VARINDIA IT MAGAZINE

Kolkata recently witnessed the successful conclusion of the 9th EIITF (Eastern India Information Technology Fair - 2018) that was hosted by VARINDIA. Amidst speeches and presentations from corporate houses, the event served as a common platform for the corporates to share ideas, discuss issues and challenges targeting the growth of the ICT sector in the region in particular and the country in general. All in all, the event saw the coming together of 200 senior officials from the IT Department, dignitaries from Central and state government departments and spokespeople from IT Corporates. The special guests who attended the event were V K Bhandari, CMD - Supertron Electronics Pvt. Ltd.; Dr Tinku Acharya, Fellow IEEE, Founder & MD- Videonetics Technology; Manjit Nayak, Addl. Director- STPI; P L Suhasaria, President- COMPASS; Mansi Saha, Regional Secretary (East)- ISODA; Sandeep Sengupta, M.D.- ISOAH; Ranjit Metrani, VP Sales and Chief Revenue Officer- ESDS Software and Ardam

Union Minister Arun Jaitley has confirmed that GST rates on cement, ACs and televisions will be cut as tax revenues from them increase, and only luxury and sin goods will attract the highest slab of 28 per cent. Jaitley termed the pre-GST indirect tax regime, during which most of the household items attracted a levy of 31 per cent, as "Congress Legacy Tax", in a Facebook post. The past one year, he adds, has seen rate reduction in 384 commodities. Goods and Services Tax (GST), which subsumed 17 local taxes, was rolled out on July 1, 2017. The GST Council in its meeting last week decided to reduce taxes on 88 items, like sanitary napkins, fridge, small screen TV, washing machine, footwear, among others. The new tax rates became effective from today. Only 35 goods, including cement, automobile parts, tyres, automobile equipments, motor vehicles, yachts, aircrafts, aerated drinks, betting and demerit items like tobacco, cigarette and pan masala, attract hig

A question comes on why the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) Chairman R S Sharma dared to give personal detail of his Aadhar card number in Twitter. In response to a challenge by a Twitter user to publish Aadhaar details online, on Saturday tweeted his Aadhaar number with an open challenge to users to show him any example with “you can do any harm to me.” It always says, PPT (People, Process and Technology), Yet now everyone is getting dependent on Technology, by forgetting the people and the Process. Whereas, People plays the important role in every organisation, then they have to define the process. By getting influenced by the technology companies, vendors and consultants, we implement the technology in the organisation, which we are seeing the result. But the fact is Technology companies are fully aware of the respective country wise laws on how to find the loop holes. Need of the hour is,we would need for a digitally secured Aadhar card/Number.... Read More

To drive the ambitious Make in India initiative and promote manufacturing in the country, the Government has issued a mandate to give preference to locally produce cyber security products in all public procurement. The intellectual property rights of these cyber security products have to be owned by companies or start-ups incorporated in India. Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) in the order said that Cyber Security being a strategic sector, all the procuring entities shall give preference to domestically manufactured/produced Cyber Security Products. The notification is based on Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order 2017 which aims to enhance income and employment in the country..... Read More

Qlik has announced the acquisition of Podium Data to expand Qlik’s mission, moving beyond analytics to being provider of solutions that democratize data for every user to create a more data literate world. Enterprise data strategies have evolved to rely heavily on the creation of data lakes. However, customers are realizing that these and other data sources aren’t designed to easily and quickly deliver data to the business user. In many instances, data lakes have only increased customer data complexity and management headaches. According to Gartner, “Through 2018, 90% of deployed data lakes will be rendered useless, as they’re overwhelmed with information assets captured for uncertain use-cases.” (Gartner. Derive Value From Data Lakes Using Analytics Design Patterns. 26 September 2017) Qlik believes an organization’s analytics strategy is only optimized when paired with a strong data strategy, and yet most analytics vendors are falling short on delivering in this ar

