The 10 Next-Gen Networking Solution Providers, 2019

www.mirrorreview.com October 2019

Innovating Wireless Technologies How Finest Wireless Technologies Are Changing The Communication For Better

Brand Promotion

Tech Labelling And How It Is Useful In Setting Apart The Brand

Amar R Kotha Managing Director

Innovation In Next Gen Networking Services

EDITOR’S LETTER Networking Solutions Transforming Businesses Industries have witnessed 2019 as a transformative year because of the everevolving change in technologies has forced them to undergo a transformation. Due to the improvements in centralized management tools and Machine Intelligence, networking solutions are becoming more effective and efficient. The network operators are preparing systems to dramatically support greater device density and data amount, which might benefit the business with new analytics about their infrastructure use from the network itself.

The networking field is rapidly changing. However, today’s companies are struggling to sustain their transformation pace as compared to the rapidity of new capabilities of technologies that are being introduced. The biggest challenge that businesses face is deciding which technologies to invest in and what technologies to adapt.

In our latest magazine issue of “The 10 Next-Gen Networking Solution Providers, 2019”, we have listed the emerging solution providers who are contributing to improve the network efficiency all the way up to business models.

On our magazine cover, we have featured Datacipher, a company that understands that a dynamic network, which provides secure and seamless connectivity, is the backbone of every great application. “Quality is our obligation and we ensure assured delivery commitment,” says Amar Kotha, Managing Director of Datacipher.

Furthermore, from the expert’s desk, we have CXO articles on “This Movement Needs A RIGHT Protection” and “Best Practices for Creating Compelling Conversational Experiences for Your Customers on WhatsApp”.

Also, you will find some engaging articles penned by our creative team on trending topics in the ‘Innovating Wireless Technologies’ and ‘Brand Promotion’ sections.

The IT industry is constantly evolving, introducing new products and features that are released faster than ever. These new capabilities anticipate making networks into even more vital assets that businesses will leverage in ways, which we have not yet begun to realize.

Vidya Joshi Editorial Coordinator

CREDIT PAGE Publisher : Archana Ghule Editor-in-Chief : Vikram Suryawanshi Editorial Coordinators : Deepali Sarwade Vidya Joshi Rakesh Mahto Shubham Biradar Balkishan Dalai

Art Director : Vinod Alhat Visualizer : Mark Davis Graphic Designer : Sumit Bonage Aniket Diwane Sakshi Bendre Head of Distribution & Production : Aakash Mahajan Head of Operations : Robert Smith Research Analysts : James Adams Advertising : Maria Smith

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Project Managers : Martin Dsilva Akshay Kamble

Digital nGenuity:

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Providing Strategic, Operational and Proactive Technology Management Services

Lavelle Networks: Accelerating Networks For The Digital Economy

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Mushroom Networks:

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Providing High-Performance Autopilot Networks To Enterprises

Paessler AG: Equipping Corporations With Powerful UniďŹ ed Monitoring Solutions

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COVER STORY

CONTENTS PAGE

10 Datacipher Empowering Enterprises With The Future Networking Solutions

Articles Innovating Wireless Technologies

Brand Promotion

How Finest Wireless Technologies Are Changing The Communication For Better

Tech Labelling And How It Is Useful In Setting Apart The Brand

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Insights Segment

Arun Gandhi, Sunil Kotagiri | Seceon This Movement Needs A RIGHT Protection

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Aby Varghese | UIB Holdings Pte. Ltd.'s Best Practices for Creating Compelling Conversational Experiences for Your Customers on WhatsApp

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Cov

Empowering Enterprises With The Future Networking Solutions

Amar R Kotha

Managing Director

Cover Story

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wing to rapidly changing technologies, enterprises too need to undergo a continuous transformation. New capabilities of technologies are being introduced on a faster scale and today's businesses are struggling to keep up with this pace.

Adapting to entirely new technologies, deciding how to invest in technologies and utilizing new applications are among the biggest challenges and inevitable for enterprises in order to compete on a global stage. One common necessity for adapting new technologies is—Connectivity. To successfully leverage new practices, advanced networking capabilities become obligatory too.

This, however, need not to be concerned by enterprises,

We support 100% assured migration, upgrade, and new network integration.

all thanks to Datacipher. Datacipher is the company that understands that the backbone of every great application is a dynamic network that provides secure and seamless connectivity.

migrations and new network integrations. Ÿ

Procurement Services Datacipher is reseller partner for leading infrastructure and security solutions vendors and implements the solutions for creating a foundation for high-performance business. It advises on how to design and integrate new networking solutions, provides proof of concept labs and assist the customers on procurement of leading networking solutions providers.

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Cloud Security Services The Datacipher team provides cloud security services with access to expert technical resources to keep the network protected at all times.

The company has partnered with top network security vendors providing high-performance security with advanced, integrated threat intelligence and deliver solutions to its customers on the industry's most scalable and resilient platforms.

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Support Services The Datacipher support services team provides seamless support for customers with multiple services and are available for 24x7x365 assistance. It provides enterprises with access to expert technical resources trained and certified by top networking vendors.

One-Stop-Shop for the Networking Solutions To survive in the competitive industry, it is important for business leaders to make flawless transitions to maintain their status as efficient, fully upgraded and dynamic enterprises. In order to achieve this, Datacipher and its team strive to provide the tools and technical assistance required. With expertise in assessment, planning, design, implementation, and support, the company utilizes a systematic approach to transform innovative technologies. It ensures that the client's network delivers optimal performance coupled with security and reliability.

It is a one-stop-shop for the customers—from selling the hardware, software solutions, to implementing, supporting, and empowering the customers.

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System Integration Services Datacipher believes in making complex network implementations as a simple task. Our network evangelists makes it possible, who are only motivated by complex network integrations. Ÿ Enablement Services Enterprises leverage Datacipher offers both sales training on Datacipher's and technical training services vast experience aligned with many top IT and for a seamless Networking vendors providing training to their channel partners

with various options to enable and maintain the partner ecosystem.

Datacipher is also an Elite partner for Juniper Networks, which is a testimonial for the technical capability in implementing Juniper Networks products. In addition, another competitive advantage amongst the others is that it is an authorized education partner for Juniper Networks, Aruba, Fortinet, Checkpoint, ECCouncil, which allows the company to deep dive into and be exposed to excellent networking and security products much earlier than other competitors.

Providing the Finest Work Culture for the Employees Amar R Kotha, the Managing Director, believes that the work culture is important to deliver the best performance for the clients. In order to achieve this, the employees are fully entrusted and equal responsibility is obliged to reduce the stress on employees. The employees are encouraged and are always provided with an opportunity to become future leaders. These team members are given flexible working options, as they are given the liberty to work from anywhere, there is no typical daily attendance tracking system in the office.

