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10 | CASE STUDY
VOLUME NO. 28, NO.4, PAGES 20, APRIL, 2017, ` 75
18 | INTERVIEW
PNB MetLife’s virtual reality platform set Sanjeev Gupta, General Manager to take customer service to new level Public Sector, Microsoft India
8 | INTERVIEW Neal Cross, Managing Director and Chief Innovation Officer, DBS Bank
9 | CASE STUDY
13 | INTERVIEW
Mobiles replace physical access cards at STAR India
Jay Snyder, Senior VP, Global Alliances, Service Providers and Industries, Dell
Karan Bajwa Managing Director, IBM India
With increasing pace of digitization in India, IBM believes that India is on the cusp of a definitive cognitive era
Huawei SD-DC² Distributed Cloud Data Center Solution meets dynamic data demands
For business enquiries, e-mail us at web-ebg@huawei.com
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
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MORE INSIDE
EXPRESS COMPUTER
COVER STORY
Vol 28. No. 4. April, 2017 Chairman of the Board Viveck Goenka Sr Vice President - BPD Neil Viegas Editor Srikanth RP* Delhi Mohd Ujaley, Ankush Kumar, Mumbai Nivedan Prakash, Abhishek Raval Bangalore Rachna Jha
Srikanth RP, Editor srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
The relevance of Watson to India
DESIGN National Design Editor Bivash Barua Asst. Art Director Pravin Temble Senior Graphic Designer Rekha Bisht Layout Vinayak Mestry, Rajesh Jadhav Photo Editor Sandeep Patil
4| IBM BETS BIG ON WATSON TO ACCELERATE GROWTH
INTERVIEW
MARKETING Regional Heads Harit Mohanty - West and East Prabhas Jha - North
7 | Khalid Wani, Managing Director Sales, Western Digital Corporation, India
Marketing Team Kailash Purohit Shankar Adaviyar Ranabir Das Ajanta Sengupta Amit Tiwari Mathen Mathew Navneet Negi Circulation Mohan Varadkar Scheduling Ashish Anchan
Mitesh Agarwal, CTO, Oracle India 12 | Jeremy Sim, Director, Industry Solutions, Qlik APAC Raimund Genes, CTO, Trend Micro 13 | Ashish Bindal, Global Head, Solutions, GreyOrange
PRODUCTION General Manager B R Tipnis Manager Bhadresh Valia IMPORTANT Whilst care is taken prior to acceptance of advertising copy, it is not possible to verify its contents. The Indian Express (P) Ltd. cannot be held responsible for such contents, nor for any loss or damages incurred as a result of transactions with companies, associations or individuals advertising in its newspapers or publications. We therefore recommend that readers make necessary inquiries before sending any monies or entering into any agreements with advertisers or otherwise acting on an advertisement in any manner whatsoever. Express Computer® Regd.No.REGD.NO.MCS/066/201517. RNI Regn.No.49926/90. Printed and Published by Vaidehi Thakar on behalf of The Indian Express (P) Limited and Printed at Indigo Press (India) Pvt.Ltd., Plot No.1C/716, Off. Dadoji Konddeo Cross Road, Byculla (East), Mumbai 400027 and Published at 2nd floor, Express Towers, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021. Editor: Srikanth RP * * Responsible for selection of news under the PRB Act. (Editorial & Administrative Offices: Express Towers, 1st floor, Nariman Point, Mumbai 400021) Copyright © 2017. The Indian Express (P) Ltd. All rights reserved throughout the world. Reproduction in any manner, electronic or otherwise, in whole or in part, without prior written permission is prohibited.
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15 | Rohan Angrish, CTO, Capital Float
CASE STUDY
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fter years of research, AI is finally delivering results. Driverless cars, virtual agents and robotic assistants are pushing the limits of human imagination. India, which has been used to leapfrog technologies, is rightly placed at a time when AI is creating new possibilities in almost every sector. The maturity of AI technologies comes at a time when India is on a rapid digitization drive, and is fast moving to create a digital ecosystem powered by technology enablers such as Aadhaar, DigiLocker and UPI. The pace and timing of digitization is perfect for a company like IBM, which has bet big on Watson. The use of cognitive systems is poised to grow in India, as Indian enterprises seek to transform themselves, and offer services at a price point that is customized to each individual. Be it a sector like telecom or healthcare or financial services - the ability to provide
The pace and timing of digitization is perfect for a company like IBM, which has bet big on Watson
a customized service in a large volume market like India, can be the crucial differentiator. With each sector throwing up large volumes of data - most of it in unstructured form, Indian enterprises face a challenging task in harnessing intelligent insights. With Watson, IBM believes it can help Indian enterprises quickly take completely unstructured data and find new patterns that are not visible to humans. India too can benefit hugely from using cognitive
Navneet Negi Mobile No. +918800523285 Email: navneet.negi@expressindia.com CHENNAI Mathen Mathew The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, 8th Floor, East Wing, Sreyas Chamiers Towers New No.37/26 ( Old No.23 & 24/26) Chamiers Road, Teynampet, Chennai - 600 018 Mobile No. +91 9840826366 Email: mathen.mathew@expressindia.com BANGALORE Kailash Purohit, Amit Kumar Tiwari The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division 502, 5th Floor, Devatha Plaza, Residency road, Bangalore- 560025 Mobile No. +91 8095502597 Email: amit.tiwari@expressindia.com Kailash Purohit Mobile No. +09552537922, Email: kailash.purohit@expressindia.com
technologies. Take the case of a disease like cancer. Approximately, 1300 people succumb to cancer every day in India. While cases of cancer are rising rapidly, India faces an acute shortage of oncologists. Press reports estimate that India has only one oncologist per 1600 new cancer patients. This is where a technology like Watson can make a huge difference, and benefit from the knowledge gained by Watson by treating similar cases across the world. Healthcare is not the only field. Take a sector like education, which is in need of a radical shift. An independent industry report released last year claimed that close to 80 percent of the engineering graduates are unemployable. Watson can be of huge relevance in this sector. Take a look at what IBM is doing with Pearson. Pearson and IBM are innovating with Watson APIs, where students will be able to dialogue with Watson in real time by asking questions on a particular topic. During the dialogue with the student, Watson will constantly assess the student's responses and guide them with hints, feedback, explanations and identify common misconceptions. The Indian government which is aggressively trying to increase the potential of its human capital through the Skill India initiative could find a cognitive platform like Watson to be extremely useful. Similarly, Watson could also be used effectively by the Income Tax department to identify patterns and detect tax evasion. With its scale and size, India has systems that capture and produce massive volumes of data. No other country comes close to India, given its size and diversity. Post demonetization, this digital ecosystem is poised to expand exponentially. As cognitive systems can only get better over time, one can expect Indian enterprises to leapfrog into the cognitive era – given the huge transformational benefits. Additionally, given India’s strength in software services and the huge number of startups, India could well be the center point of IBM’s cognitive strategy.
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16 | HOW SHREE CEMENT ACCELERATED ITS PROCURETO-PAY CYCLE
STARTUP CORNER 14 | LESSONS FROM A STARTUP’S JOURNEY INDIAN FINTECH STARTUP USES BIG DATA ANALYTICS TO OFFER REAL TIME CREDIT
NEWS ANALYSIS 11 | SAP TAILORS ITS HANA PLATFORM FOR INDIAN SMES BANK-CHAIN: INDIA’S FIRST BLOCKCHAIN EXPLORATION CONSORTIUM LAUNCHED FOR BANKS 17 | MICROSOFT SHOWS HOW AI CAN BE USED TO PREVENT BLINDNESS
BHOPAL Prabhas Jha The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India. Board No : 0120 6651 500, Ext:270 Direct No : 0120 665 1270 Fax No : 0120 4367 933 Mobile : 91-9899707440 Email: prabhas.jha@expressindia.com JAIPUR Prabhas Jha The Indian Express (P) Ltd. Business Publication Division, Express Buliding, B-1/B Sector 10, Noida 201 301, Dist. Gautam Budh Nagar (U.P.) India. Board No : 0120 6651 500, Ext:270 Direct No : 0120 665 1270, Fax No : 0120 4367 933 Mobile : 91-9899707440 Email : prabhas.jha@expressindia.com
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
4 | COVER STORY
IBM bets big on Watson to accelerate growth With increasing pace of digitization in India, IBM believes that India is on the cusp of a definitive cognitive era
Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
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ast year, during a visit to India, IBM CEO, Ginni Rometty said that she believes that India can be a world leader in cognitive systems. The reasons for Rometty’s belief - India is on a rapid digitization drive, and is fast moving to create a digital ecosystem powered by technology enablers such as Aadhaar and UPI. The nation is also home to one of the largest developer populations in the world, and has a large number of ISVs who are rapidly helping global clients in their digital journey. This makes India a very unique market - as it is a market that not only has huge domestic potential, but also has huge influencer potential - thanks to its large base of software services players. India is also a unique market as its enterprises want to give clients access to high quality services at an extremely affordable price point. Be it sectors like telecom, healthcare or financial services - the ability to provide a customized service in a large volume market like India, can be the crucial differentiator. With each sector throwing up large volumes of data - most of it in unstructured form, Indian enterprises face a challenging task in harnessing intelligent insights. With Watson, IBM believes it can help Indian enterprises quickly take completely unstructured data and find new patterns that is not visible to humans, and in effect, amplify the cognitive ability of human beings. India is a significant market for IBM Watson, and Karan Bajwa, Managing Director, IBM India, points out three core reasons why his company believes that IBM is rightly positioned to help Indian enterprises with Watson’s cognitive capabilities. Says he,”India will be a very significant market for Watson for multiple reasons. Firstly, cognitive computing is about scaling expertise and augmenting capabilities of professionals. For us in India, every domain exhibits that challenge - be it healthcare, education, law, telecom, or financial services and financial inclusion - and Watson is here to help. As evidenced with oncologists at Manipal Hospitals, we are showing that this can be done at scale using the unique capabilities of Watson.” The second reason for IBM’s bullishness on Watson is the intent of the government to aggressively go down the digital path. “India is getting digitized at scale, thanks to initiatives such as Digital India. Cognitive is the “enrichment” layer on top of this digital foundation - and the rich data generated by it - that enhances services, customer engagement, and delivers immensely valuable insights from all the data,” states Bajwa. Finally, India is home to one of the world’s most prolific developer population, and rapidly becoming a global hotbed of innovative startups. With Watson, IBM wants to be the enablers of this vibrant community. Watson APIs delivered on cloud are fostering innovation around the world, and IBM sees India as one of the most important markets for consumption of these APIs. One more critical factor in India’s favor is the country’s ability to leapfrog technologies. “While some of the reasons may also hold true for other markets, the pace and the “leapfrog effect” are unique to India. India has often skipped ahead a generation or two of technologies, compared to the rest of the world - as evidenced in the telecom sector. We are at a similar point with regards to cognitive - where we can apply our learnings, our domain and industry expertise from around the world - readily to this market,” says Bajwa.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
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COVER STORY Making sense of unstructured data Watson’s ability to crunch huge volumes of data makes it well suited for a market like India, where the scale, velocity and diversity of data is much much larger, faster and complex than other countries. “80 percent of all data is dark and unstructured. It cannot be read or used by the hitherto computing systems. By 2020, that number will be 93 percent. Cognitive computing has the ability to read and make sense of this gigantic amount of data that was being wasted so far,” explains Dr Prashant Pradhan, Chief Developer Advocate, IBM India / South Asia. With the cloud as the platform, Watson can be made available to enterprises quickly and cost effectively. Says Dr Pradhan, “With Watson, every digital application, product and process can understand, reason and learn. Our platform is the cloud. So cognitive is the only way to ingest and extract value from the new natural resource of data in all its forms, so that it can be turned into competitive advantage and societal value. And cloud is the platform on which these solutions are designed, built, tested and deployed in the world.” Democratizing expertise Unlike traditional analytics solutions, a cognitive solution understands reasons and learns while interacting with humans. It understands data, structured and unstructured, text-based or sensory – in context and meaning, at astonishing speeds and volumes. It has the ability to form hypotheses, make considered arguments and prioritize recommendations to help humans make better decisions. However, the biggest differentiator is the ability to learn. It ingests and accumulates data and insight from every interaction continuously. Consider for example, a case, where Watson could correctly diagnose a 60-year old woman’s rare form of cancer within ten minutes – a feat that could not be achieved by the existing doctors. Watson sifted through 20 million cancer research papers. Additionally, the machine looked up several medical cases and millions of research papers. While human beings are experts in certain fields, their ability to process large volumes of data is limited. Through the ability to look at multiple sources of data and arrive at an inference is a complicated task for humans, a machine equipped with cognitive capabilities like Watson can do this with ease, and this can only improve over time. As the solution is trained and not programmed, by experts who enhance, scale and improve their expertise, it gets better over time. For example, it can help doctors diagnose accurately by looking at a huge number of parameters that are unique to every individual. Karan Bajwa gives the example of Manipal Hospitals, which is using Watson to deliver personalized treatment for cancer patients. While cases of cancer are rising rapidly, India faces an acute shortage of oncologists. Press reports estimate that India has only one oncologist per 1600 new cancer patients. This is where a technology like Watson can make a huge difference, and benefit from the knowledge gained by Watson by treating similar cases across the world. “Think about the corpus of oncology knowledge developed in partnership from the top oncologists at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Manipal Hospitals can now leverage this and achieve the leapfrog effect which we critically need, to serve a lot of patients where oncology expertise is tough to find,” states Bajwa. As the system gets trained with more patient data, the expectation is that the
treatment recommendations will improve A team of 12 oncologists from Manipal significantly. Says Nandkishor Dhomne, CIO, Hospitals, who have been trained to use this Manipal Hospitals, “Our expected aim is to solution help the patients in exact diagnosis ensure that our doctors with minimal effort and administer treatment accordingly. Watson would have a highly integrated solution that can understand the case and highlight a list of would allow access to Watson potential treatments with a percentage rank of recommendations for each patient. certitude. The doctor then reviews the list and Specifically, all demographic information, makes the final treatment decision in consult laboratory, radiology and histopathology with the patient. reports for a patient are automatically pulled by the Personalized HIS system and sent to context-based services Watson. Hence on a single Today businesses and Through the click, the doctor can open the organizations in 45 Watson system with all ability to look at countries across 20 different required information preare using Watson multiple sources industries populated.” to build cognitive of data and arrive capabilities into their IBM Watson is now used by oncologists at six locations in at an inference is products, applications, the Manipal Hospitals processes and offerings. a complicated network to provide Many retail customers, task for humans, for example are using information and insights to physicians to help them cognitive computing to a machine identify personalized, provide personalized, equipped with evidence-based cancer care context based, offers to cognitive options across India. Manipal various customers. One oncologists can access IBM capabilities like example is North Face, Watson for Oncology for which has launched a new Watson can do patients with breast, interactive online shopping this with ease colorectal and lung cancer experience powered by IBM that are registered with a Watson. Customers can now Manipal facility pan-India. use natural conversation as
they shop online via an intuitive, dialog-based recommendation engine, receiving outerwear recommendations that are tailored to their needs. Says Prativa Mohapatra, Vice President, Watson, IBM India/South Asia, “We believe that organizations have just begun to scratch the surface of cognitive computing capabilities. From improving customer engagement to enhancing research capabilities that identify new life-saving medical treatments, the potential value is boundless.” Across the globe, IBM is working with clients in financial services to apply cognitive to better manage risk and provide personalized guidance and investment options. In India, organizations like DHFL and Yes Bank, are testing out the potential of Watson. The potential for cognitive technology is immense and IBM’s clients in India are embedding cognitive technologies as a part of their digital transformation journey. “We are seeing organizations adopting cognitive technologies for specific use cases, applicable to a particular function or business issue. For example, scaling expertise in customer service operations, assisting faster on-boarding of new employees, enhancing organization process and methods accessible in a human and intuitive way, using deeper personality
India is getting digitized at scale, thanks to initiatives such as Digital India. Cognitive is the “enrichment” layer on top of this digital foundation - and the rich data generated by it - that enhances services, customer engagement, and delivers immensely valuable insights Karan Bajwa Managing Director IBM India
GLOBAL USE CASES FOR IBM WATSON Company
How Watson is being used
Pearson
Pearson and IBM are innovating with Watson APIs, education-specific diagnostics and remediation capabilities. Students will be able to dialogue with Watson in real time by asking questions on a particular topic. In another scenario, Watson will be able to search through an expanded set of education resources to retrieve relevant information to answer the student's question. During the dialogue with the student, Watson will constantly assess the student's responses and guide them with hints, feedback, explanations and identify common misconceptions. Watson also will be able to support the student by answering their questions, showing how the new knowledge they gain relates to their own existing knowledge and, finally, asking them questions to check their understanding. Students can respond in natural language to questions Watson asks, and Watson will use the student's responses to provide help, show areas they have improved and where they still need to work on.
