, support our customer growth with advance application and this brings us in the line of growth. Our readers would like to know about your personal journey. Share your faiths, beliefs, and philosophy for life and success. As stated above, I started ARTHA IT with only two employees, and here I am with huge clients’ base, advancing with the latest technologies. With my extensive experience in IT, I believe that a company should be committed to its clients because it is the key to achieve more success and gain the trust of clients. At ARTHA IT, we keep customers on top of our priority list while developing our solutions and this helps us to better beneﬁt our clients. What are your future plans for the company? What role will ARTHA IT play in the coming future? Cloud is our life for now and future. With our solutions combined with high-level security protection, every client can run operation and collaboration without any limitation. To tackle the future challenges, we have collaborated with

reputed cloud leaders and developed following solutions based on their cloud platforms: Ÿ ARTHA For Operations - Portal Management Whether you’re working in your office or on the go, you get a familiar, line set of productivity tools. Our portal management applications let you manage, collaboration and Analysis with anyone in real time such as Vendor, Customer, Employees and partner, our portal able to enhance your company KPI with your vendor, customer and employees. Collaboration with people and organization not only for the transaction, but can build the quality and trust, that is the right solution for our customers. Ÿ ARTHA For e-Mobile Working with your vendor, customer and employees with easy, efficient and productive, ARTHA For E-Mobile is a mobile application platform without coding (no code), easy to create, enhance additional new functionality. Ÿ ARTHA For Human Capital Wherever you are working, Employees Self-Serve with advanced functionality support organization to manage employee profiles, recruitment, leave management, travel management, e-KPI, training, support and service request, announcement and feedback

What would be your suggestions for aspiring entrepreneurs who want to start a new venture in this industry? A strong mentality, positive thoughts, and willingness to develop are the basic foundation qualities to start as an aspiring entrepreneur. In my opinion, you should create a market that makes people come to you, which is the best practice an entrepreneur can follow.

We provide single gate end-to-end IT solutions to small, medium, and enterprise companies. 43

www.amazon.in

DELIVERING AI FOR A SMARTER FUTURE

19-20 JUNE 2019 RAI, AMSTERDAM

AI and the Consumer

28-29 NOVEMBER 2018 SANTA CLARA CA, SILICON VALLEY

AI in the Enterprise

AI Technologies

GET INVOLVED +44 (0) 117 980 9020 | enquiries@ai-expo.net

www.ai-expo.net

Co-hosted events

25-26 APRIL 2019 OLYMPIA GRAND, LONDON

Data Analytics for AI & IoT