There is very minimal weekly, monthly reporting on business activity thus reducing the pressure on employees, however, they encourage open communication and feedback on various issues.

Amar believes that mentoring is always an ongoing process; the team of engineers continuously work on hands-

on labs to excel themselves.

Datacipher provides the team members with all the documentation, lab resources for testing the solutions, and upgrading the knowledge. This unique mentorship and continues learning has helped the company to elevate in the path of promoting success.

Highly Skilled Individuals Delivering the Best Results Amar proudly asserts, “We believe ensuring quality service delivery is our obligation, hence we fulfill the commitments with 100% assured delivery.”

So he believes that Datacipher's success in networking services is due to the result of his strong technical delivery team of professionals. The skilled team comprises of 50+ certified engineers based in Hyderabad, Bangalore, Mumbai, and other APAC locations.

This team is responsible for auditing, implementing, and securing some of the best ISPs and are involved in migrations of top-class datacentres, securing the topmost cloud solutions providers.

Datacipher engineers contribute to mission-critical networking projects that are related to some prestigious banks, and stock exchanges.

By delivering the excellent outcomes, the company has been successful in maintaining the winning streak for years. Juniper Networks have awarded Datacipher with the prestigious ‘Worldwide Highest Customer

Quality is our obligation, and we ensure assured delivery commitment.

Satisfaction Award' and a multiple times with the “APAC Platinum partner of the year Award” Words of Wisdom from the Leader With the abundance of experience in the field, Amar has been the pioneer in the networking sector. By sharing his experience with the novel companies, he advises, “Companies are by all means more focussed in achieving the top line, bottom lines. Instead, every company should focus on quality, assured service delivery—that will ensure customer trust in our services eventually leads to healthy revenues and profits.”

Roadmap for Coming Years Moving forward and overcoming all the milestones, Datacipher aims to be No. 1 trusted partner for the enterprises for meeting the enterprise networking migrations, network security needs. The company has already expanded the footprints in most of the metro cities of India and is focusing on expanding to Tier 2 cities in India.

Testimonials Ascertaining the Beneficial Services Throughout the years, Datacipher has built a stellar reputation with many clients across the country by providing high value.

As the services are totally client-centric, positive clientele feedback is very important. The company has succeeded in delivering the best solutions for their networking issues. Many clients have appreciated its services and solutions, which not only motivates the workforce but also helps it create solutions that are more efficient.

CC Reddy, IT Systems & Operations Manager, NRSC says, “Our users needed greater granularity when accessing different applications. Previous solutions left us constrained by the technology, but the Juniper solution and Datacipher Expertise has allowed us to achieve our goals successfully.”

“Data security is one of the main concerns for most of our clients. Our entire effort to migrate to Juniper Networks from our existing network was aimed at that. We are extremely happy about the migration support received from Datacipher in realizing our goal.”

-Nirmal Kumar, Technical Lead, CtrlS

Our support services team provides seamless support for all our customers with multiple options, including 24x7x365 support.

“We are building technology, not for today, but for the next five years to come and even further out. We wanted to be ahead of the market needs, and together with Juniper and Datacipher, we're able to deliver that path into the future.” - Manoj TK, Vice President, Value Labs

Company Name

Company Info

Datacipher Amar R Kotha MD

Datacipher is a system integrator, professional services and consulting services powerhouse. www.datacipher.com

Digital nGenuity Joel D. Rafuse Founder

Digital nGenuity offers a Full Managed Services package to clients. www.ngenuity.ca

ExteNet Systems Jim Hyde President & CEO

ExteNet Systems is a leading national provider of converged communications infrastructure and services addressing outdoor, real estate, communities and enterprise advanced connectivity needs. www.extenetsystems.com

Lavelle Networks Shyamal Kumar Founder & CEO

Lavelle Networks is one of the best SD WAN Vendor who offer customized SD WAN Solutions for growing Enterprises. www.lavellenetworks.com

Mobilitie John Bollen Chief Digital OfďŹ cer

Mobilite is a provider of complete wireless real estate solutions, we design, build, manage, and maintain wireless and wireline infrastructure to deliver optimal coverage in the most demanding and challenging environments. www.mobilitie.com

Mushroom Networks Dr. Jay Cahit Akin Co-founder & CEO

Mushroom Networks, the next-gen networking company, is working on revolutionizing how enterprise IT manages their networks. www.mushroomnetworks.com

Paessler AG Helmut Binder CEO

A leader in network monitoring, Paessler AG enables companies to monitor all their systems, putting businesses ahead of IT problems instead of behind them. www.paessler.com

Rajant Corporation Robert J. Schena Chairman, CEO & Co-founder

The Rajant team envisioned a new, more robust mesh technology that would allow these networks to be fully mobile and mobility-enabled, and operate reliably in even the most demanding environments. www.rajant.com

Silex Technology Keith Sugawara CEO & President

Silex Technology, Inc. has built its brand and business with a commitment to technology innovation, reliable products, quality manufacturing and premier customer support. www.silextechnology.com

Tradesparq Dean Yu CEO

At Tradesparq, our mission is to drive trust and transparency in international trade. www.tradesparq.com

Digital nGenuity: Providing Strategic, Operational and Proactive Technology Management Services

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he current generations of networks are facing challenges from new territory and modern IT environments such as Internet of Things (IoT) and software-defined networking (SDN). The application of these networks on traditional budgets and increasing security concerns is making it more difficult than before.

Adhering to these current challenges, Digital nGenuity is providing a full range of advanced networking services.

Started with just two employees and by putting in hard work

and fair pricing, it has expanded to 18 staff with a solid and loyal client base.

Over the years, Digital nGenuity expanded to purchase their own building after it outgrew the rented space. It has a proven track record of supplying best of breed business solutions. Currently located in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, it is one of the leading providers of information technology and managed services in the Atlantic region. It has established strong relationships with key manufacturers and suppliers enabling it to meet their client’s diverse needs.

Throughout it expansion, it has

Joel D. Rafuse Founder

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maintained a steady growth of 30% a year for most years. Digital nGenuity provides a full range of experienced, high caliber technical professionals.