Pfizer
IBM and Pfizer have announced a collaboration that will utilize IBM Watson for Drug Discovery to help accelerate Pfizer's research in immuno-oncology, an approach to cancer treatment that uses the body's immune system to help fight cancer. Pfizer is one of the first organizations worldwide to deploy Watson for Drug Discovery, and the first to customize the cloud-based cognitive tool – tapping in to Watson's machine learning, natural language processing, and other cognitive reasoning technologies to support the identification of new drug targets, combination therapies for study, and patient selection strategies in immuno-oncology. Immunotherapies, which modify a patient's immune system to recognize and target cancer cells using a combination of vaccines, immunomodulators, and small/large molecules, are reshaping the field of oncology. Oncology researchers at Pfizer will use Watson for Drug Discovery to analyze massive volumes of disparate data sources, including licensed and publicly available data as well as Pfizer's proprietary data. With this new tool, Pfizer researchers will analyze and test hypotheses to generate evidence-based insights for real-time interaction. The customized technology can also support efficient safety assessments.
Panasonic
Panasonic and IBM have announced a digital concierge service to enhance consumer experiences and expectations while traveling. The Panasonic Digital Concierge applies Watson and IBM Cloud to a digital mirror designed for hotels and other hospitality industry customers. Using the digital mirror, hotel guests can have a spoken dialog with Panasonic's Digital Concierge to quickly obtain a host of information about the hotel and its services, entertainment and shopping opportunities, transportation, weather, and other topics related to their stay.
H&R Block
H&R Block's tax professionals at approximately 10,000 branch offices across the U.S. will use a new, consumer-facing technology that incorporates IBM Watson - the largest deployment of Watson in retail locations. The new technology will help H&R Block tax professionals deliver the best outcome for each client's unique tax situation. This collaboration between H&R Block and IBM represents the first time Watson will be applied to tax preparation. The field of tax preparation involves massive volumes of data, including a federal tax code with more than 74,000 pages and thousands of yearly tax law changes, all of which impacts a client's tax outcome. As part of the first phase of the collaboration, H&R Block and IBM development teams trained Watson in the language of tax, first applying the technology to the thousands of questions and topics discussed during the return filing process. The result is a new cognitive experience for filers offered for the first time this tax season at H&R Block retail locations. The solution uses cloud-based Watson services to understand context, interpret intent and draw connections between clients' statements and relevant areas of their return.
Lotte Group
Lotte Group, one of Korea's top five companies, will use Watson technologies to maximize insights from the huge amount of structured and unstructured customer data collected through its various channels, including the Lotte Members program, deriving valuable learnings about customer preferences and product feedback. Lotte and IBM will team to create an 'Intelligent Shopping Advisor' for customers and an internal employee 'Cognitive Business Decision Advisor' for the Group's retail affiliates. The 'Intelligent Shopping Adviser' will be first introduced to Lotte's department stores. Customers will have their own virtual personal assistant offering help from product recommendations, shop location guidance, to support for online pickup service. Customers will benefit from greater convenience and an enhanced customer experience as they interact, in natural language, with a service that understands the questions asked, in the context of the individual shopper's needs. For example, a shopper can ask a question like "my 12-year-old daughter's birthday is next week. She likes reading and fashion, what is popular now and how can I purchase this gift?" The service will be designed to offer tailored recommendations, transaction support, advance notifications for customer's important life events and learn to recognize an individual's interests. With relevant choices and purchase knowledge, customers will not need to search and save their time and resources
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
6 | COVER STORY
We believe that organizations have just begun to scratch the surface of cognitive computing capabilities Prativa Mohapatra Vice President, Watson, IBM India/South Asia
With Watson, every digital application, product and process can understand, reason and learn Dr Prashant Pradhan, Chief Developer Advocate, IBM India / South Asia
insights of prospective buyers, easing the process of supplier negotiations which often takes weeks/months to just a few minutes,” says Bajwa. In education, Watson is helping in personalizing academic instruction and enhance experiences for students and teachers. Oil pipeline analysts are using Watson to trim years off production timelines; a leading audit firm is using Watson to reinvent audits – the difference between manually analyzing a small sample of hundreds of documents to using Watson to read and derive insights from thousands or millions of materials. A medical school has discovered a protein that inhibits the growth of tumor in cancer patients. A university in Australia uses Watson as a student advisor to answer their questions as they arrive in campus. Citizens of Singapore have access to government services with help from Watson. Last year, Macy’s announced the pilot of “Macy’s On Call,” a mobile web tool that allows customers to interact with an AI-powered platform, via their mobile devices. “Macy’s On Call” taps IBM Watson, via Satisfi, an intelligent engagement platform, to deliver a solution that will enhance the customer in-store shopping experience. The mobile companion, accessed via a mobile browser, allows customers to input natural language questions regarding each participating store’s unique product assortment, services and facilities and receive a customized response to the inquiry. There are a number of ways that customers may request information. For example, a customer could type, “Where are the ladies shoes?” or type a combination of brand and product inquiry such as “INC dress,” and they will receive the relevant response and location of that product in the store. Positioning Watson in India Watson is a big bet for IBM. The company continues to invest in Watson, including dedicating $100 million to
venture investments to support startups building cognitive apps through the Watson Developer Zone on Bluemix. IBM is also making Watson more widely available through the Watson Ecosystem, which has grown to more than 500 partners. Paired with Watson is the company’s core big data and analytics business. IBM has also invested over $15 billion in these areas since 2010, including over $7 billion on more than 20 acquisitions. Nearly half of IBM Research’s spending is focused on analytics and cognitive technologies. India is a high growth market, and extremely strategic, as it has a large domestic market, and a huge base of developers of software services players. Explaining the positioning of Watson in India, Bajwa says, “Our approach will be “bi modal” in nature. On the one hand, we will bring to bear deep, specialised solutions and expertise to specific industry verticals. You can think of Watson Oncology, deployed at Manipal Hospitals, as an example of such deep, domainspecific solutions. In addition, IBM has created a number of solutions to address specific business function challenges including Expertise Finder,
Agent Assist, Cognitive Claims, Equipment Repair, Conversation Bot and many more. On the other hand, developers, ISVs and startups can leverage Watson APIs via BlueMix on IBM Cloud to create innovative solutions, products and services with Watson.” Pradhan says that the consumption of cognitive technology is happening in two modes. So business and governments are adopting IBM Watson pre-built offerings/products and solutions which have a distinct Industry Pattern or leveraging IBM Watson Developer Cloud as a platform and appropriate APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) to built point solutions/ capabilities. “We have a plethora of ecosystem partners including business partners, start-ups and developers who have adopted this mode and are scaling fast. While industries like telecom, financial services, healthcare are early adopters, we also see lot of interest and applicability across emerging verticals like fashion retailers, media & entertainment and education. Knowledge based and services centric businesses like consulting, legal, BPOs are also rapidly adopting these technologies.” IBM is also engaging with
academia through its University Relations team, and with organizations such as Manipal Academy of Data Sciences, to introduce cognitive computing to students, professionals and budding entrepreneurs. IBM also recently signed a MoU with Infrastructure Leasing and Financial Services institute to provide personalized education to their students. IL& FS will leverage Watson capabilities to create technology-driven personalized learning and tutoring. IBM will use its cognitive technology platform, IBM Watson, as part of the partnership. IBM will use the IBM Watson data cloud as part of the deal, and access Watson education insight services, Watson library, student information insights — these are big data sets that have been created through collaboration and inputs with many universities. Similarly, students at MIT Pune have been using IBM Watson APIs powered by IBM Bluemix, and have hit the ground running with speed within weeks. Drawing from Watson’s domain knowledge, Chintu will assist senior citizens in conducting everyday tasks such as reading the newspaper / book and provide mood based
COGNITIVE IN ACTION Company
Cognitive solution used
InspireOne Technologies
Uses IBM Watson cognitive APIs in its professional development app to empower employees to develop their leadership skills
TEXTIENT
Uses Watson’s Personality Insights API along with sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and concept extraction to automatically generate a comprehensive Brand-Essence Report in a matter of minutes
Kalyan Jewellers
Has deployed IBM’s cognitive solution on the IBM Cloud platform to redefine its customer interface and experience
Manipal Hospitals
Uses IBM Watson to deliver personalized cancer care to its patients
Signzy Technologies
Uses Watson's cognitive APIs to quickly create an Artificial Intelligence assisted digital on-boarding solution. Using different APIs, the company has been able to replicate human intelligence in document verification and in detecting potential frauds
With cognitive capabilities, IBM Watson could prove to be extremely useful in areas such as fraud detection, procurement and even detecting new cyber attacks
entertainment services for song and dance and generate reminders on their daily medication. IBM has opened Watson’s APIs to an ecosystem of developers, partners and startups – who are adding the power of Cognitive to their businesses. For example, TEXTIENT is a Software as a Service (SaaS) platform for brand, marketing and customer insights. TEXTIENT uses Watson’s Personality Insights API along with sentiment analysis, entity extraction, and concept extraction to automatically generate a comprehensive Brand-Essence report in a matter of minutes. The report reflects dimensions influencing a brand’s strength and equity such as dominant brand personalities, emotional and sensory brand experiences, customer engagement and brand credibility. Talview, a HR technology solution provider uses a Watson-enabled solution to capture and objectively analyze all the data associated with the hiring process. The core functionality of the solution is to enable job candidates to record video interviews through a fixed or mobile device and to enable employers to apply sophisticated screening criteria to evaluate candidates. The solution analyzes a candidate’s resume content and social media posting content for recurring or important content patterns. The linguistic analysis
capabilities of the IBM Watson Tone Analyzer service allow the solution to read between the lines of what a candidate writes in a blog or says in a video interview, including emotions, social tendencies and language styles. Against the same data, IBM Watson Personality Insights service extracts personality insights such as values and needs. Similarly, professional development organization,InspireOne Technologies has embedded Watson in its Supernova application to empower employees to develop their leadership capabilities. Supernova uses Watson’s Sentiment Analysis and Natural Language Classifier APIs to analyze corporate emails, enabling Supernova to deliver evidence-based insights so managers can refine their own leadership capabilities and areas for development. Supernova can capture and quantify to what extent an employee applies leadership competencies such as collaboration or strategic thinking and also explain how to further develop such skills. For example, an employee who does not demonstrate collaboration frequently might get specific pointers, such as asking more questions from team members during interactions. HDFC Life, a large insurance company in India, has been using InspireOne’s Supernova solution powered by Watson. For SMEs, IBM expects Watson APIs on cloud to be the dominant consumption pattern. Companies such as Wayblazer - who developed a travel and hospitality business using Watson APIs - or ROSS Intelligence, who developed a cognitive app for lawyers - are prominent, and very interesting examples of this model. Says Mohapatra, “We recognise that many SMEs are going to be cloud- and mobilefirst, and hence the cloud based pay-per-use model is important. We enable hybrid cloud patterns where a business can build cognitive applications using the optimal mix of public and private cloud.” But the biggest potential of
Watson could be in the Government sector. Most central and state government departments are grappling with the challenges of managing huge volumes of data. With cognitive capabilities, IBM Watson could prove to be extremely useful in areas such as fraud detection, procurement and even detecting new cyber attacks. “We believe one of the biggest beneficiaries of this technology could be the public and government services. This is where we need - skill and scale. There are volumes of information, enormous data residing in documents and journals across departments Imagine the power of harnessing these and making them consumable,” states Bajwa. Future of Watson in India With Watson, IBM is seeing growth in both dimensions breadth as well as depth. On the depth front, IBM sees the early adopters of today moving on to leverage their IP and collective expertise deeper and better with Watson becoming better as they learn more. Here IBM sees Watson redefining professions altogether, where instead of spending 80 percent of their time in gathering and analyzing information, professionals are able to focus more and more on value-added work, while Watson assists them in understanding and leveraging all data and insights in the organization and beyond. On the breadth front, IBM sees the collective ecosystem leading the charge. “We believe in a few years, every decision we take - in every aspect of life and in every profession - will be impacted by cognitive. With increasing pace of digitization in India, a lot of domains will be ripe for the application of cognitive technologies and services, delivered via the cloud,” says Bajwa. At a time when a majority of private Indian enterprises and government departments are looking to transform themselves digitally, IBM’s big bet on cognitive technologies could pay off in India.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
|7
INTERVIEW
We want to be the largest storage company in India THE STORAGE INDUSTRY is in a state of change and traditional storage is giving way to more innovative approaches such as software-defined storage. Since no one solution fits every need, having a broad portfolio is necessary, and nobody has a portfolio of the scope of Western Digital Corporation. In an exclusive conversation with Nivedan Prakash, Khalid Wani, Managing Director Sales, Western Digital Corporation, India shares the company’s India specific plans and opportunities and how WDC plans to maintain its leadership position in the country How bullish is WDC about the Indian market? Earlier, we had created a region comprising of Middle East, Africa, and India combined. And we had termed it as an emerging market. Interestingly, in one of the recent developments, we have decided to craft In the last 18 to out India as a 24 months, we region by itself and we will be have seen directly strong growth working with in our the corporate. This signals a surveillance very strong business due to shift in terms of our strategy, the Indian focus, and the government's attention that the increased focus organization on smart city wants to have projects on India as a market. It is because we predominantly believe that India will be one of the fastest growing markets for WDC and its entire product line - be it consumer, enterprise, OEM, surveillance, or datacentre.