Hitachi Vantara has announced its intent to acquire REAN Cloud LLC. This acquisition will reinforce Hitachi Vantara’s ability to accelerate secure enterprise cloud adoption across multi-cloud environments and strengthen its ability to manage and operate traditional applications as well as emerging workloads in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. Hitachi Vantara shares REAN Cloud’s passion for creating leading-edge solutions and will leverage REAN Cloud’s expertise to speed delivery of transformative digital solutions for its combined customers and partners. Bobby Soni, Chief Solutions and Services Officer of Hitachi Vantara, says, “Enterprises today want the ultimate flexibility in selecting the right environment for their varied workloads and development requirements. Moving and managing data and applications across environments requires careful orchestration through a unified cloud platform. Hitachi Vantara already offers trusted and reliable private cloud solut

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has announced new features to HPE 3PAR, so that users can focus on unlocking the economic value of their data. HPE InfoSight is a cloud-based AI platform built on a unique approach to data collection and analysis, predicting and automating resolution to problems and continuously improving to make HPE storage smarter and more reliable. HPE InfoSight delivers HPE 3PAR customers a predictive analytics framework to anticipate and prevent issues across the infrastructure stack. This is in addition to the cross-stack analytics made available to HPE 3PAR customers, which provides IT the ability to resolve performance problems and pinpoint the root cause of issues between the storage and host virtual machines. Since releasing these capabilities, HPE InfoSight has already predicted and auto-resolved 85% of more than 1,500 complex, priority cases across the HPE 3PAR installed base. HPE InfoSight enables a new and better product experience that

President Donald Trump, the Republican leader has said in an interview that he is willing to hit all Chinese goods imported to the US with tariffs if necessary. Trump administration will start imposing tariffs on Chinese imports worth $34 billion from Friday. On China's part, it will promptly strike back with tariffs on an equal amount of US exports. Trump has said in his speech that he is not doing this for politics but as a right thing for his country. He also added that they had been ripped off by China for a long time. US has imposed 25 per cent tariffs on approximately USD 34 billion of Chinese mechanical and technological products. Starting Friday, the US will tax 818 Chinese products, worth $34 billion a year. It won't target the 284 additions, worth $16 billion until it gathers further public comments. The move has sparked an immediate response from Beijing, which said would hit back dollar for dollar.... Read More

Fuchsia is laden with Google’s Material design found all over its Android and Chrome OS products. Every few months we hear a little bit more about Google’s not-so-secret Fuchsia operating system. The project is open source, and first became publicly available on GitHub in August 2016. We expect Google Fuchsia, when it finally comes out, to take over as Google’s singular, united operating system for phones, tablets and laptops. Fuchsia is a hybrid OS that is still very much in development. The entirety of Fuchsia OS is comprised of two distinct but connected user interfaces (UI): a phone-centric one codenamed ‘Armadillo’ and a traditional desktop UI known as ‘Capybara’ internally. It is expected that, Fuchsia is going to accomplish much of what Microsoft and Apple already have in Windows 10 and iOS-to-macOS Sierra Continuity, respectively, but in a very Google way. A report says, since Fuchsia OS was built from scratch and isn't based on Linux, like Android, there

On Friday government woke up as 74% of the cash dispensers are processing on outdated software and are prone to fraud and lack basic security features. The automated teller machines (ATMs) run by public sector banks may be easily accessible to frauds as they are running on outdated software by leaving it vulnerable to cyber attacks.The government, however, did not disclose details of such ATMs that were run by private sector lenders. Most ATMs in India Are Easy Targets for Hackers & Malware Attacks. A question arises on why do people wait for such attacks to happen to bring about a change? A huge number of machines in the country are operated by public sector players, state run-banks control close to 70% of the business, comprising lending and deposits, and the report says, government telling Parliament that close to 89% of the ATMs belong to this category. The development came at a point when several ATM fraud incidents have been reported in different parts of the countr