Easy to Budget Services Digital nGenuity offers a Full Managed Services package to clients. It is an allinclusive monthly fee covering all the services in one price that is reviewed on a yearly basis. This allows companies to easily budget and provides a consistent cost throughout the year. Below are some of the services offered by Digital nGenuity Network Management Services The company provides a complete suite of network management services including design and implementation, managed services, evergreen planning, virtualization, WiFi access, hardware supply, and a superior level of support. Ÿ Cyber Security Services Digital nGenuity offers threat & risk assessment consulting, remediation consulting, security awareness training and testing, managed security services and business recovery and continuity planning. Ÿ Cloud Solutions Digital nGenuity offers a broad portfolio of professional services aim to ensuring clients successful deployment, adoption, and exploitation of cloud computing technologies. It is in partnership with Microsoft, IT Cloud, Ÿ

Solarwinds, and DATTO to provide Antivirus and Spam solutions, Microsoft Office365, and Cloud-based Backup solutions. Ÿ Consulting Services Digital nGenuity provides a strong team approach to all IT consulting challenges. It has a great deal of experience and expertise to offer from the team and has forged strong relationships with many companies and personnel throughout North America to be able to provide complete business solutions to clients through technology.

Journey of A Passion Seeker Joel D. Rafuse, Founder of Digital nGenuity has a studied for his Bachelor of Commerce with a major in computing science and minor in accounting from Saint Mary’s University. Exploring his interest in computer science, he aced all the computer courses and hung out in the computer lab helping other students with their computer programming assignments. After working for many odd jobs during a break from university and with a renewed interest in computers and networking, Joel went back to Henson College and successfully completed his Novell CNE training for networking computers together. He grew the networking portion of his father’s business to the point where in 2004 he started his own company, Digital nGenuity. In the initial days of the company, he worked with his friend Ralph Davis, who was the other technician in the company. They were both doing what they loved and soon the company’s reputation for good work along with good value grew.

Approaching the Challenges with a Strong Team In order to sustain the growth, Joel had to relinquish control and trust the

employees he hired to do the work in a manner that met his standards.

Dependency on the founder of the business is one of the major issues that Joel had already conquered by trusting his team members. Like many entrepreneurs, he was very focused on all aspects related to the company.

Digital nGenuity has a fantastic team working behind the growth. The experienced consulting and technical management team provides the knowledge, insight and expertise to make a significant contribution in a variety of business application areas. As an innovative technology company, it is constantly working with new and

Digital nGenuity provides comprehensive strategic, operational and proactive technology management services that allow you and your team to do what you do best: deliver rst-rate service to your customers emerging technologies as they become of value to the clients. Digital nGenuity has always approached challenges with a strong team approach. It has a great deal of experience and expertise to offer clients and has forged strong relationships with many companies.

Joel says, “This was difficult for me and they didn’t always make the right call.

In the end, I simply found that small course corrections allowed them to do

the hands-on while I worked on the business rather than in the business.”

Word of Mouth Referrals In an industry where maximizing profits is one of the sole goals for many companies, Digital nGenuity is providing services at an affordable price. Many companies charge as much as they can and provide lesser services.

These companies may make money but they lose clients and eventually go out of business due to a bad reputation.

Over the years, Digital nGenuity has developed a great reputation in the industry and grew from word of mouth referrals. Until few years ago it had no sales or marketing team. Highlighting his strategies Joel says, “Our strategy has never been to grow fast, it was to grow steadily and sustainably. We saw many of our competition grow fast and flame out just as rapidly.”

Continuing its Expansion for the Future In the past year, Digital nGenuity has acquired several of their competitors and plans on acquiring more in the coming years. The acquisition will help grow their knowledge base, skills and knowledge of technologies and they will continue to supply solutions and technologies that will help their clients to grow and reach their potential.

Digital nGenuity has been expanding its service area from regional to provincial to country wide. Digital nGenuity will continue to research new technologies and is focused on increasing the expertise in the field of security as it is an exploding market. The company will continue to evolve their offerings and become more efficient so that both, their clients and their employees can prosper and grow.

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Lavelle Networks Accelerating Networks For The Digital Economy

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ver the last decade, the primary focus of most of the enterprises has been on data center communication due to the size, scale, and complexity of application software increasing enormously.

However, the edge and access networks were deprived of innovation, performance or cost optimizations. The enterprises neglect their access and edge networks or besides were investing in few technologies like MPLS or private circuits. The biggest challenge faced by enterprises presently is to have a fast, safe, ubiquitous access networks. The fast safe and ubiquitous access network will improve the user experience everywhere when they use applications in the data center.

Overcoming these challenges, Lavelle Networks is accelerating the network for the digital economy. It is endeavoring towards delivering the best enterprise network experience for the users, and not harness the performance despite running on any device or application, on any cloud. Lavelle Networks solutions are client-centric and the team is fiercely passionate about delivering the best results to the users.

It All Started With A Coffee Inspiration leads to innovation and after reading the pioneering work at Google B4, Shyamal Kumar, Founder and CEO and Karthik Madhava, Founder & VP, Business Development, were drawn towards the

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networking industry. Together they drew up all sorts of topologies that could be solved by moving intelligence into the cloud. The team of founders wanted to build a technology and a product company with the unique identity of Bangalore. This idea struck them at a Coffee shop on the famed

world-class, tremendously scalable software-defined network platform with an established background in leading SD-WAN class of edge networking.

Shyamal says, “We are solving the biggest access problem for enterprises, and we are solving it using the right technology architecture which is future proof.”

We want to deliver the best enterprise network experience for every user, on every device, for any application, on any cloud.

The ‘Network Guy’ of Lavelle Networks Shyamal Kumar, is known as the ‘network guy’ in Lavelle Networks due to his data networking skills. In his unparalleled journey, he has worked in the data center, enterprise and service provider networks. Shyamal has a key role in bringing wireless broadband platforms to the world. The ingenious leader with his team brought SD-WAN products to the market and catalyzed the rapid adoption of it.

In his journey, Shyamal has been fortunate enough to work with some of the most exceptional leaders of the software industry. He has been the part of the hard paces start-ups with the Lavelle Road, an epitome of leaders and has learned that great work Bangalore’s culture and heritage, hence is always a result of deep passion. His the name Lavelle Networks. deep passion for software has kept him Lavelle Networks understands the motivated throughout the journey of current generation of enterprise building a company from scratch. After problems and needs a fundamental all these years of experience in the field, change in the thinking, and that Shyamal still wishes that if he would software-defined networking is at the have started over, he would have core of the next-generation network. learned more ferociously in the initial Today, it is the only company building a years. Shyamal believes that everybody

has limited time in their lives and must experience everything one can. He ends the statement by quoting, “When you look back it’s never the things you did that you have regrets about, it’s always the things that you missed doing.”