For us, India has been on a growth trajectory for the last couple of years both from WDC as well as SanDisk perspective. Any vertical that we are currently operating in India, we see a very strong opportunity to grow. Besides, we believe that the country has the potential to drive its own go-to-market strategy and the right support from the corporation in terms of resources and investments would actually help us execute the GTM strategy in India. Moreover, the merger and integration of SanDisk business within our ecosystem helped us to scale and create a high growth model here. In the last 18 to 24 months, we have seen strong growth in our surveillance business due to the Indian government's increased focus on smart city projects. The consumer space is another critical growth area for us driven by the huge penetration of smartphones and content generation. In terms of product category, we have witnessed good growth of the dual drives that can be used as both USB as well as storage device. At the top of it, the rising demand from the
enterprise space is going to further help us drive different growth verticals in India. You mentioned about the smart city projects. How strong are you in that space or are you still exploring or in talks with different government agencies? Smart City is a fabulous initiative and as an organisation we believe that our product line would help add a lot of value in building infrastructure for smart cities, especially in the security and surveillance space. At this point of time, we have a fairly decent level of engagement with the government. Besides, we continue to have our teams to work on strategic alliances and partnerships in the SMB and the enterprise space that is being pushed or supported by the government. The fact that the initiative of Smart City has kicked off on a good note and the government is serious about it will help us expand our horizon. From the overall initiative perspective, it’s a step in the right direction and as an organisation, we will continue to support the government wherever we can.
WDC is seen as a strong player in the surveillance space. Besides the smart city projects, where else do you see the opportunities lying in his domain? If you look at the surveillance industry per se and the opportunities associated with it, it’s not only smart cities driving this space. Smart city is a very small portion of this particular segment. The whole surveillance space is driven by every other vertical, whether it is the enterprise, corporate, or end user space. One of the key areas that continues to grow in the surveillance sector is the consumer space, wherein you will find a lot of end users wanting to have a much more reliable security and surveillance system built at home. If you collectively look at all these segments – government, private or public private enterprise, high end residential areas, individual users - everybody is concentrating very heavily on surveillance and security. I believe it’s going to be in every vertical that you can find an opportunity to grow. And from the technology perspective, our Purple line
of products, is considered to be one of the best available in the surveillance space. Besides, we keep on working towards product enhancements to offer bestof-the-breed solutions to the market. Since the company has identified India as one big potential market for its growth, has this called for a realignment in your go-tomarket strategy? Usually as an organization, we do not share our go-to-market strategy. But I can tell you that from the organisational perspective, we have made some realignments post the integration of SanDisk business. We did it to make
sure that we have the right resources available to cater to the right segments in the market. For us the importance of India as a market is very critical and our investments in the country continue to be strong. We have a very strong R&D centre based out of Bangalore. Now, we will focus on expanding our team and create pillar to pillar strength in India to ensure that we have a very strong core built here. And our go-to-market strategy will revolve around this approach. We just want to make sure that we are a very strong player in our domain and the largest (post the acquisition) as well as best storage company in India. And the focus would be on creating a robust value system for the customers. In your bid to become the number one storage player in the Indian market, what sort of road blocks are being faced by the comany in this journey? There are always external factors through which you have to navigate around in different markets. It could be related to the whole demography and, as you
rightly pointed out, India has such a large demography that it brings a lot of complexities with itself in the way you build your business to make sure that you are able to fulfil and cater to the tier 2, 3 and 4 cities in India. Creating an ecosystem where you have touchpoints for consumers to reach out to you is always a challenge and I am just talking about a particular segment and similarly you will find a lot of challenges in various other environment. But having said that, I think as a company we have been able to successfully navigate around it and build the right model which allows us to cater to those complexities and roadblocks which are out there. We will keep finding these tactical, time bound, and economic challenges but as a company, we will always strive to overcome them. I personally feel that irrespective of these roadblocks - short term or long term - the sheer fact that India is one of the fastest growing economies in the world gives you no other reason not to believe that this is the growth market to target.
Oracle foresees tremendous opportunity for mobility in the higher education sector THE INDIAN EDUCATION sector is in the midst of a huge transformation enabled by technology. Classroom boards have become more interactive and students have immediate access to information using mobiles, iPads and laptops. Looking at the huge opportunities in this sector, Oracle has rolled out a series of mobile enhancements specifically designed to meet the unique needs of higher education. In an interaction with Srikanth RP, Mitesh Agarwal, CTO, Oracle India, shares his perspective on why Oracle foresees a tremendous opportunity for mobility in the higher education sector in India Some edited excerpts: What do you believe is the market opportunity for your firm in terms of mobility? Is there a ‘white space’ that has not been targeted by other firms? Mobility in India is mostly being driven from within the organization. Today, organizations want to be able to extend their enterprise applications to mobile Mobility is devices taking the same because keeping the trajectory as workforce that taken by connected the Web when empowers everyone to it came into make being decisions, take action, and stay informed. What we are seeing is that Mobility is taking the same trajectory as that taken by the Web when it came into being. Today, nobody questions the need for a web presence. Similarly, time has come when it is imperative to have a mobile presence for all applications
and services. With respect to specific sectors, Oracle foresees tremendous opportunity for mobility in the higher education sector. Currently, more than 50 percent of India’s population is under 25 years old. But as opposed to developed countries, where the percentage of skilled workforce is between 60 percent and 90 percent of the total workforce, India records a low 5 percent of workforce (20 to 25 years) with formal vocational skills. There is a pressing need for accelerated reform in the higher education ecosystem to equip India’s youth with skillsets that enhance their employability in a digital economy with Apps tailored to specific education or coaching needs, enabling faculties or educational houses to provide management information and decision support systems, education systems that leverage enterprise mobility are ahead of the game from both, value creation and sizing the bigger market share perspectives. Therefore,
universities and colleges are looking to ensure that information is available anywhere, anytime via any device to enterprise applications. This has led to a surge in the demand for enterprise mobile applications in the education field. We offer universities a complete mobile solution to help colleges reduce the financial burden of deploying new technologies for curriculum updates and provides scalable services to address fluctuating demands. From a technology point of view, what is the unique differentiator you have over other firms? Oracle Mobile Platform provides a common technology framework for building, integrating, securing, deploying and managing mobile apps on any device. It supports a multi-channel, multi-device framework that allows building apps once and deploying them to iOS, Android and other platforms— with web, native and hybrid delivery. It leverages Oracle Fusion
The next frontier for mobility will see mobile devices enhance learning to make content more engaging
Middleware infrastructure to expose enterprise applications and data as web services and restful API’s that allow easy integration between mobile apps and back-end systems. This means that the same platform that you use to develop and maintain your enterprise applications can now be extended to develop, integrate, secure, deploy, and manage your mobile applications.
Apps created with the Oracle Mobile Platform integrate easily with each other as well as with third party applications based on Java and other industrystandard languages and protocols. This platform also protects API’s to uphold corporate security and compliance policies, with comprehensive capabilities for mobile identity management and mobile application management.