Focusing On Policies and Not Network Protocols Lavelle Networks describes ScaleAOn SD-WAN as its best-selling platform. It comprises of features like software scale, ability to handle the most complex and diverse set of network access interfaces. The highlight that sets the company apart from others is that it has a 360-degree focus on the policies and not network protocols. These features have helped Lavelle Networks gain loyal clients that are happy with the service and solutions.

people for making mistakes, but not compromise on dissecting the mistakes.

Shyamal believes that promoting a friendly culture is important for better team performance.

According to Shyamal, the right culture is important, and it is certainly the only thing that would define the journey from the beginning to the end. As over the course of 30-40 years of work career, most people forget the details around milestones, but rarely forget the good and bad experience throughout the journey. He further explains, “We want people to look back and say they were glad they were part of Lavelle Networks, during the time they were with us. That cannot happen without the right culture that in turn reflects the company values.”

digital transformation with secure, agile and efficient cloud connectivity to win the digital race.

Lavelle Networks believes that the future is aiming towards progress, within a span of few years the company aims to expand the product portfolio to cover the complete network access market from wireless to security in the enterprise space. Forth seeing the industrial transformation, the team is keenly ideating on the possibilities to participate in the tremendous opportunity that a 5G/IoT market would provide.

Future Aiming Towards Progress These solutions have helped Ritesh Mishra, AVP Max Life Insurance to leverage hybrid WAN transport that helped enhance the user experience, he further asserts, “We have been extremely happy with Lavelle Networks SD-WAN solution. It has helped us in leveraging hybrid WAN transport which resulted in enhanced user experience in terms of improved application accessibility speed.”

With a mission to deliver, the best network experience beyond every node and accelerate networks for enterprises of all sizes with nextgen networking solutions to assist the clients to optimize

Another happy client of SD-WAN solution is Satyavrat Mishra, HeadIT & Infrastructure, Aditya Birla Fashion & Retail. He said, “I have my stores connected on a Lavelle Networks SD-WAN that has enabled me with deep insight into my network and application behavior in real-time with cloud-based management.”

Work Culture Reflecting Company Values

Shyamal Kumar Founder & CEO

In an organization, an employee should always make decisions as fast as possible, and never be too hard on

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Innovating Wireless Technologies

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ireless communications are one of the better domains of technology development of our time. This progress is being driven by the shift of what has been largely a medium for supporting voice telephony into a medium for supporting other services. The demand for new wireless capacity is growing at a quick pace. In the present day, the wireless communication system has become an important part of different types of wireless communication devices, which permit the user to communicate even from remote operated areas. There are many devices used for wireless communication like mobiles, Cordless telephones, GPS, Wi-Fi, satellite television and wireless computer parts. Current wireless phones include 3G and 4G networks, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi technologies.

Let's see how the following emerging communication technologies are going to make the communication systems better and efficient to use.

5G Enables High-Speed Internet for Masses The 5G cellular technology is upon us, we might see 5G get adapted in major cities by the end of 2019 or at the beginning of next year. The technology supposed to compliment Wi-Fi as the speed of the internet is going to improve by the introduction of 5G. The speed is not the only thing that 5G is going to provide as its prices are going to be economical. The evolution of 5G will help in setting high-speed internet services for individuals and organizations on the Internet of Things and low latency applications.

gathering and exchanging information related to safety, navigation, and infotainment. With the development of selfdriven cars catching up the speed we might see V2X be made compulsory in the future for all the vehicles. But, this system needs hi-speed internet service to work.

Long Range Wireless Power to Replace Power Cables The long-range wireless power someday in the future going to replace the power cables from electronic appliances like computers, mobiles, and gadgets used in the kitchen. But, the initial wireless power systems were not that successful in providing the experience that the users expected. The information that is available combined with current technology will help to redesign the communication system that will fit into living spaces. Previously, the device needed to be kept in a certain place, which is a slight improvement on the cable charging devices.

Low Power Wide Area Networks Provide Long-range Wireless Connectivity Low Power Wide Area (LPWA) technology come up as a phrase in 2013 not as a new technology standard, but rather as a category of wireless technologies that are well suited to the specific needs of machine-to-machine and IoT devices.

Most of IoT devices, especially those in cities and industrial sectors, don't require the same speed and bandwidth of consumer cellular devices. LPWA Network (LPWAN) technologies enhance the business case for IoT solutions, offering a cost and power-efficient wireless option that leverages existing networks, global reach, and strong builtin security.

Vehicle-to-Everything Wireless (V2X) Compulsory in Future for All Vehicles

Wireless Sensing Enforce Effective Communication

V2X wireless system will allow normal and autonomous cars to communicate with each other and with the infrastructure on the route. This new technology will help in

A Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) can be specified as a network of devices that can communicate the information gathered from a monitored field through wireless links. The

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data is moved forward through different nodes and with a gateway, the data is connected to other networks like wireless Ethernet. WSN is a wireless network that includes base stations and numbers of nodes (wireless sensors). Networks are used to monitor physical or environmental conditions like sound, pressure, temperature and co-operatively pass data through the network to the main location.

Enhanced Wireless Location Tracking is Precise Wireless communication systems are used to sense the locations of the devices connected to them. The highly accurate tracking system can precisely locate the device up to one meter.

The data generated from the device can be used in different business areas like marketing, channel management and the Internet of Things.

Millimetre-Wave Wireless Provide High Speed at Lower Frequency The improvement in technologies over the past decade has allowed the widespread use of millimeterwave to address the challenges of lower frequency and highspeed communications. The evolution of network technologies from 1G to 5G has taken almost ďŹ ve decades from 1G in the 1980s to 5G in the 2020s. The possibility of achieving data rates of up to 10 gigabits per second, where the data rates are restricted to less than 1 gigabit per second in microwave frequencies has increased. The application of millimeter waves to automotive radar solutions, high-speed pointto-point communication, streaming highresolution videos, and carry large amounts of data.

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Backscatter Networking Leveraging Existing RF Signal Resources Backscatter communication technology has been introduced recently. It is becoming a go-to choice for self-sustainable communication systems as an external power supply or a dedicated carrier emitter is not required. By using existing RF signal resources, backscatter technology can support sustainable and independent communications and consequently open up a whole new set of applications that facilitate Internet-of-Things.

Software-Defined Radio making it Assessable for All Software-defined radio is an RF communication system that incorporates a significant amount of this software-based signal-processing functionality. It is a concept according to which RF communication is achieved by using software to perform signal-processing tasks that are typically performed by hardware.

This communication system provides a vehicle for carefully analyzing RF signals and experimenting with modulation and decoding techniques. It also makes custom RF communication systems more accessible to those who have limited experience with RF design.

Wi-Fi 6 More Reliable with Speed Wi-Fi 6 will ultimately enhance the experience for all wireless users, from office workers, who will find that their devices communicate more securely and quickly in crowded offices, to people supporting constellations of IoT devices.

Customers will find that they can pack more low-power devices into a space with fewer access points.

Wireless communications globally are something that people can expect as technology advances. Wireless communications have a lot of benefits and can make the world a lot more efficient. It does have concerns though as with every other new advancement that is made in today's world. The difficulties with security regarding access to a person's personal information or the negative impact that it may seem to have on society are a few things that are keeping back the progress that wireless technology could be making.

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Mushroom Networks: Providing High-Performance Autopilot Networks To Enterprises

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oday, the number of applications that enterprises and IT professionals need to manage has drastically increased and diversified.

They are also significantly more sophisticated and internet intensive as compared to those that were used just a few years ago. Today’s enterprises are relying more and more heavily on cloudbased delivery of applications, services and data versus the traditional data center providing these. As a result, these changes have created various challenges for the enterprise and IT professionals as they struggle to manage and optimize the performance, security, and scalability of their networks.

Mushroom Networks, the next-gen networking company, is working on revolutionizing how enterprise IT manages their networks. The company’s goal is to “set networks on autopilot”, which includes automating the enterprise network edge in branch offices. In addition to this, it also provides simplified service delivery and optimized performance for accessing IaaS and SaaS platforms.

Mushroom Networks’ primary focus has been to automate IP packet flows by mapping the flow types onto appropriate overlay tunnels, which are specifically designed to optimize the performance and reliability of those types of application flows. For example, a large datafile download application is more concerned with bandwidth than latency, so these sessions are dynamically steered to an overlay tunnel optimized for bandwidth, while a VoIP conference call, which is critically dependent on low latency, would be steered to another tunnel optimized for latency.

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Additionally, Mushroom Networks’ solutions offer unmatched flexibility and agility to IT managers who can now customize and optimize their networks using a user-friendly GUI interface. This allows larger organizations with more complex needs to utilize the advanced capabilities of the SD-WAN platform quickly and easily to manage and optimize their networks. Smaller businesses with no dedicated IT

Mushroom Networks’ devices adapt and work around network problems automatically, without human intervention, giving you optimal network performance in all circumstances.

bonding technology. Their real-world experience with last-mile SD-WAN is unmatched in the industry, allowing them to leverage their large client base in order to optimize last-mile WAN management. An example of this is the company’s wireless LTE/4G SD-WAN bonding solutions. Their devices are capable of combining highly varying and challenging cellular connections into a single, high-reliability IP tunnel. This allows for delivery of broadcast-quality live video streaming from remote locations using only cellular transport – a capability unmatched in the industry.

Its leading SD-WAN technology is a perfect combination of ease-of-use and enhanced capabilities. If the user prefers the default settings utilizing cutting-edge SD-WAN capabilities and built-in firewall protection for the branch office, the device is essentially “plug-and-play” and installs with zero changes to the users’ existing network.

Smart, Adaptive, and Blazingly Fast Services The network challenges faced by enterprises are generally well understood and there is a huge market for viable solutions. Despite the intense competition, Mushroom Networks’ has risen to the top and their popular SDpersonnel and minimal explicit network WAN solutions have become best sellers. This includes their wired multirequirements can also easily take WAN devices for branch offices, as well advantage of Mushroom Networks’ innovative automation and optimization as their cellular bonding of multi-SIM appliances. However, the key advantage of network resources. that their SD-WAN provides is their sophisticated overlay tunnels’ ability to Perfect Combination of Ease-Of-Use automatically and dynamically adapt to and Enhanced Capabilities In 2004, Dr. Jay Cahit Akin and his team changes in network and traffic conditions without human intervention. laid the foundation of Mushroom Networks by inventing broadband

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Mushroom Networks Fits Your Size - One Office or Thousands of Branches With the help of the SD-WAN framework, service providers can easily deploy and manage client WAN services, while individual branch offices can easily achieve previously unknown network performance and reliability. With its application-centric overlay bonding tunnels, one can unlock the power of self-healing cognitive networking that solves network problems even before they can be detected.

Smart Networks That Learn The overlay tunnels are smart enough to think for themselves. They are constantly measuring vital network statistics on all links such as bandwidth, latency, jitter, and others. Application flows are routed to the appropriate paths on a packet-by-packet basis ensuring optimized network performance every time. The tunnels measure, store and remember so you don’t have to, and paths are automatically black-listed and white-listed per flow, as appropriate.

The Most Admired CEO of Mushroom Networks Dr. Jay Cahit Akin, (CEO and Co-founder), prior to cofounding Mushroom Networks, was a venture partner at ITU Ventures for 7 years. Initially, he worked in the marketing consultancy sector and then went on to manage the Adaptive Systems Laboratory within Qualcomm Institute. He has dedicated two decades to researching the technical aspects of communications and providing practical solutions, including owning several patents and authoring many publications.

utmost importance in improving the market-product match as well as ensuring complete customer satisfaction. This is evidenced by the large number of enthusiastic customer comments: Ÿ

“I was highly skeptical that this device would perform where so many others have failed but this thing rocks!!”

- Jacques Robinson (Director, Progress Financials)

“Since implementing [Mushroom Networks’] devices, our emergency on-call technicians receive much fewer downtime calls. This has been beneficial to not only our employees but also to our fiscal budget,” - Ryan Headrick, Information Technology Manager, Albertina Kerr. Ÿ

Networks on Autopilot With an industry-leading vision to set all components of network management on autopilot, Mushroom Networks is marching steadily towards a successful future. In the coming years, the company’s goal is that their SD-WAN appliances will be so automated there will be no need for a complex (or ANY) user interface.

Dr. Akin asserts, “Eventually, similarly to a self-driving car, the driver (in this case the IT manager), can take his or her hands off the steering wheel and work on other important and high-level projects, instead of fighting daily fires and working on mundane networking configuration.”

Dr. Akin obtained his Ph.D. and Master’s Degree in Electrical Engineering & Computer Science, as well as a Master’s Degree in Applied Mathematics, from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. He is a recipient of the NATO Graduate Study Scholarship award and was a national team member for the International Mathematics Olympiad in 1993.

Today, he is the Co-founder and CEO of the industryleading SD-WAN company and was a recent nominee for the Most Admired CEO award by San Diego Business Journal. “Whoever says they have not made any mistakes is not telling the truth. Having said that, my approach to mistakes has been to look at them as experiences that were needed to make me the person I am today,” said Dr. Akin about his professional journey.