We provide the industry’s most complete, end-to-end offering aimed at reducing the risks associated with smart mobile devices. This is a unique capability that Oracle provides with respect to providing security in the mobile space. With a complete set of security-focused capabilities—including access and authentication, single sign-on, application containerization, corporate
application store —Oracle Mobile Security enables organizations to rapidly adopt and deploy new mobile technologies and applications, and segregate and manage corporate data and applications without interfering with mobile users’ personal data and applications. Can you share some details on the future strategy? Modern students are more connected and empowered than ever before. They arrive on campus – either physically or virtually – with high expectations. And as student expectations continue to rise, so will the pressure for colleges and universities to deliver personalized, seamless experiences demanded by modern students. Therefore, the next frontier for mobility will see mobile devices enhance learning to make content more engaging. Mobile learning is set to become a permanent feature in schools, colleges and universities, worldwide.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
8 | INTERVIEW
“Our goal is to make DBS the world’s most innovative bank” OVER THE PAST few years, DBS Bank has been accelerating its digital transformation agenda. This includes embarking on a comprehensive and holistic mission of building a start-up culture, re-architecting the bank’s technology infrastructure, and leveraging Big Data, biometrics and artificial intelligence to reimagine banking for its customers. Neal Cross, Managing Director and Chief Innovation Officer, shares insights with Nivedan Prakash on how the bank has reinvented banking through constant innovation DBS is one bank that has created a culture of innovation. How are you catalysing innovation across the organization? Before I joined, the bank had undergone the process improvement to get the basics right and in turn, create a better customer experience. Then they started looking at design thinking training and did well on the culture movement. When I came on board, my immediate task was to regroup as well as rebuilt the innovation team and as a first initiative, we started engaging staff like startups. The first rule set up was that the innovation group would never ever invent products or services. Secondly, we will not hire technology people or business experts. With this approach, we have turned the entire bank into an innovation group. As part of the innovation exercise, the bank staff run workshops either on their own, or in collaboration with startups, DBS digibank has students, and been live since last coporate partners, year and we went wherein they from zero to half a figure out the million customers issues and come up with creative in 6 months ways to solve them. This has worked really well for us, as it not only helps the bank in understanding customer problems but also finding accurate solutions. The objective of all these is to make the whole organization more experimental and scientific in producing solutions for customers. Our goal is to make DBS the world’s most innovative bank. Last year, 5000 bank staff across functions like HR, finance, corporate banking, and consumer banking among others were enrolled for an innovation program so that they could achive what they intend to. Besides, we organized hackathons for the staff so that they could innovate new products for the bank. Our intention was to develop and bring in the culture of startups within the bank. We have recently built Asia’s biggest banking innovation center in Singapore, called DBS Asia X (DAX), which underscores our ongoing commitment to shaping the future of banking and emracing the future of work. What sort of digitization efforts are being put in to accelerate digital transformation at the DBS Bank? One of the tangible outcome of DBS’ digital transformation journey is the development of DBS digibank, India’s first mobile-only bank, which allows customers to access bank services from their smartphones or tablets without having to visit a physical branch. On the digital piece and
Today, 92% of the customer requests are serviced by the chatbot and we have recieved a lot of positive feedback from happy customers
creating new businesses around it, we spend a lot of time in India with the digibank team while tyring to understand the consumer psyche, what they want to achieve, and be there with friction-free, highly contextual offering for them to fulfill their financial need. Moreover, we spend a lot of time in training the digital team. We run hackathons across India so that startups can help us understand how things would look like and work in the country. DBS digibank has been live since last year and we went from zero to half a million customers in 6 months. This is an incredible growth like an startup. For us, it is not just about the products but how businesses can reinvent themselves. Like, for the talent development program, HR is running a hackathon where startups are inovled. We also run another program wherein we pay $25,000 to our staff and coach and mentor them like startups. With no strings attached, we are first company in the world to take such initiatives. We take no equity, as this is simply for staff benefit. Hence, we have a developed a typical culture within the organization, which is way more than powerful than any form of innovation. Any particular reason for activly engaging with the fintech ecosystem? We have been engaging with fintech startups more than any other bank across the globe. Besides, we use fintech as well. The classic example is our chatbot system deployed in India. Then, we have partnerships with fintech companies for crowd lending, micro lending, social payments, etc. Besides, we have enhanced our engagement with the start-up community with the launch of DBS HotSpot, a pre-
accelerator programme for fintech, social enterprises and digital start-ups to encourage entrepreneurialism. DBS has collaborated with fintech’s to create state-of-the-art customer offerings. For example, digibank comprises artificial intelligence technology from USbased Kasisto, an intelligent budget optimiser from Singapore-based Moneythor and a soft token solution by Singapore-based V-Key. Additionally, we are establishing the FinTech Foundry, a startup engagement initiative, where fintechs will be encouraged to partner with DBS staff to prototype ideas, as well as develop mobile and web banking solutions via an eight to 12-week programme. The initial focus will be on delivering customer-centric concepts related to insurance, deposits, payments, wealth management and cybersecurity. This programme will leverage DBS’ tech specialists, user experience designers, ethnographic specialists and data scientists. DBS is one of first banks to deploy chatbot. How has been the experience so far? The implementation of chatbot has been very successful. Today, 92% of the customer requests are serviced by the chatbot and we have recieved a lot of positive feedback from happy customers. We use chatbots in multiple ways like they can understand your spending, give past transaction details, balance left in the account, and accordingly guide your future spends. It’s a very high quality chatbot and we took a long time to get it right. In order to sustain the momentum of being futureready, what are the specific technological initiatives being
taken? While I can’t be very specific about our initiatives and projects, the technologies that are being closely looked upon are Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain, and Big Data Analytics – all these are progressing ata good rate. Again reiterating, it’s not just about the technology but the culture that is being developed within the organization to harness these technologies in the best possible way. We have around 340 projects running currently and we have to keep delivering each one of them. But having said that, amongst all the megatrends, we are very excited and bullish about Internet of Things, as it creates transparency to drive efficiency. Our future can be reinvented with the help of IoT. You mentioned about blockchain. How do you see its potential and the areas where it can be leveraged. Except for Nasdaq, which is a finanicial institution, none of the banks in the world have gone live with the production of blockchain. Currently, the banks are just experiementing, doing pilot projects, POCs, and talking around blockchain. There are certain areas where blockchain can prove effective like trade and finance across borders where multiple parties are involved, ownership of mortgages, and detecting and reducing fraud amongst other areas. While it’s highly unlikely that blockchain is going to totally reinvent finance, it will definitely make the finance cheaper, better, and quicker. We are in the very early stages of blockchain. The need of the hour is to leverage the cloud to bring down operational costs, get better data management and APIs out so that
There are certain areas where Blockchain can prove effective like trade and finance across borders where multiple parties are involved. Blockchain will definitely make finance cheaper, better and quicker
we can connect to the new ecosystem and partnerships, and then create positions like Chief Ecosystem Officer to manage all these. In your bid to be future-ready, how is DBS building the workforce with relevant skillsets? The first thing we ensure that we hire the right people. For example, at the DBS Asia Hub 2 in Hyderabad, we are going to organize a hackathon in the first week of April this year, wherein we will pick the very top developers and give them an opportunity to work with us. Through this recruitment drive, DBS Hack2Hire, we will hire 100 technology skilled professionals in emerging and disruptive
technologies across cloud, machine learning and Big Data. We have collaborated with leading technology providers such as Amazon Web Services, Cloudera and Pivotal for conducting this hackathon. We are seeing rapid advancements in banking technology using cloud, machine learning and Big Data, which are paving the way for a new world of seamless banking. We want to bring developers well-versed in these new technologies into the bank to accelerate our digital transformation efforts. We believe that recruiting via a hackathon is an innovative and effective way to attract the right talent. Meanwhile, we recently conducted a similar initiative in India named ‘Ideathon’ to identify talent from top business schools across India. This was part of the bank’s campus engagement and communication strategy, aimed to make DBS Bank the preferred place to work for millennials. Besides, on a regular basis, we organize a lot of ‘lunch and learn’ sessions, wherein we invite industry thought leaders who talk on digital currency, blockchain, IoT, robotics, and other areas. We have a daily newsletter that goes out to staff around highlighting all the innovations being done across the globe. Then, we have startups working with internal staff, wherein from the technology perspective, they get to see the new tools and techniques. We have also rolled Office 365 to improve our collaboration platform. We have started a strategic technological initiative, called ‘GANDALF’, which stands for Google, Amazon, Netflix, DBS, Apple, LikedIn, and Facebook. From each of these businesses, we learn different things like from Netflix, we learn how to run experiments and from Amazon, we learn how to manage data, etc.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
|9
CASE STUDY
Mobiles replace physical access cards at STAR India AT STAR INDIA, employees just need to tap their mobile phones running Android or iOS to unlock their doors and gates Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
S
tar India is one of India’s most well known brands, and creates more than 20,000 hours of content annually for over 50 channels in its network. The firm has thousands of employees, spread over seven locations in India. Star India, which has always been proactive in ensuring the highest security standards, was keen to replace the physical access cards, due to its inherent limitations. Firstly, physical cards were prone to damage, and there was a high possibility of them being misplaced, and even misused. Further, every new replacement of a physical card had to be done manually, which cost the company, time and
A virtual card in a mobile phone gives Star India unprecedented flexibility to provision or revoke IDs quickly Vishwanath Kulkarni Director of Sales, Physical Access Control, India and SAARC, HID Global
money. Sumir Yadav, Star India’s Senior Vice President (Administration and Facilities), started looking at options, and decided that the best option was to leverage the use of mobile-based access solutions, as almost every employee had a smartphone. After looking at different options, Star India zeroed in on HID Global’s mobile access solution that eliminates the need for access cards and reduces costs related to card re-issuance. Employees just need to tap their mobile phones running Android or iOS to unlock their doors and gates. Says Sumir Yadav, “The new solution from HID Global lets us take advantage of technology in this mobile first age and achieve better security without being intrusive or compromising on user experience.” The company has deployed HID Mobile Access for more than 3500 employees across seven locations. The deployment, from the initial planning to the solution going online, took Star India only 12 weeks. Mobile IDs, a core component of HID Mobile Access, are provisioned via the solution’s online portal. “A virtual card in a mobile phone gives Star India unprecedented flexibility to provision or revoke IDs quickly. Using the portal, Star India can now easily and efficiently assign access rights to employees over the air. Onboarding of employees can now be done in a faster way,” states Vishwanath Kulkarni, Director of Sales, Physical Access Control, India and SAARC, HID Global. Whenever a new employee
joins the company, the IT administrators can effortlessly enroll them into the system by simply sending the employee an email invitation. The system-generated email contains directions and an activation code for the recipient to download and use the HID Mobile Access App. Upon entering the code and
successfully activating the app, the employee can begin using their mobile device to unlock doors and gates at Star India. Since mobile IDs are provisioned via the online portal, they can be easily changed, issued or revoked by any of Star India’s own administrators at a moment’s notice. HID Global’s technology ensures that enduser identity data stored on mobile IDs is protected using secure data encryption. Phone-based access Doors can be configured to
allow only people who have the right authorization. Additionally, the management team also receives better data on staff’s time and attendance.
Using a portal, Star India can now easily and efficiently assign access rights to employees
As employees can use their own devices to sign in, Star India does not have to maintain an extensive inventory of physical access cards, and is spared from the hassle of managing and maintaining physical access cards. In the future, Star India is exploring options to expand the use of mobile access beyond opening doors and gates to include accessing its staff canteen and collaboration spaces, as well as to manage visitor access.
HOW IT WORKS ◗ The company no longer has to maintain an inventory of physical access cards, or designate staff to manage them which savestime and money ◗ Mobile IDs can be easily
changed, issued or revoked by any of Star India’s own administrators at a moment’s notice
◗ The management team receives better data on staff’s time and attendance
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
10 | CASE STUDY
PNB MetLife’s virtual reality platform set to take customer service to new level
THE INSURANCE firm has launched conVRse, a first-of-its-kind Virtual Reality (VR) based customer service platform, that enables customers to get their queries answered using visual elements Abhishek Raval abhishek.raval@expressindia.com
I
ndia is in the midst of an exciting phase of digital transformation, with firms in the BFSI sector taking the lead in pushing the limits of innovation. One recent example of innovation is an experiential virtual reality platform called conVRse, launched by PNB MetLife Life Insurance Company. The goal provide a differentiated, immersive and a personalized experience to the customer through the VR headset available in 15 PNB MetLife branches across 10 cities. When customers put on the VR headset they find themselves in a 3D simulated virtual room, face to face with
an avatar “ Khushi ”, the company’s life insurance expert. The customers simply need to walk into select PNB MetLife branches, wear the VR headset and get all their servicing requirements fulfilled by Khushi. The platform will display policy related information and uniquely engage the customers through visual elements like animations. “ConVRse is a digital platform which combines customer service and engagement together. Traditionally, customer queries are answered using a one-to-one linear transaction. For example, if you use an IVR system, you are asked to put in the policy number for getting any query answered. As
customer engagement is a vital element of customer relationship management, our virtual avatar viz., ‘Khushi’ not only answers the customer’s queries, which are more transactional in nature, but also engages with the customer. We are trying to move from a conventional service into an engagement, which is more effective,” opines Samrat Das CIO, PNB MetLife Life Insurance Company. The Chairman of IRDAI launched the service on 19th December, 2016. The platform requires standard make VR head gear, an android device which runs the app, and an Internet connection. As the VR application is resource intensive, it currently has restrictive access. It can only be accessed at the branches and not at the insurer’s home. Accordingly, the bandwidth for VR is dedicated and not shared. How VR can make a difference Using VR, the insurance
THE POWER OF VR FOR SERVICING EASY ACCESS TO INFORMATION
SERVICE REQUESTS
CLAIMS
◗ Policy details ◗ Policyholder
◗ Address change ◗ Mobile/Email
◗ Intimation ◗ Submission
◗ Premium
◗ Change in
◗ Track status
◗ ◗ ◗ ◗
◗ Apply for a
details
payment New application Fund value Payment refund Policy document
update
Premium mode
Policy Loan ◗ Fund Switch ◗ Bank account ◗ Standing instructions
process
CUSTOMER FEEDBACK
◗ Registration ◗ Track resolution
firm can go beyond answering traditional queries. For example, when the customer is querying Khushi on when the next premium is due, Khushi might also recommend that given the current premium being paid by the customer is on a quarterly basis, it might be more appropriate to pay on an annual basis because perhaps it might turn out to be less costly and also there are lesser hassles of paying it on a quarterly basis. The entire policy is visible wearing the VR headset. Another example is that of a customer who wants to just change his address. The customer can actually talk to Khushi as it is an audio, visual experience, and the change in address can be done quickly. The response to the VR platform has been phenomenal. “About 200 customers have availed the services till date and the feedback has been great. Going forward, the service will be rolled out across all the customer touchpoints and services. We are closely watching what the customers are doing using the VR facility but it’s too early to identify a trend. As soon as the customer enters the branch and if he wants to use the VR, there is a special room that he can go to and wear the headset to navigate through his queries, where he is guided by the avatar known as Khushi. Enhancing engagement The overall vision behind going for VR is to enhance the engagement and intensity of the interactions for the firm’s customers with its sales teams and distributors to demystify the complex world of life
insurance because in most cases, the customer does not have a clear idea about the life insurance product. “VR can be used as an excellent communication jargon for explaining life insurance products in a language that is understood by a layman by using the audio visual medium and make people address their need rather than buying something they do not require. That’s the journey that we have embarked for ourselves and any kind of subtle engagement can have a direct contribution effect in terms of the servicing capability as well as the acquisition capability. We are even exploring such VRs at PNB’s ATMs,” explains Samrat Das.
MetLife has an Innovation center in Singapore known as LumenLab. This particular VR initiative from the beta stage to the concept stage to final execution was done jointly by LumenLab and MetLife India. It took about two months for the idea to hit the ground from the moment it was envisaged.