Outstanding Client Feedback Dr. Akin believes that listening to client feedback is of

Dr. Jay Cahit Akin CEO & Co-founder

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Insights Segment

I

get asked a lot of questions.

I’m a CTO. I expect people to ask me questions. Crazy, geeky, technical questions, because they know I’ll answer them without spin, bias, or agenda. Arguably the best part of being an engineer is getting to understand how things work.

How do you build a better bot?

By far the question I am asked most often right now is how to create conversational experiences for customers.

Specifically, conversational experiences that directly impact a business’ bottom line — decrease costs, increase revenues, and equally importantly, delight customers. No one just wants to “build a bot.” Everyone wants to build a better bot, literally the best bot to help them to meet their business’ specific needs and objectives.

Full disclosure: I work for Conversational AI and Cognitive IoT platform company UIB (which is also a WhatsApp Business solution partner) which means I build a lot of bots.

Why is everyone suddenly bursting over bots?

“Conversational experiences” can be any type of bot, chatbot, or virtual customer assistant (VCA). What they all refer to is using a conversational interface (CUI or CUX) to create a better way for your customers to talk directly to your business.

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Bots have become increasingly popular over the last two years and companies’ interest in them is only increasing.

The short answer is that bots are incredibly cost-effective and scalable. Bots can automate your customers’ conversations with your business in a way that both saves you money and differentiates your business. But the real silver bullet is that due to the inherent “intimacy” of conversation, companies are discovering what their customers want and need at a level of granularity (and in real time!) that has never before been possible.

Here’s what I see in our industry right now: Ÿ Beyond offering companies the ability to deliver affordable intimacy on a global scale, the newest type of cloud-based, subscription SaaS, “Bots-as-a-Service” or BaaS, is fast, easy, and secure. I want to add a note here about the industry squabbling you may have heard between voice and texting/messaging advocates. Some smart people were passionately positing that voice or messaging was the future of conversational interfaces.

The answer was decided quickly. Customers want and need both voice and messaging. Here’s why — when people are by themselves in a quiet environment, they choose voice. Likewise, when people are in crowded, noisy environments, they choose messaging. Ÿ

While it’s easy to joke that certain companies don’t have any customer service, there isn’t a company in business that doesn’t need to provide customer service and support. Human to machine (bot) communication dramatically improves the quality, cost, and efficiency of providing that customer service. Human call center

About The Author Aby Varghese is UIB Holdings Pte. Ltd.'s (UIB's) Chief Technology Officer. He's based in India.

Aby's 20+ years of expertise in rapid prototyping and lean development methodologies have allowed him to explore incorporating technologies such as machine learning, natural language processing, and unified communications to unleash the potential of the Internet of Things (IoT).

He spent his early years as a software engineer with the multi-billion-dollar conglomerate KGISL Group, where he worked with Patni Computers for Hitachi Consulting. Aby earned his Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication from Bharathiar University. He is also an angel investor for startups in India and founder of the Bangalore Node School. Aby can be reached on aby.varghese@uib.ai. Ÿ

agents, no matter how large your budget and how many people you have working your phones and chat screens, cannot instantly respond to all customers’ inquiries in their preferred languages.

Ÿ

And finally, use cases for bots aren’t just about answering customers’ Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs). Smart bots are being used to generate leads, close sales, train employees, report problems, generate helpdesk tickets, book hotel rooms, purchase airline tickets, and many other use cases. Where there’s a need for customers to talk to your business, there’s a conversational solution.

not, it’s well worth the one-time investment to add additional languages so that all of your customers can easily communicate in their preferred language.

What channel(s) should I use?

What language(s) should I use?

The answer is what you’d expect, use your customers’ preferred channels. That said, the choice of social media platforms, messaging apps, smart speakers, virtual assistants, and other communications channels can truly be overwhelming. With over 2 billion users, the world’s most popular communications channel is WhatsApp. Supporting voice and text, WhatsApp is not only fast, secure, and reliable, it provides support for rich media (e.g., images and videos) and flawlessly handles multiple languages.

While there are always budget limitations, look at your bot’s target user audience. What languages do they prefer to speak? Are they comfortable with conversing in English? If

When you’re working with WhatsApp, remember that it does not support graphical, menu-driven chat as Facebook Messenger does. Users can say whatever they want, which

29

is why you should use a good NLP/AI engine and take the time to train and test your bot so it meets your objectives for it.

your marketing team to define the bot’s personality based on your company’s mission, values, and culture. Ÿ

Create and test your variants. Variants are the different ways that your customers will ask the bot their questions. You’ve likely heard the joke that AI isn’t very smart but it can learn fast. This is 100% true. Involve multiple people in generating your variants, ideally matching the demo- and psychographics of your targeted audience. For example, instead of asking 10 people to generate 30 variants each, it’s much better to ask 30 people to generate 10 variants each. The greater the diversity of the people you ask, the better your bot will be able to answer your customers’ questions. Keep in mind that while you’re able to add new variants at any time but everyone wants to launch a bot that can answer everyone’s questions no matter how they ask them. When finished, be sure test all of your variants on your NLP.

Ÿ

Make your bot conversational. How do you do this?

Always ask the users for their feedback after each conversation. A thorough beta test will really polish your bot.

Ÿ

Implement live agent handover (if needed).

Ÿ

Actively track the conversations. For your bot’s first week of life, invest the time to closely monitor ALL conversations so that any problems can be immediately addressed as they happen. Use people’s feedback, good and bad, to constantly improve your NLP engine. Users will give invaluable insights into what they expect from your business. Make sure that this goes — directly and unfiltered — to your top management. Remember that this is the business model behind Amazon’s Alexa Voice Service. Understanding your customers is key to delivering the products and services they want and need.

What NLP/AI engine should I use?

New mainstream and niche engines seem to be popping up every day. Ask yourself whether an “all-purpose” or a niche engine will work best for your specific use case. If, for example, your bot is going to be used to support cancer patients as they go through their treatments, an engine with an extensive cancer-specific library will be your best choice. Currently, the four most popular engines are IBM Watson, Google Dialog Flow, Wit.ai, and Amazon Lex. If you’re not building your bot yourself, check that your provider can support the engine that you want to use. Watch out that you don’t get locked in. With technology changing quickly in a competitive market, look for a provider who can use any engine to save you stress, time, and money should you ever want to switch engines.

Know that when your users first start using your bot, they will be curious and ask very simple questions. What you will soon discover, however, is that they very quickly move from “gently” testing your bot to directly and aggressively challenging it. It’s human nature to try to “break the bot.”