KEY BENEFITS
◗ Interact with 'Experts' for easy access to information and real time resolution
◗ 'Education & 'Training' in an immersive environment ◗ 'Transparency & Trust' driven by superior technology
About 200 customers have availed the services till date and the feedback has been great. Going forward, the service will be rolled out across all the customer touchpoints and services. Samrat Das CIO, PNB MetLife Life Insurance Company
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
| 11
NEWS ANALYSIS
SAP tailors its HANA platform for Indian SMEs GERMAN ENTERPRISE software maker SAP has launched SAP S/4HANA private cloud tailored for mid-size companies in India
Mohd Ujaley mohd.ujaley@expressindia.com
Our commitment, through SAP S/4HANA private cloud, is to provide each and every Indian business the opportunity to tap into the power and potential of SAP HANA as they pave the way towards a pervasive digital business
W
ith the government pushing for the adoption of digital transactions and a unified technology driven taxation system, goods and services tax (GST) likely to be rolled-out in JuneJuly 2017, the Indian small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are gearing up for balancing between the limited IT resources they have with the need to be agile to capitalise on emerging opportunities. To focus on this thriving market in India, German enterprise software maker, SAP recently launched SAP S/4HANA private cloud, a next generation business suite tailored for mid-size companies. “Our commitment, through SAP S/4HANA private cloud, is to provide each and every Indian business the opportunity to tap into the power and potential of SAP HANA as they pave the way towards a pervasive digital business,” said Deb Deep Sengupta, president and managing director, SAP Indian subcontinent. The Walldorf, Germany headquartered company said that its newly launched private cloud edition offers the flexibility and functionality of SAP S/4HANA enterprise
Deb Deep Sengupta President and Managing Director, SAP Indian subcontinent.
management solution to mid-size companies at a simple and affordable subscription pricing model. “Setting up of an IT infrastructure that can take care of finance, HR, procurement, analytics require lot of expertise and capital investment. But if a company goes for a solution like SAP S/4HANA private cloud, upfront there is saving of 30 percent on that investment and also it allows them to focus on their core businesses,” stated Atul Sareen, vice president and head of cloud sales,
SAP India. Available in a modular subscription pricing without any upfront capital investment, SAP claims that the solution offers enterprise-caliber data security and faster time to value allowing SMEs to go digital within weeks on predefined services. The key advantage of SAP S/4HANA in general is that transactional and analytical data can be processed at faster speed when compared with traditional database platforms. “The benefit of this solution is that
both transaction and analytics are in sync. This is mostly used by the large enterprise and mid-market firms. For SMEs, we have done good amount of market research on S/4HANA and came out with S/4 HANA private cloud,” mentioned Sareen. SMEs which are typically defined as a company employing 500 employees or less or having a turnover of about `1500 crore, usually have limited IT resources and require an ERP system with broad and deep functionality as well as a
low cost of ownership. The number of companies that fall under this category is large. SAP has more than 7500 customers across the subcontinent, out of which over 5500 customers are SMEs. Interestingly, this is the segment where revenue growth is happening. But it is also a highly fragmented market where tech firms such as Oracle, Salesforce, and Intuit are trying to increase their pie. In November last year, Oracle purchased cloud SME business apps player NetSuite and now both Oracle
and SAP are likely to face off in this arena more often. “We have been focusing on SMEs for many years. Currently, 75-80 percent of our installed base in India falls under this category. We have over 5500 SME customers in the country. For us it is a huge opportunity,” added Sareen. Overall, the SME market is divided into different segments and with the government pushing for local manufacturing under the “Make in India” initiative, companies are setting up new units. SAP sees this as an opportunity to increase sale of its ERP solutions in the country. Going forward, the company also plans to bring SAP S/4HANA public cloud edition in India.
banking sector include better client satisfaction through faster, more convenient and secure services, minimization of fraud, maximization of efficiency, security and transparency, streamlining paper work, accelerated information and money flows and greatly improved auditability. Says Prasanna Lohar, Head of Technology (Digital Banking), DCB Bank, “There is more to Blockchain than moving money. In the recent days, the country has seen a dramatic increase in Blockchain adoption/awareness and the government’s openness to the technology can translate to a lenient regulatory view towards Blockchain.” Lohar believes that Blockchain has the potential to transform our
lives through its benefits. This includes faster settlement times that are user-optimized, lower collateral requirements and counterparty risk, improved contractual term performance, greater trans-
parency for regulatory reporting, better capital optimization, reduction of operating costs and the fact that it is incorruptible. “The recent trend is towards collaboration i.e. partnerships between competitive banks, technology companies, fintech companies and regulators. This will bring benefits to consumers and the financial system. Collaboration among these different stakeholders will bring multiple innovative and cost effective use cases in sections such as clearing and settlements, payments, smart assets, identity management, data management and data protection, AML and KYC and governance which in turn can lead to a sharing economy in the Indian banking sec-
tor. Post de-monetization, UPI and many other movements in innovations , Blockchain can be the radical change agent in India,” states Lohar. Banks can greatly benefit from using Blockchain, as it can be used to remove a huge amount of paperwork and intermediaries. As the number of intermediaries get reduced, the advantages are tremendous. Hence, any transaction that involves lot of intermediaries is a good use case for Blockchain. This has huge cost implications. For example, a report from Santander InnoVentures claims that banks can slash infrastructure costs by $15-20 billion by 2022, by eliminating redundant activities.
Bank-Chain: India’s first Blockchain exploration consortium launched for banks Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
B
ank-Chain, India’s first Blockchain exploration consortium for banks was announced in Mumbai on 8th February, 2017. State Bank of India (SBI) has taken the initiative to take this effort forward as it believes that it is essential for banks to collaborate and develop Blockchain solutions for the betterment of the financial sector. A spokesperson for SBI added that Bank-Chain will enable banks to explore, build and implement Blockchain solutions which can minimize fraud and maximize effi-
ciency, security and transparency. Bank-Chain has been formed in collaboration with Primechain Technologies, a young Indian startup with a core focus on Blockchain. “Some of the quick action Blockchain use-cases include antimoney laundering, currency exchange and remittance, KYC, digital signature, communication of financial information”, says Shinam Arora, CEO, Primechain Technologies. Axis Bank, Central Bank of India, DCB Bank, Deutsche Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, IDBI, Kotak Mahindra Bank and Saraswat Bank have also shown an interest in collaborating for Bank-Chain. Some of the core benefits of Blockchain technology for the
Banks can greatly benefit from using Blockchain, as it can be used to remove a huge amount of paperwork and intermediaries
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
12 | INTERVIEW
Data driven culture can drive the growth of analytics HEADQUARTERED IN RADNOR, Pennsylvania, Qlik is a global provider of business intelligence & visualization software that helps its customers generate better insights and make informed decisions. With a prior experience of working with technology leaders such as Toshiba and Panasonic, Jeremy Sim the director of industry solutions at Qlik, APAC, is responsible for the growth of company's business in the manufacturing and high tech sectors. Qlik has over 40,000 customers globally, across all business sectors ranging from SMB to Fortune 500 companies. In an exclusive interview with Ankush Kumar, Sim talks about how data generated by IoT devices can be effectively used by the industry and the government sector Some edited excerpts: How do you see the combination of IoT and data analytics being used by the industry? Recently, we are seeing an increase in the adoption of IoT. As you can imagine, you need a strong The government infrastructure in should therefore order for IoT to aim to create an be pervasive. However, several IoT industry in organizations India worth USD 15 like the hightech, auto and billion by 2020, telco sectors are based on the already seeing value from IoT approximation data analysis. that India would For example in have a share of 5-6 the auto sector, our customers percent of the analyze the global IoT industry sensor data from automobiles to understand the reliability of the product as well as the driving or usage patterns. These insights drive innovation within the product brand and also help improve after sales service.
Which sectors do you believe will lead in leveraging this combination (IoT and analytics)? In terms of Internet of Things (IoT), we do see the manufacturing and retail sectors at the forefront of leveraging this innovative technology. Manufacturers are empowered to gain greater insights into their production systems with sensor data from their equipment. Additionally, the items produced, especially electronics and automobiles, constantly transmit information about the reliability and usability. This allows the manufacturers to understand the relation between their products and the ecosystem. Such knowledge is valuable for the development of new products and potential upgrades. Retailers can also learn of buying patterns of customers via mobile devices, which results in better marketing activities. Through the installation of sensors in stores, retailers are able to analyze and monitor how customers navigate along the aisles in order to create effective assortment of goods and allocation of products. How is the demand for BI and
analytics solutions from the government? Business Intelligence is now being considered as an important tool for turning measurements into actionable information. With the augment of the ‘Digital India’ initiative, government departments have fast tracked how they want to look at managing, measuring and monitoring data. As government operations are largely information-based, data analysis is playing a critical role. They are also placing a huge focus on aspects such as embedded BI, as well as mobile and social BI. We have been working with various government departments in India and globally, and enabling them to glean actionable intelligence out of vast amounts of data. In India, we work for government agencies dealing with the Department of Information Technology, state governments, as well as departments associated with taxation. How do you think IoT can be effectively used in the government sector? The digital space has witnessed major transformations in the last couple of years. With
IoT industry in India worth USD 15 billion by 2020, based on the approximation that India would have a share of 5-6 percent of the global IoT industry. Capacity building (Human & Technology) programmes should be undertaken for IoT specific skill sets for domestic as well as international markets. The country should also undertake Research & Development for all assisting technologies. The aim should be to develop IoT products customized to Indian needs in all possible domains.
the advent of the government’s ‘Digital India’ initiative in full throttle, IoT would play a very critical role. With IoT, the number of connected sensors will soon reach trillions, working with billions of intelligent systems involving in-numerous applications, which will drive new consumer and business behaviour. This demand for increasingly intelligent industry solutions based on IoT will drive trillions of dollars in opportunity for the IT industry and even more for the companies that take advantage of IoT. The government should therefore aim to create an
How can we make the best use of the data generated by IoT devices? Firstly, there has to be a strong infrastructure to manage the transmission and collection of IoT data. Processes need to be in place to transform and managed the data once collected. Most importantly, the people who analyze the data need to be trained. There has to be a data driven culture within an organization to drive the growth of analytics. Besides increasing the usage of analytics, organizations also need to embrace the analytical results. This is where strong corporate and executive
leadership is needed. How is Qlik making sense of all the data that has been generated? In general, there are 3 types of data in IoT: data in motion, data in use and data at rest. Different technologies are required for each of these. Qlik provides the analytical platform to visualize and analyze data. Hence, what an organization requires is a network of technologies that eventually draws data from the source to the end user where they can start their analysis. Qlik collaborates with numerous technologies in order to create the rich applications where users can make sense of their data. How do you ensure the security of data on your platform? With huge amounts of data transmitting across cyberspace, security can be an issue. Once the data is at rest, Qlik becomes responsible for the governance and usage of the data within the organization. This remains a key strength of Qlik as our analytical platform can both govern the access and usage of the available data, as well as even the way the final analysis is shared.
“We need radical re-thinking to beat cyber criminals” IN THE ERA of ransomware and other targeted attacks, Trend Micro offers security solutions that works and integrates end-to-end with other solutions that customers use, thereby enhancing RoI. In an interaction with Nivedan Prakash, Raimund Genes, CTO, Trend Micro talks about cyber security trends and how the company is working to protect users from emerging threats Please highlight some of the current trends prevailing in the security domain? Till a couple of years ago, everyone in the industry used to talk about APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats). But now discussions have shifted towards modern-day malwares, which includes ransomware. Unlike APTs, ransomware is pure profit for Today, in the era of cyber social media, criminals. As threats every corporate have and individual is diversified and vulnerable to grown in sophistication, cyber attacks. It’s cyber nice to remain criminals have moved on from visible but at the primarily same time, it targeting individuals to opens a window focusing on of bigger where the vulnerability money is i.e. enterprises. Cyber threats reached an alltime high in 2016, with ransomware and Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams gaining increased popularity among
cybercriminals looking to extort enterprises. Throughout last year, we witnessed threat actors extort companies and organizations for the sake of profitability and we don’t anticipate this trend slowing down. The other trend that we are witnessing is that our industry is not a vendor driven market. We have to always react to the behavior of cyber criminals. I believe that our competitors are these fast and dynamic cyber goons and not the likes of Symantec or McAfee, as these people with profit motive keep changing their behavior dramatically. As a vendor, you just can offer one piece of technology as it will sooner or later become irrelevant. For you to survive in this fiercely competitive market, you have to invest in different security solutions; you need a set of different technologies to safeguard your assets. At this point, everyone in the industry is talking about Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and the benefits associated with them. But soon you will find the cyber criminals fooling these technologies as well. While we are also witnessing an influx of security startups in the
global market that are focusing on user behavioral analytics, most of them specialize on a single technological area. These kinds of startups won’t survive for long, as the behavior of cyber criminals is changing constantly. Among the modern-day threats, which ones are blown out of proportion? In the past, APTs were blown out of proportion. I used to refer such threats as targeted attacks, as these were nothing but modified malware. There is no point in making a hue and cry of such attacks and giving them some sophisticated nomenclature. In the current scenario, one over-hyped area is ‘end-user IoT’. People are talking about ransomware on IoT devices, but I believe it won’t give them any RoI. Hence, they might use some other tactics to exploit IoT devices. In IoT, it’s all about economy of scale. When we did drone hacking at Trend Micro, the industry looked at it as cool stuff. But people with malicious intent want more and more money. Today, nobody is putting attention towards Industrial IoT, which is more vulnerable than end-user IoT. There are high chances of a power grid or a power generator getting blown up or a smart city getting shut down with
and certainly not from the big security players. While a few small vendors are still trying to cash in by blowing things out of proportion, customers at large are aware of the situation and they easily figure out when it’s overhyped. There is an urgent need for us to realize the reality that we are constantly under attack that is multi-fold and not just one vector. Today, in the era of social media, every corporate and individual is vulnerable to cyber attacks. It’s nice to remain visible but at the same time, it opens a window of bigger vulnerability.
the modern-day threat vectors. To quote an example here, Trend Micro conducted its own analysis of Shodan (an online search engine that scans cyber assets or Internet connected devices looking for any security flaws that could open them up for attacks) data for February 2016 and found that millions of Internet-connected devices in the US, including many in the most sensitive industries, are vulnerable. But luckily, cyber criminals have not yet found a business model of making money by targeting Industrial IoT. However, I don’t see modernday malware getting over-hyped
Looking at these trends, in which areas did Trend Micro invest recently? We have made huge investments in areas like cloud security, next generation endpoint, breach detection system, endpoint detection and response, security information and event management, and identity and access management. Next year, Trend Micro will be completing 30 years in the industry, and unlike most of the players in the market, we have been profitable in this long journey. The reason behind our strong growth and continued success is the diversification of products that we offer to the
customers. A lot of traditional players still rely on consumer revenue but looking the changing dynamics of the market, we understood well in advance that our consumer revenue will decline. Hence, we made good investments in areas like cloud and network security. Although losing consumer revenue in most of the markets was a painful experience, we covered it up by cementing our place in the enterprise security domain. Cyber criminals have always been a step ahead of security vendors. Can we expect the reverse in the near future? We could be ahead of the cyber criminals, as we already have the technology to beat them. But it changes the way we use the computers. If I am appointed as a consultant to your organization, I would ban every BYOD device as well as the usage of Android devices. And I would force you to use the PC connected to the Linux server. PC is considered as the best invention of the mankind but the whole ecosystem has been created in such a manner that we are prone to all sorts of cyber attacks. In order to remain ahead of the cyber criminals, we need to bring a radical change in our approach.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
| 13
INTERVIEW
AI enabled robots can enable customers to have better control over inventory levels ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE has transformed the world of robots. GreyOrange, a robotics firm that specializes in deploying advanced robots for automation at warehouses and distribution centers, is using robots that use machine-learning algorithms to dynamically adapt to inventory consumption patterns and optimize storage in a warehouse. Ashish Bindal, Global Head, Solutions, GreyOrange, shares with EC, how AI-enabled robots are transforming the world of warehouse management Some edited excerpts: Compared to traditional robots, how are artificialintelligence (AI) enabled robots different? Artificial intelligence enabled solutions are designed to demonstrate human like decision-making capabilities. These robots are able to react to various expected /unexpected AI-enabled situations. The robots are reaction also able to react improves with time and to various experience. expected These machines can /unexpected learn from situations their usage patterns, just like humans do. Rather than working upon a static algorithm designed to work in a predictable environment, these robots have a dynamic algorithm which learns from the past experiences and becomes better with usage. Can you give us some specific use cases or
examples of customers on how AI has helped GreyOrange in automating inventory management? What have been the efficiency improvements year on year? GreyOrange Butler is a robotic automation solution that receives inputs from various sources in the warehouse and helps optimize the operations in the warehouse. The system is designed in a way that the Butlers bring right racks to humans instead of humans going to racks. The operators stand at their place and pick/put the products from these racks. GreyOrange Butler solution enabled by artificial intelligence, can understand that in a particular season, the products stored in certain racks can have a higher demand as compared to the others. For example, during Diwali, businesses often see utensils sold in great volumes. The Butler picks up this pattern and starts placing racks with utensils nearer to the operator, thereby ensuring quick turnaround time for orders and increasing efficiency.
Moreover, AI-enabled Butlers also equip the customers to have better control in the inventory levels and do support FIFO (First in First out), FMFO (First manufactured out) etc. Basis the inventory movement, the position of racks in the warehouse is decided in such a manner that the pick /put operations results in a faster turnaround time for an operation in the warehouse. This improves the overall efficiency of the pick/put operations in the warehouses. This has resulted in the operator picking efficiency getting better up to 5x vis-a vis
traditional systems. Currently, most robots in a warehouse are created or designed with a fixed number of package sizes in mind. If the sizes or weights of packages are changed, can GreyOrange's robots learn by themselves and adapt? GreyOrange solutions have been designed to manage racks, cases and a combination of both to enable multiple types of order fulfillment. The racks of the solutions are modular in nature and can be configured as per the Stock Keeping Unit (SKU) profile of the customer. For example, lighter SKUs can be at the top and heavier at the bottom. What are the types of data sets and the sources of data sets that is used by GreyOrange to understand and improve efficiency? We understand customer inventory data, days on hand for inventory, SKU details Length, breadth, height and weight, seasonality of SKUs, order line in an order, number of lines in an order etc. We also understand customer business growth,
projections to design future proof solutions. The size of the warehouse, daily through-put, peaks and criteria of success for automation are also taken into consideration to design a robust automation solution for a customer. Please share names and experiences of clients who
are using AI enabled robots We provide our warehouse automation solutions to some of the largest brands in e-commerce logistics, consumer packaged goods (FMCG) and Retail space around the world. All our clients use artificial intelligence enabled
solutions. Some of them are Flipkart,Myntra,Jabong and Pepperfry, Aramex, DTDC, Delhivery, Kerry Logistics (in Hong Kong), and Gojavas. Clients have realized ability of systems to manage peaks seamlessly, improvement in operator efficiency, predictability and real-time data tracking to take business decisions.
Together we are better placed to do things that we couldn’t uniquely do before: Dell EMC AFTER THE merger of Dell EMC, Dell’s alliance organisation and EMC’s alliance organization have been merged into a team. From a combined opportunity perspective globally, now Dell EMC alliance has a full stack in its portfolio to do things that it couldn’t uniquely do before, like providing an end to end solution. In an interview with Mohd Ujaley, Jay Snyder, Senior Vice President, Global Alliances, Service Providers and Industries, Dell EMC says that the value chain is now 100% complete. Please tell us about the role of Global Alliances. We have specific responsibility for our 17 most strategic global partnerships which include both system integrators and outsourcers. We also have responsibilities for Dell EMC global service provider program. We have services for our From a industry team focused on combined healthcare, opportunity energy, gas, perspective , finance, manufathe real cturing, etc. advantage Global Alliances is for us now is part of the to have a full market function of the stack in our company. We portfolio dramatically changed the organisation about a year and half ago and there are a couple of big changes for our 17 partners. We are focused on building a business plan with each partner for market strategy. A differentiation model is in place to try and create solutions around
either geography, technology or industry. Today we are much more industry aligned, which is a great thing. How is Global Alliances placed after the merger of Dell and EMC? We combined the two organisations on day one of the merger, which was September 7, 2016. We brought Dell’s alliance organisation into EMC’s alliance organisation, and have taken the best practices of their strategy and relationships to be a part of our team. From a combined opportunity perspective globally, the real advantage for us now is to have a full stack in our portfolio to allow us to do things that we couldn’t uniquely do before, like providing end-to-end, from literally the tablet through the compute through the storage to all the way to the backup. The value chain is now 100% complete. We can build and deliver the entire stack. The strategy and vision has remained consistent. Opportunistically, the market share that EMC had with its partners in the overall market was at a level or even
greater than EMC's core sales team. So, we are probably 30% to 50% share of wallet with a lot of these partners. Dell had a much lower share of wallet with the same partner. Now, the opportunity that is immediately in front of us is to get equal share of wallet cross Dell's portfolio with the same exact partners and we are actively working on that. It is advantageous to all of us to create an economy of efficiency for our partners and also creating revenue opportunity for Dell EMC. What kind of impact Dell EMC would have on companies such as Pivotal, Virtustream, VMware, RSA, Nutanix and others? We have only been together now for a few months. There is a lot of aspirational desire to go and work across the portfolio of Dell Technology which includes Pivotal, Virtustream, VMware and RSA. We are also focused on creating efficiency in models that allow our partners like TCS and HCL to take advantage of that full technology stack. We are still figuring some
of those things out. Michael clearly has the desire and mandate for us to do that. We are trying for an integrated business plan across all of Dell Technologies with partners. It is the next evolution that is going to give us some of the things that you are asking. Are you planning to launch any new alliance program? The channel in alliances has always been distinctly different. In the last year and a half a lot of the traditional resellers are trying to transition their business to stay current and maintain relevancy. John Burn is the president of the channels for Dell EMC. John and I have spent a lot of time talking about this. We have come out with a single partner program. So, all partners will be a part of the Dell EMC partner program. Within the partner program, we have three branches – channel, service provider, and global systems integrators. All the partners have a similar look and feel relative to tiers. We have four tiers.
The value chain is now 100% complete. We can build and deliver the entire stack. The strategy and vision has remained consistent
There are many products that are overlapping within Dell EMC. How will you address this challenge ? Honestly, I don’t have to worry about this. It is being driven by product engineering and product marketing. Our CTO office is leading the charge. John has been looking over this since a year and they define the future roadmap and future strategy around products. They determine if we are having overlaps and whether it is fine to keep overlaps and where do we want to rationalise the portfolio. I am a consumer of what they build. Personally, I love to see them resolve this sooner and get clearer on the strategic roadmap for all the product lineups. So, I am sure when I am betting on a particular product with my partner it is going to be a long standing viable solution. I do have somebody on my staff, so to answer your question who reports to me and also to the Dell EMC CTO, he makes sure that as I am building solutions for my partners, I am aligning up with the overall product roadmap we have as a company and not investing
heavily on something that is going to phase out in 6 to 12 months. How has been your India experience? We continue to have a phenomenal partner segment in India with HCL, TCS, Wipro, Infosys, Cognizant, Tech Mahindra. We are really excited about the opportunities with these firms. I continue to prioritise the partnerships in India. At the top of the list are some of the most critical partnerships for us for growth in the future. We have done significant investments in taking our engineers who build our products out of our center of excellence in Bangalore and use them to train the technical resources within the partners. We started it six months ago and today we have trained 384 engineers across our 5 partners in India. It goes both ways, we trained them how to use the product and they have given us feedback on how to modify the product. It’s been an exceptional two way relationship and we will continue to do that in 2017.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
14 | STARTUP CORNER
Lessons from a startup’s journey MANAVJEET SINGH, CEO and Founder, Rubique, shares the key lessons learnt while building his startup
F
or any startup, initial foundation built up is always a challenging and especially when you are a technology company, it becomes more imperative. The journey of Rubique which started as bestdealfinance.com in October 2014 was also of some hits and misses in overall approach including technology. But small pilot runs and with quick rectification of the mistakes, Rubique is establishing its foothold in the market with growing acceptance from the overall ecosystem and going strong with 60+ financial institutions, 155+ product agreements across SME and retail loans, ` 440+ crores worth loan disbursed and
12300+ success credit card setups. The struggle days For any breakthrough technology to get implemented successfully in the market, initially roadblocks are evident. With the digital India wave picking up, our journey started with full enthusiasm to make financing simple through technology but the first hindrance was to take buy-in from financial institutions. With the market full of offline players and web aggregators, it was getting difficult for the team to establish our unique proposition. But somehow we managed to get buy-in few from banks and signed them up. Policy digitization When we started receiving
the policies from the banks we realized how different they were from each other, mainly because of the varied risk appetite of each. Being a marketplace, we had to develop a solution which could run based on customers’ inputs and check on eligibility on right offer. So the team studied each policy and came up with a set of 500 data points to be captured to make this work. Fortunately, we also got some bank’s consent to work on integration so we could provide the in-principal approval online itself (one of its kind, not tried by any other player in market so far). With few integrations and first version of matchmaking algorithm we launched our website bestdealfinance. We thought we nailed it. Integrations and traffic Traffic was the favourite word of all investors that we met that time. But we deliberately stayed away from building traffic as we wanted our
platform to provide wide range of offers to the customers and fulfill the promise of our brand. Getting more offers invariably meant more financial institutions. But as we continued meeting them we realized that, apart from accepting our propositions some of the financial institutions system were not ready to go ahead with implementation. At the same time, we realized the traffic which were coming on the website somehow was not going ahead beyond a point. It was alarm bells for us to make certain changes. Breaking free from set assumptions It was time to relook at everything – our identity, our technology, our distribution. The certain assumptions based on which we marched ahead were not yielding any significant results. The market was heating up and before anyone else took the lead, we had to crack it. The team started rigorous research in terms of meeting the financial institu-
tions, associates and other stakeholders benchmarking local as well as international competition. Post these findings, the first thing we did was changing our brand identity; bestdealfinance became Rubique – a technology solution which would make finance simple for consumers by solving the complex puzzle like process involved in it. Knowing that the proposition of online approval would instant click to millennials who are hungry for ‘Instant’, we brought in more vibrancy in the logo by adding new age colors. Now the backbone – technology; following customized approach for each financial institution for policy digitization and integration was taking more time and effort. It was adversely hampering the go-to market strategy. We needed speed to execute this. The technology team relooked at the system architecture and focused on making it more agile, plug and play model. Also instead of focusing on readymade solution available in the market, team decided to build an in-house CRM system to fit the process flow. After understanding the customer’s unwillingness to fill up the long forms online, the team made significant changes in the entire process flow to make it simpler and intuitive for customers. Even the quali-
fication engine and matchmaking algorithm was refined and the 500 data points were brought down to 300 data points across all products. These rectifications helped the team to speed up the process of integrations and currently there are 15 integrations live on the website and 25 in different stages of approval with financial institutions.
financial institutions but there have been increasing requests from other e-commerce players and we are working on the solutions for them. There is lot of action on the ground and along with progressive market, we are quite confident that Rubique would leave its mark.