While this is great for your testing, planning for this natural shift in human behavior will help you to design the bot’s NLP/AI layer to survive these “stress tests.”

How do I build my bot?

Congratulations! You’ve decided to build (or commission) a bot, and you’ve selected your language(s), channel(s), and NLP/AI engine. Now comes the fun part — actually building your bot. Based on nine million users and counting, this is my own personal checklist for how to create a compelling conversational experience with your bot:

I can’t wait to talk to your bot! Ÿ

Create your conversations. What will people ask your bot? And more importantly, how will the bot answer their questions? If this is your first bot, remember that your bot’s replies define the character of your business just as a live call center agent’s responses do. Engage

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Paessler AG: Equipping Corporations With Powerful Unified Monitoring Solutions

T

he IT industry is constantly evolving, with new products and features being released faster than ever. In the last few years, a handful of pressuring issues have affected the growth and reputation of many companies. These issues revolve around losing confidential data or suffering software crashes, which often result in a damaged reputation and the sudden loss of customer trust. To tackle this, many companies are looking for solutions that are easy to apply, affordable, and reliable.

As a leader in network monitoring, Paessler AG enables companies to monitor all their systems, putting businesses ahead of IT problems instead of behind them. Paessler’s core product, PRTG, is a straightforward monitoring platform that keeps companies on top of their most important technology. Today, it is a “hidden champion” in the field of IT infrastructure monitoring for any sized network.

A Global Provider with Wellfounded Core Values Established in 1997, Paessler AG is a leading worldwide provider of network monitoring software, offering IT and network administrators with comprehensive network monitoring tools that are easy to use, easy to buy, and easy to install and maintain. The company’s mission is to empower IT

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professionals to manage their networks, ensuring maximum productivity and 100% uptime. The core values of Paessler AG reflect its strong dedication to help customers and solve their issues. These core values include a committment to excellence, customer focus, team players and a consistent drive to exceed expectations. Moreover, these are the driving forces behind the developed of PRTG. PRTG: A Multipurpose Network Monitoring Solution Paessler AG understands the challenges of complex IT

Our network monitoring solutions provide peace of mind, condence, and convenience at a price you can afford.

infrastructures and networks, therefore, it is committed to 100% uptime.

Keeping clients’ requirements in mind, it has developed an award-winning powerful and easy-to-use solution: PRTG. It is a network monitoring solution that helps IT professionals monitor their entire infrastructure around the clock, which is suitable for businesses of all sizes. With this, clients can monitor everything in their infrastructure including LANs, WANs, servers, websites, applications and much more. PRTG includes flexible alerting, multiple user interfaces, cluster failover solution, maps and dashboards, distributed monitoring and in-depth reporting.

Furthermore, the leading next-gen networking solution provider has recently launched PRTG PLUS, which offers the proven capabilities of PRTG in a new, more flexible subscription license for large IT environments. “For large environments (where customers want architectural flexibility in a single annual subscription license and access to premium support), we just announced the PRTG PLUS license,” says Paessler AG’s new CEO, Helmut Binder.

A Veteran Leader Paving the Way towards Success Helmut Binder joined Paessler AG as CEO in 2019. He uses his prior expertise and knowledge to lead

Paessler AG towards its success and growth. He follows the impressive legacies of Christian Twardawa and Dirk Paessler, the first two CEOs. He completed his education in Business Administration from The University of Cologne and in Tokyo. The seasoned leader finished various management assignments in the electronics and telecommunications sector before he started working in the IT industry for 15 years. He has spent the majority of his career working in international markets. In the past decade, Helmut worked with two privately-owned mid-sized German companies. Before joining Paessler, he served as the CEO of the IT services and software specialist Materna, where he took over the CEO role from the two founders. “I enjoy the individual culture and processes in privately-owned companies because agile teams with the freedom to innovate usually develop the best outcomes.

Paessler is a remarkable company and I’m looking forward to actively shaping its further success,” says CEO Helmut.

Paessler AG CEO Helmut’s Valuable Advice According to the CEO of Paessler AG, companies encounter problems every day. These problems are unique and different from each other and at the same time, they may be similar. Therefore, Helmut advises companies to never stop learning, growing, and remaining flexible to new opportunities and tools. These characteristics empower teams to remain relevant and continue innovating in any industry.

Clients’ Satisfied with PRTG The glowing testimonials from clients showcase how Paessler AG’s solutions are flexible, reliable and easy to install. These solutions help them to monitor and manage their systems with less effort. Because of its innovative solutions, the company was named as Gartner Peer Insights Customer’s Choice for IT Infrastructure Monitoring Tools. This demonstrates that its customers love PRTG. For example, Lydia Muzar, CLICKinto states, “PRTG [is] cost-effective and provides more info than we typically need. It’s also very attractive and visually appealing. That’s actually very important for monitoring; the aesthetics are just as important as what it is capturing... The fact that [PRTG] is easy to navigate and visually appealing [makes] it easy for IT to capitalize on when they are doing their day-to-day work.”

Setting Goals to Offer Better Solutions In the near future, Paessler AG is looking forward for PRTG PLUS partners. They have also pipelined many projects in their ever-growing Roadmap, a path that helps their team continue offering greater and greater performance to all Paessler customers.

Helmut Binder CEO

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Insights Segment

This Movement Needs A

RIGHT Protection C

loud adoption has been a “movement” as most businesses today (big or small) have one or more applications running in the cloud. Gartner predicts that the worldwide public cloud service market will grow from $182.4B in 2018 to $331.2B in 2022, attaining a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 12.6%. The spending on Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS) and Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS) are predicted to grow in a year from 2018 to 2019 by 27.5% and 21.8%, respectively. According to Sid Nag, Research VP at Gartner, “Cloud services are definitely shaking up the industry. At Gartner, we know of no vendor or service provider today whose business model offerings and revenue growth are not influenced by the increasing adoption of cloud-first strategies in organizations. What we see now is only the beginning, though.”

2018

2019

2020

2021

2022

Cloud Business Process Services (BPaaS)

45.8

49.3

53.1

57.0

61.1

Cloud Application Infrastructure Services (PaaS)

15.6

19.0

23.0

27.5

31.8

Cloud Application Services (SaaS)

80.0

94.8

110.5

126.7

143.7

Cloud Management and Security Services

10.5

12.2

14.1

16.0

17.9

Cloud System Infrastructure Services (IaaS)

30.5

38.9

49.1

61.9

76.6

Total Market

182.4

214.3

249.8

289.1

331.2

Source: Gartner (April 2019) In our opinion, the 3 key benefits of Cloud adoption are: Ÿ Ÿ Ÿ

Agility and Scalability: Scale resources on the fly to meet the increased business demands Reliability: Better reliability with disaster recovery and avoiding single point of failure Cost: Reduce infrastructure overheads and operational costs

With the rapid increase in the adoption of cloud, one of the top concerns that the organizations are deterred by is security for addressing the unique and dynamic requirements for protecting the cloud infrastructure. Cloud environments are highly connected which “makes it easier” for traffic to bypass traditional perimeter defenses. Security and compliance risks

36

involved in Cloud System Infrastructure Service (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) as well as Cloud Applications Service (Software-as-a-Service) threaten an organization's ability to drive digital business. Most IT and security teams are struggling with legacy security products that simply cannot contend and align with the speed and efficiency that the cloud provides. The legacy solutions don't understand the language of today's cloud and web, and that frustrates both IT and users.

On top of it, deploying multiple different silo solutions that caters on-premise and the cloud breeds several challenges especially for the Cloud environment and services putting our sensitive data at risk of loss and exposure.

As organizations worldwide are racing to realize the benefits of private and public Cloud System Infrastructure and

Applications, the basic security issues must be addressed. This includes, tracking physical servers, virtual machines (VMs), cloud instances, cloud applications and platforms as well as risk associated with their security posture. Enterprises moving to the cloud must also be able to discover, classify and monitor devices, users and applications connected to cloud resources and take into account new tools, personnel and training that will be required for the cloud environments. As people become increasingly mobile, collaborate more freely, and shift more of their data to the cloud, enterprises need security that governs

use and protects data everywhere.

At Seceon, we believe that people and companies should be able to collaborate without limits, working safely across the cloud, web, devices and locations. To stay true to that vision, we have created industry's most advanced comprehensive Cybersecurity platform that will provide deepest visibility into cloud and on-premise compute instances and applications so that customers can make informed policy decisions to reduce risk and improves efďŹ ciency of SOC teams. To learn more, go to: https://www.seceon.com/use-cases/cloud-security/

About the Authors: Arun Gandhi works as the Director at Seceon leading product management and marketing with responsibility for driving strategic Go-To-Market initiatives, positioning, customer use cases, and executive engagements with customers & partners.

Sunil Kotagiri is a lifelong technologist, architect, and hands-on executive and handled every role in the software engineering lifecycle in Technology Company at some point. As a Co-Founder of Seceon, Sunil oversees the architecture, development, and delivery of Seceon's most advanced comprehensive cybersecurity platform based on cutting edge Big/Fast Data Architectures and Machine Learning (ML) and Artiď€ cial Intelligence (AI).

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Brand Promotion

T

he first known label to mankind emerged in the year 1700 in the form of handmade drawing on small medical containers. During the 18th-century, wineries put printed label on their bottles. These labels were printed on a homemade paper by a wooden press and then glued to the bottle of wine. After that, the labelling was used in different types of product. In 1935, self-adhesive label allowed this industry to grow rapidly. The first intelligent label appeared in 1970s as the technology evolved, it allowed use of electronic reading to put a large amount of information on the labels. The time has brought considerable change in the labelling sector. The market research done by the labels and labelling shows that the label printing market was standing strong at 34.46 billion USD until 2017. Labelling Market will grow at a rate of 2.8% per year. At this rate, it might reach 39.5 billion USD by 2022.

Importance of labelling as a marketing tool The packaging is a very important part as it is used to identify a product and to differentiate one product from another. The labelling enhances the appearance of the product which is used for promoting. It also helps in providing information about a product to a prospective consumer. Companies use labelling as an extension to their brand. The label contains pictures, logos of the company which helps customer to recognise the brand. The products' label delivers a specific message about the product to the consumer. It explains the benefit of the product of the competitors. The labelling has to follow certain rules and guidelines to get final approval before it gets printed on the packaging of the product. Companies have to abide by the mandatory consumer product information standards under the CCA, Food standards code if the company is involved in the food industry. It is very important now a day as

38

labelling is quite significant in grabbing attention of the customer. It encourages potential buyers to purchase the product and it also provides all the information related to consumer. These techniques can be used get the product appeal more than the products from the same categories.

Next-gen labelling techniques used to bring change in the industry The packaging industry is continually moving towards decreasing the weight of the product by using switching to flexible plastic format. Though labels do not significantly add to the weight of the product, still the manufacturers are using smaller labels and thinner material to cut down the weight. The improvement in material science has reduced the volume and thickness of label materials, but it does not compromise with the strength for handling and printing processes. The use of recyclable material in packaging is growing across the globe. The labels can affect the purity of the plastic which can make it unrecyclable. The purity of the recovered plastic granules will depend on how easily the adhesive can be removed. The development of new label adhesive has been introduced to make sure that the molecular bond is dissolved, resulting in high purity recyclable material. The demand for faster turnaround with greater customisation is driving the label printing industry.

The big player in the industry are making heavy investment in high tech management information system, that is integrated with specialised inspection and colour performance software and technology and fully automated press and finishing line set up systems. The aim of this investment is to establish abilities that will be automated and streamlined workflow 24/7.

Thermal technology and its use in labelling The thermal printing has a wide range of solutions for the companies who want to improve their packaging. The thermal printers are favoured due to their portability, speed, and capability to create high quality, vibrant labels which are sturdy and visually appealing. It is done by the implementation of thermal imaging technologies, which is available for different packaging solutions. The top-grade thermal printers are made to produce high volume printing in a rough environment. The strong equipment can print content including barcodes, texts and imagery on labels and tags at super-fast speeds round the clock. The printers can label items, package, shipping and many more.

Labelling strategy and how to approach it Developing a clear and focused labelling plan is an important component of a branding strategy because labels and packaging are usually the ďŹ rst things consumers notice.

Small businesses and start-ups tend to have fewer resources at their disposal making it harder for their product to compete with better-known brands. A well thought out label development plan can put a business' limited resources to

better use and help their label manufacturer have a deeper understanding of what is expected from them. Also, label development can lessen the chances of waste or error occurring during printing. Companies have to make through plan about the labels that are going to get printed on the container of the product. The mindfulness is necessary about the essence of the product before designing the label.

It should bring out all the qualities of the product and put it in front of customers in a visually attractive manner.

Labelling plays a signiďŹ cant role in the success of a product, as market is full of commodities in the same bracket that targets similar group of consumers. It is important to look apart, cement products individuality and bring out the persona which is different from the others.

The technologies and strategies are in place to bring the necessary changes in the labelling industry. But it comes down to the intent and the creativity of an organisation to push the ides through innovative labelling on the product.

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