And the journey continues From bestdealfinance to Rubique, there were many leaps and bounds. But the journey was interesting, a lot we learned and there is more to come. Not only from
When we started receiving the policies from the banks we realized how different they were from each other, mainly because of the varied risk appetite of each company Manavjeet Singh CEO and Founder, Rubique
Indian Fintech startup uses big data analytics to offer real time credit UNLIKE OTHER financial institutions, the CashCare option is available at the point of sale, where a customer can apply and instantly use the credit limit provided to them Srikanth RP srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
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n a country where 75% of households earn less than ` 5 lakh annually, there is a big shortfall in consumer financing. Typically, banks and NBFCs are not equipped to provide a solution because they prefer catering to higher income segment, require plenty of paperwork and a longer-term relationship with the bank, which makes it challenging for consumers to avail this option. Indian Fintech startup, CashCare has tried to explore this niche in this market by making financing process relatively simple for the con-
sumers, using technology. Using an app or using a Webbased application, consumers only need to spend 2-5 minutes to fill basic personal and work information and provide access to shopping and spending history. As soon as the customer hits the submit button, the customer gets EMI options and can proceed to complete the purchase immediately. Unlike other financial institutions, the CashCare option is available at the point of sale, where a customer can apply and instantly use the credit limit provided to them. Vikas Sekhri, Founder, Cashcare Technlogy, states, “We specialize in point of sale consumer loans where consumers can convert their purchases into EMIs with one click. CashCare has built a proprietary credit algorithm that enables consumers to get access to instant credit.” Going beyond conventional data What’s unique about CashCare’s business model is that it goes beyond credit score and bank statement data and uses social, shopping history, mobile payments, utility payments and behavioral data to understand credit behavior of the customers.
The firm believes that with modern data, CashCare can calculate loan risk better and faster than any existing system in the market. Its customers are value seekers and aspirational who are looking to purchase products that meet their current needs. Typically, customers
Cashcare uses social, shopping history, mobile payments, utility payments and behavioral data to understand credit behavior have a salary range between ` 10-25000 and belong to an age group of 22-30 years, and working in small to mid-size companies. Real-time credit scoring system CashCare uses technology to provide a real-time credit scoring for the customers. The firm uses more than 10,000 data points about the customers and utilizes big data analytics to assess the
credit results within a few seconds. “On a real-time basis, our system pings various databases (e-commerce data, CIBIL, bank statement, social connects) via APIs. This data is parsed, optimized, analyzed and run through a proprietary algorithm. We are revoluti-onizing consumer credit by creating IPs around fraud mechanics and using transactional data to predict credit behavior. We use bank-
ing, SMS, payments and shopping history data to do real-time credit assessment,” states Sekhri. The firm believes that keeping up with changes in a consumer’s life is important to understand a consumer’s current ability to take and serve a loan. Both transactional and social data play a great role in understanding the consumer. For example, transactional data such as the purchase of home appliances and other
products could signify a significant change in a consumer’s life such as the purchase of a new home, an increase in income, or a life event such as marriage. “Typically, organizations are completely unaware of how to measure these changes and understand how they affect the borrowing ability of a consumer. We are using technology to level the playing field and are tapping into the underserved market
to offer consumer credit more efficiently, accurately, and securely,” explains Sekhri. At the point of sale, CashCare can enable a realtime approval process and customers can start using the credit within 30 minutes. From a customer’s perspective, applying and getting a credit card can easily take 7-10 days. The firm has already processed credit for more than 20,000 applicants and is growing at a rapid pace.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
| 15
INTERVIEW
How startup Capital Float is using Machine Learning to automate loan processing CAPITAL FLOAT, an online platform that provides working capital finance to SMEs, has leveraged technology to build a differentiated model that is able to deliver credit to the smallest of businesses in a scalable and efficient manner. Rohan Angrish, CTO, Capital Float, tells EC, how his firm is leveraging innovative techniques such as cellphone penetration to offer customized financial services, APIs to achieve higher levels of scale and efficiency, and machine learning to take internal efficiencies to a new level Some edited excerpts:
How do you use technology to differentiate your firm? Today, the data and technology today has reached a point where we can actually bring down both in cost to the originator as well as pricing for purchasetaking loans. We see ourselves as setting up a new trajectory or setting a new paradigm within which to operate where other players will come in and participate. We call this coopetition. We are looking at being not being a lender but being a lending platform. We create this differentiator by capturing as many data points that are possible about the customer. Lets take the example of SMEs to There are explain this concept. If certain loan you break profiles within down the segment of Capital Float SMEs across today that are two different axis, there done end to end are online by a machine. SMEs and No human offline SMEs. Within this being looks at online this type of loan segment, there are profile SMEs about which you have a reliable digital footprint of some shape and size. There is some reliable digital data and then there are SMEs out of which there is a more reliable digital footprint. Now the e-commerce guys fall squarely in their online businesses and there’s a reliable digital footprint that we can use to underwrite that particular business which is why it’s a sort of a low hanging fruit where Capital Float entered. And we penetrated that market to the extent that we became the leading player in the market. We set the trend and we set the business model . Then you have the other quadrant which is offline businesses about whom we have no digital footprint. That’s hard to crack, that is
the kirana who is sitting in a Tier 3, Tier 4 town or maybe in a village. So the Holy Grail is to effectively get to those people but there is this sort of transitionary middle quadrant which is really interesting, This can be an offline shop or an offline SME but has a digital footprint and this is where Capital Float deals. If you take a look at a kirana store, you may have come to that store to do topup for the cell phone or recharge a prepaid SIM card. So there is some amount of that business where we can get reliable third party digital data about this business. In this case, the kirana store doesn’t have an intention of going online to sell its products. However, it still has a reliable digital footprint. We identified this opportunity, and we launched our kirana app. A kirana store can download the Capital Float app and apply for a loan using purely Aadhaar. At the same time I’m connected with this remittance player at the backend and get transactional data about the kirana store on that platform. I use this transactional data to create some sort of partial picture of what this person’s business looks like, at the same time also got permission to scrape this person’s SMSes. From SMSes, we can reconstruct how they top up their phone. So using all these things, we were able to create a credit profile for a kirana store that otherwise had actually no credit profile. No one has ever looked at that kirana store to create a credit profile, but by giving them our app we created a credit profile. By putting a bunch of pieces together, we can give kirana stores a loan offer on the spot with our automated decision engineering loan app that is running in the background. So within minutes of opening our app, SMEs can have money in their account. We are able to give a kirana store money in minutes completely digitally, paper free in a regulatory, compliant and safe way. So whether it’s a kirana store, whether it’s the handicraft market, whether you have a self-help group or even individuals, we can have everyone mapped. How do you leverage APIs? Today standards are built in a very one-to-one way where the APIs are built and ready to use just one partner. If I bring in another partner, then I have to build another API. To overcome this issue, we are trying to come up with standards for data exchange while being regulatory compliant. So it will need things like ‘permissions’, it will need things like consent in the form of digital consent, but at the end of the day, the
idea is to come up with platforms where people just come in and plug in either as producers of data or consumers of data. We will become front runners in the cashless economy with credit as a hook. Companies are signing Capital Float and saying that I want to enter the market where I want to give credit as a hook, and I want to partner with you. How do you leverage machine learning? When we took our first call in the market, it was necessarily intuitive because we had no data to back up. We were taking the models that we knew worked somewhere else, and hoped that the models will work in this system and we started. We tweaked the traditional model a bit and started drawing data from the system. Data started flowing back to us. We started pushing cash in one
direction but what that means is that data starts flowing in the opposite direction and we started learning from that system. I then was able to — at a certain point, tweak my model, and push more money, more efficiency into the system and then that led to a more virtuous cycle. The more loans we pushed, the more data flowed back into the system, and better were the loans, as we kept on learning. All of these cycles of iteration, today within Capital Float, are all based on machine learning. There is no human being sitting and trying to figure it out. What are the efficiencies as a result of machine learning techniques being applied? There are certain loan profiles within Capital Float today that are done end to end by a machine. No human being looks at the loan profile. So we only start
tracking the loan performance when the loan starts coming back in, in which case we have an early warning system that helps us track a potentially, a loan that might be going bad so that we can get in touch with the customer and ensure that the loan does not go bad. But the idea that there are certain loans today which are within our risk appetite and within our level of comfort and we have learnt enough to know that there is no human being needed over there. It’s kind of like a cockpit of a Boeing 747, where the plane can fly itself, even though it doesn’t need a human being, there is still a pilot sitting over there. In case something goes wrong, the pilot gets you. Earlier we did not have this capability, but today a significant part of our small ticket size is completely human free. The small ticket segment is completely
Today a significant part of our small ticket size is completely human free. The small ticket segment is completely automated end to end in terms of risk profiling and underwriting
automated end to end in terms of risk profiling and underwriting. But that being said, there is no part of Capital Float that has zero automated risk profile and underwriting. In fact, in the worst case, the machine does about 80% of the work and the human being has to do the remaining 20. It even gives a suggestion to the human being on what must be done. For example, if the ticket sizes and loans are outside of the ability or comfort zone to let the machine take the call itself. That’s when the human being comes in and does the remaining thing to make sure that everything was done correctly. So in the worst case, we have 80-20 split and in the best case machines are doing 100%. We will be able to go from small ticket sizes to slightly bigger ticket sizes. Over a period of time, we will see automated underwriting grow.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
16 | CASE STUDY
How Shree Cement accelerated its procure-to-pay cycle TO SUSTAIN its position in the industry, Shree Cement decided to upgrade its ERP system to minimize downtime Rashi Varshney rashi.varshney@expressindia.com
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rowing from a single manufacturing plant with a 2 million metric ton production capacity per annum, Shree Cement now sells 25.6 million metric tons cement per annum and operates 10 manufacturing plants across North and East India and more than 50 regional sales offices. The company aims to build more new plants in South India and invest in new technology to ensure timely delivery and enhance customer satisfaction.
Due to rapid year-on-year business growth, the firm’s legacy ERP platform could not support the increased transaction volume, such as processing cement orders across multiple locations. It also needed to shut down the ERP system for monthly patches updates, negatively affecting manufacturing operations. The unsupported legacy system also posed a significant risk to the business. Since 2008, Shree Cement used legacy Oracle Database and Oracle e-Business Suite for its ERP system. With 20% growth in cement production and 30% growth in power generation annually, the company
HIGHLIGHTS
◗ Reduced planned downtime to less than 10 minutes instead of 4 hours ◗ Accelerated procure-to-pay cycle by 69x by automating the process ◗ 40% faster management reports ◗ Reduced truck weighing cycle time by 70%
experienced performance issues with its legacy ERP system due to exponential growth in transaction volume and additional loads on the server. To overcome these challenges, Shree Cement decided to upgrade its ERP system to Oracle Database 12c and Oracle e-Business Suite Release 12.2.4. Reduced planned system downtime The upgrade has helped Shree Cement gain real-time visibility into its ERP processes, and reduce planned downtime. It has helped the company in accelerating its procureto-pay cycle time by a factor of 69x and enabled faster dispatching time. Managers can create reports 40% faster with the added advantage of improved inventory planning. Previously, the company used to ask users to log off and shut down the system for up to two hours to apply monthly patches updates and reboot the server during the month-end period. It caused disruption to manufacturing operations, such as dispatching cement materials to customers. With Oracle's online patching feature, the company can now apply patches and upgrades to a cloned database and copy it to the production database without requiring users to log off the system. This has helped the company in dramatically reducing planned downtime to less than 10 minutes instead of up to 4 hours previously. “We can support the demands required for our rapidly growing business and improve customer service. The multitenant architecture also allows us to easily migrate to Oracle Sourcing Cloud Service
and other cloud services in the future,” says Manoranjan Kumar, CIO, Shree Cement.
Truck drivers can create goods receipts at a remote depot even without access to the Internet
Faster procure-to-pay cycle Shree Cement uses outsourced trucks for dispatching cement materials to customers. Previously, it could take up to three to four days to process payment for transporters after delivery. By automating its procure-to-pay process with Oracle Purchasing and Oracle Financials, Shree Cement can now rapidly calculate and create invoices as soon as transporters deliver the goods to a depot. The integrated ERP system also automates bank payment instructions based on pre-defined business rules, such as delivery cost, with registered suppliers, and sends invoices to transporters via email and text message. As a result, the firm accelerated the procure-to-pay cycle by 69x. Oracle Financials also enables the company to easily adopt changes in local accounting and regulatory requirements across different states in India. “We use online bidding for procuring all our raw materials or manufacturing equipment. We have streamlined purchasing processes and ensured best practices. Our buyers can focus on negotiations with suppliers rather than paperwork and increase saving opportunities,” says Kumar.
weight, empty weight, and gross weight. Truck drivers also had to wait for the weighing system to generate an invoice and collect it at the plant gate. The entire process took seven to eight hours and affected dispatching turnaround time. By capturing vehicle master information and integrating logistics management system with Oracle, Shree Cement now inputs the truck information directly in the ERP system and automatically prints an invoice as soon as the driver completes the gross weight. It has greatly reduced the truck weighing cycle time by up to 70% and re-allocated all the operating staff resources to more valuable tasks. “With the automation, we have increased the number of trucks coming through on our weighbridges. This turned into faster dispatching turnaround time and higher production volume, supporting business growth,” Kumar says.
Online Truck Management Previously, the company needed to allocate 4 staff across 11 weighbridges in each plant to manually gather truck weighing information— including truck number, driver name, truck capacity, truck
Improved inventory planning There was no integration capability with mobile applications. Shree needed to manually copy data from the mobile application to a non-Oracle technology platform and then bring back the updated data
into the ERP system. It created data integrity issues across all the plants and offices. By integrating the mobile application with Oracle e-Business Suite, the company gained real-time visibility of ERP processes, such as inventory management and purchasing, and improved operating efficiency. For example, truck drivers can create goods receipts at a remote depot even without the Internet. The integrated mobile platform then automatically synchronizes the updated inventory in the ERP system once an Internet connection is available. “The mobile capability allowed our regional offices to
We can support the demands required for our rapidly growing business and improve customer service. The multitenant architecture also allows us to easily migrate to Oracle Sourcing Cloud Service and other cloud services in the future Manoranjan Kumar CIO, Shree cement
instantly view accurate cement inventory status for each depot and start selling right away. It also improved our inventory planning and reduced stock lifecycle,” says Kumar. Productivity and asset utilization With 10 manufacturing plants across multiple locations, it was imperative for Shree Cement to track and manage equipment lifecycle, such as the maintenance history of grinding units, to minimize machine downtime and ensure smooth manufacturing operations. By using Oracle Enterprise Asset Management, Shree Cement gained a complete view of asset life cycle in each plant and enabled the staff to efficiently plan and schedule preventative maintenance control. It increased asset utilization and reduced impact on production activities. Shree Cement also deployed Oracle Human Resources to capture employee records across the enterprise, providing insight for managers to monitor employee performance and identify training needs, such as machinery operations. Furthermore, employees can view and update personal information, such as changing contact details, via self-service functionality, reducing the burden on the HR team. By using configurable workflow and approval feature, managers can also access and approve requests from employees, such as annual leave, without relying on an individual supervisor. This helped the company to improve productivity and enhance employee satisfaction.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
| 17
NEWS ANALYSIS
Microsoft shows how AI can be used to prevent blindness BY TRAINING computers to recognize early signs of eye-related issues, Microsoft is looking at building a large ecosystem that will collaborate and collectively work on diverse datasets of patients across geographies to come up with machine learning predictive models for vision impairment and eye diseases Srikanth R P srikanth.rp@expressindia.com
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urrently close to 285 million people are visually impaired, of which 55 million reside in India. The causes for visual impairment can be many, but some of them are preventable. Take for example, a disease such as diabetic retinopathy. If not treated early, diabetic retinopathy can be a major cause of irreversible blindness. India which is now being called the ‘diabetic capital of the world’ due to the highest number of diabetic patients in the world (estimated to be more than 50 million) – clearly has a huge problem to solve. Experts believe that two-thirds of all Type 2 diabetics and all Type 1 diabetics are expected to develop diabetic retinopathy over a period of time. Currently, out of 50 lakh surgeries conducted in India, atleast 15 lakh surgeries are related to diabetic retinopathy. That said, blindness can be prevented if diabetic retinopathy is detected at an early stage. Detecting eye disorders is a specialized skill and ophthalmologists often have to look at the damage caused to the blood vessels in the eye, and screen other parameters such as fluid leakage or hemorrhages. Can technology help? Technology giant, Microsoft, certainly believes it can make a huge difference, and is experimenting with using Artificial Intelligence technology to identify eye disorders and diseases such as diabetic retinopathy at an early stage. By training computers to recognize early signs of eye-related issues, Microsoft is looking at building a large ecosystem that has likeminded organizations, which will
collaborate and collectively work on diverse datasets of patients across geographies to come up with machine learning predictive models for vision impairment and eye disease. Microsoft India has already collaborated with L V Prasad Eye Institute to launch Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE). The partner organizations of this consortium include Bascom Palmer – University of Miami, Flaum Eye Institute – University of Rochester (USA), Federal University of Sao Paulo (Brazil) and Brien Holden Vision Institute (Australia). The availability of a large amount of data together with the means to analyze it and gather insights is transforming business like never before. Having the right infrastructure to gather, analyze, visualize and make sense of the data is therefore going to be critical to all institutions and Artificial Intelligence technologies can help organizations build, innovate and transform their businesses. As the datasets grow in size, the ability of the program to detect eye-related issues will improve significantly. Explaining the vision behind forming the consortium, Anil Bhansali, Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D), says, “In our shared vision to eradicate preventive blindness, Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE) will help redefine eyecare by bringing together the power of technology and knowledge of global experts. Through Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), the partner eyecare institutions around the world will come together to build a pool of patient data from
Through Microsoft Intelligent Network for Eyecare (MINE), the partner eyecare institutions around the world will come together to build a pool of patient data from various geographies. This will include the rate of change of myopia in children, conditions that impact children’s eyesight, predictive outcomes of refractive surgery, optimal surgery parameters as well as ways to personalize a surgery and maximize its probability of success Anil Bhansali Managing Director, Microsoft India (R&D)
various geographies. This will include the rate of change of myopia in children, conditions that impact children’s eyesight, predictive outcomes of refractive surgery, optimal surgery parameters as well as ways to personalize a surgery and maximize its probability of success.”
Over the next few years, the consortium hopes to establish a common set of problems to work on with all the consortium partners. Over the long-term, the consortium aims to have a deeper understanding of the geographically diverse disease patterns and to help tackle avoidable
BUSINESS AVENUES
blindness at large. According to press reports, India currently has 11,500 ophthalmologists against six million people who are affected by the disease. Using Artificial Intelligence techniques can significantly improve the speed, efficiency and accuracy of
identifying eye-disorders at an early stage, before they become a major problem. By using machines to perform automated detection, the diagnosis can be made more accurate and efficient – and could prove invaluable in remote areas, where the required expertise is not available.
EXPRESS COMPUTER | APRIL, 2017
18 | INTERVIEW
‘We want to ensure that public cloud serves the public good’ RECENTLY, MICROSOFT INDIA partnered with several state governments to help them leverage cloud, machine learning and mobile based solutions to improve citizen services in sectors such as education, healthcare and agriculture. In an interview with EC, Sanjeev Gupta, General Manager Public Sector, Microsoft India shares how the Government of India can use technology for governance and what are the most exciting factors in India for the tech giant How do you see the cloud ecosystem shaping up in India? The cloud ecosystem in India is a significant opportunity and set to grow to US$ 1 billion by 2020. This growth is being driven not only by the mature enterprise ecosystem, but also the burgeoning startup and small and medium business segment. Contributing to this uptake in cloud adoption are the Indian government’s progressive plans such as Digital India and Startup India. Microsoft's cloud is mirroring this growth statistic, with 52% of top 100 Indian companies listed on the BSE adopting our cloud services. With our local datacenters, full suite of cloud services for all types and sizes of organizations and a vibrant partner community, Microsoft is bringing the full power of its enterprise grade secure technology to India. Since the launch of our commercial cloud services With our local through local datacenters, we cloud have witnessed infrastructure, the significant adoption of our possibility to cloud services transform India across sectors into a digitally like BFSI, healthcare, empowered, media and knowledge entertainment, ecommerce, economy is telecom and the manifold government. Top financial services organizations such as HDFC, ICICI Lombard, IDFC, and Kotak Mahindra Bank, large IT players like Wipro, Infosys, and TCL, and majority of Indian healthcare providers including Fortis Healthcare, Apollo Hospitals, AIIMS, L V Prasad Eye Institute (LVPEI), and Narayana Health, have adopted Microsoft cloud. New generation ecommerce players and startups like Snapdeal, PayTM, Justdial, Meru cabs, etc., are also leveraging the power of Microsoft cloud to spur their growth momentum and connect better with customers. How is the Indian government accepting new technologies such as cloud. What kind of challenges do you see in the public sector in India in terms of technology adoption? The Indian government continues to reinforce its belief in the transformative power of technology to drive socioeconomic change, with its progressive vision. For us at Microsoft, this presents immense opportunities to support the government in achieving its goals of digital transformation and inclusion. We want to ensure that
We have partnered with several state governments including those of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu to help them leverage cloud, machine learning and mobile based solutions to improve citizen services, education, healthcare and agriculture
the cloud, especially the public cloud, serves the public good. Therefore, we extended our cloud services through local datacenters – this is not only a big milestone for us at Microsoft, but also an important step forward in being a key partner to the country’s growth ambitions. How can IT companies such as Microsoft support Digital India, smart cities and e-governance initiatives? Cloud is really at the heart of the technology revolution that we see around us. Today, cloud computing is making it possible to drive intelligence and insights from the immense magnitude of data, converting it into predictive and analytical power. This power puts data and cloud computing at the core of analysis and action to empower the government to address challenges including poverty, hunger, health and education. With our local cloud infrastructure, the possibility to transform India into a digitally empowered, knowledge economy is manifold. It not only has the potential to fuel India’s inclusive growth, spur innovation and accelerate digital transformation, but also open new possibilities in e-governance, financial inclusion, healthcare and education, and positively impact the lives of a billion people. What are the company's major implementations in these initiatives? Microsoft is a proud and committed partner in driving a transformative change in India. We have partnered with several state governments including those of Andhra Pradesh, Punjab, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu to help them leverage cloud, machine learning and mobile based solutions to improve citizen services, education, healthcare and agriculture, among others, in the states. Some examples include ◗ Agriculture: Microsoft has collaborated with ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) and the Andhra Pradesh government in creating a Sowing App and Personalized Village Advisory Dashboard to provide powerful cloud-based predictive analytics. The app empowers farmers with crucial information and insights, helping them to determine the most appropriate time to sow seeds. This, in turn, helps reduce crop failures and achieve optimal harvests. Today, over 200 farmers are already using it. This is a significant start for digital agriculture and can reap benefits in multiple ways as governments and stakeholders discover the potential for technology to unlock and offer multiple solutions for the farming community. ◗ Education: To boost Andhra Pradesh’s education ecosystem, Microsoft is working with the Government of Andhra Pradesh on a machine learning based model to analyze and predict drop outs and take preventive action. Azure Machine Learning predicts which students will struggle/drop out of school across its 10,000 schools. Officials have created more than 600,000 predictions using Azure Machine Learning, revolutionizing how Indian local governments increase student retention. We are focused on expanding digital inclusion and skills training as well as nurture new
businesses and innovators through various initiatives, in line with the government’s vision. Our education and entrepreneurship programs and platforms such as Project Jyoti, Imagine Cup, Microsoft Innovation Centres, DreamSpark, and BizSpark, have engaged over five crore students, academicians and entrepreneurs in more than last 20 years. ◗ Last mile connectivity: Addressing the issue of last mile connectivity, we have piloted lastmile access projects in Srikakulum in Andhra Pradesh, and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, using our cost-effective technology called TV White Space. We have also partnered with the Government of Maharashtra to create the first smart village in Harisal. ◗ Smart Cities: Microsoft’s CityNext initiative enables city residents and city leaders to use technology to build a foundation for sustainable growth and prosperity. It puts people first and builds on a new infrastructure of collaborative technology to engage citizens, businesses and government leaders to do ‘new with less’. We have a long history of successful programs, which collectively propel cities and their people toward what's next. ◗ Healthcare: LV Prasad Eye Institute is using Azure Machine Learning and Power BI to predict the final surgical outcome of eye surgery patients and provide insights into how blindness spreads across the country, helping health officials develop strategies to fight the issue. Using a predictive model that helps
predict regression rates for eye operations, doctors can pinpoint the procedures needed to prevent and treat visual impairments. Using the data, doctors can also better understand the risks involved for a patient, which leads to more effective treatment while reducing costs. How important is privacy for government undertakings? How is Microsoft ensuring privacy on cloud? The increasing complexity of connected systems has increased the surface area for cyberattacks. This requires urgent cyber security interventions by the government to ensure that India’s digital infrastructure is
We have piloted last-mile access projects in Srikakulum in Andhra Pradesh, and Varanasi in Uttar Pradesh, using our cost-effective technology called TV White Space
not vulnerable to cyber breaches, which are only increasing in scope and sophistication. With technology at the core of Digital India and Smart Cities initiatives, it is important that the government embraces the power of technology while undertaking measures to safeguard it from threats that know no borders. Microsoft’s approach to cybersecurity in today’s cloudcentric world rests on three core functional areas: protect, detect and respond. To support a comprehensive, cross company approach to security, Microsoft invests more than a billion dollars in security research and development, every year. We are the first company in the industry to win a certification ISO/IEC 27018 that validates the highest levels of data security and privacy. We provide unique, tailored solutions to help our customers monitor, analyze and prioritize threats within their environments. We also offer industry-leading tactical and strategic response capabilities backed with unique access to deep product expertise. Our cybersecurity investments in India underline our relentless commitment to security and partnering India in realizing its digital vision. We recently launched our first Cybersecurity Engagement Center in the country. This full-scale center brings forth innovations and advancements by way of security platform, threat intelligence analytics, advanced threat protection, machine learning capabilities, security consultancy services and cloud security in a comprehensive way. Our Microsoft Consultancy Services offer a suite of security
services to help enterprises and governments understand their security needs and set up appropriate security strategies to protect their critical infrastructure. Microsoft’s Digital Crimes Unit – a team of technical, legal and business experts, seeks to build trust by fighting technology-facilitated crimes like global malware, reducing digital risk and protecting vulnerable populations, by combining big data analytics, cutting-edge forensics and novel legal strategies. Additionally, Microsoft has also launched Microsoft Secure - a nationwide awareness campaign to ensure security for digital transformation. We remain committed to building a secure information infrastructure in India and look forward to working with organizations to secure India against cyber threats. What are the three things about India that excites Microsoft the most? India is truly at a turning point in how technology can accelerate the dreams of individuals and organizations here. We are amid a revolution – organizations are transforming themselves and industries are being reinvented in ways we never imagined. There are three core trends that are driving this revolution - cloud computing, big data and analytics, and intelligence. The convergence of all three is where the magic happens; reshaping the way businesses engage with their customers, and governments with citizens, how they run their business processes and transform their products. rashi.varshney@expressindia.com
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Published on Mar 30, 2017
India's Leading IT Magazine
Published on Mar 30, 2017
India's Leading IT Magazine