Rajesh Rege joined as the Country General Manager & Leader, Solutions & Cloud Technologies Group, Microsoft India. He quite as the Managing Dircetor, Redhat India/South Asia Operations ,who was global leader for the open source solutions. Over the last 3 years, helped establish Red Hat firmly in India/South Asia with an upsurge in visibility, recall and opportunity participation. Acquired a multitude of new customers with inroads into new sectors/ segments. Built a dynamic, action-oriented team who in turn have made Red Hat a magnet for great talent. On-boarded senior internal stakeholders to the India opportunity driving investments and support. Elevated partnerships into formidable multi-pronged engagements for reach & scale with several joint successes. Worked closely with media, analysts, policy makers & industry associations (member CII committee on IT/ITES) to champion open source & Red Hat.... Read More

Robotic process automation (or RPA or RPAAI) is an emerging form of business process automation technology based on the notion of software robots or artificial intelligence (AI) workers. Every sunrise sector requires a focussed roadmap and people with a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges, to place it on the fast track. RPA tools have strong technical similarities to graphical user interface testing tools. These tools also automate interactions with the GUI, and often do so by repeating a set of demonstration actions performed by a user. RPA tools differ from such systems including features that allow data to be handled in and between multiple applications, for instance, receiving email containing an invoice, extracting the data, and then typing that into a bookkeeping system. The data manipulation aspect is not something one would normally find in a testing tool. There are eight technologies, identified in a survey by NASSCOM which are part of the “F

European Union regulators have awarded a fine over android antitrust case in favour of Google with a record of $5.06 billion for using its Android mobile operating system to squeeze out rivals, and ordered changes to its business that could loosen the company’s grip on its biggest growth engine: mobile phones. As Android is an open-source and free operating system, device manufacturers still have to obtain a license, with certain conditions, from Google to integrate its Play Store service within their smartphones.

The European Commission levied the fine Wednesday, saying that Google has broken the law by forcing Android smartphone manufacturers to pre-install its own mobile apps and services, like Google Search, Chrome, YouTube, and Gmail, as a condition for licensing. Secondly, Google's app and services an unfair preference over other rival services, preventing rivals from innovating and competing, which is "illegal under EU antitrust rules."... Read More

The big bets placed on machine learning by Kai-fu Lee the former Apple, Microsoft and Google executive turned as investor, a key figure in the Chinese technology industry leading the way for China With a portfolio of 300 companies. Lee is among the leading investors in Chinese AI startups through his venture fund Sinovation Ventures, a $1.8bn dual currency fund, which also invests in the US. “The State Council paper laid out China’s desire to be a hub of AI innovation by 2030, and these papers have teeth in terms of very strong local execution,” says Kai-Fu Lee. This isn’t a divination by a researcher or academic, it’s government policy from Beijing. A State Council document, issued in July last year, resolved to position China as the world’s pre-eminent practitioner of artificial intelligence (AI) in both research and application within the next 12 years. Governments across the world are rushing to support innovation in AI, but none has published as coherent a plan as Chin

UK speed tester, OpenSignal has stated in its recent report that India’s 4G download speeds are slower than that of its neighbours - Sri Lanka (13.95Mbps), Pakistan (13.56Mbps) and Myanmar (15.56Mbps). The average 4G LTE data speed in India has been about 6.1Mbps for more than a year. According to a list prepared by OpenSignal, 4G download speed in India is the slowest among 88 countries spanning 6 continents. The speed in India has been calculated to be a dismal 6.01 mbps, while the fastest in the world is in Singapore at 44.31 mbps. USA also struggles with a lowly rank. 4G speed in America has been calculated to be 16.31 mbps. The methodology used to prepare this report is based on the real-world experience of consumers on mobile networks in their usual, daily lives. However, when it comes to availability of 4G connections, India performs far better. India ranks 14 out of the 88 countries with a very encouraging 86.26%. It does not come as much of a surprise conside

Finally Twitter says This week : We’ll be removing locked accounts from follower counts across profiles globally. As a result, the number of followers displayed on many profiles may go down... want everyone to have confidence that follower count numbers are meaningful and accurate. An online micro analytical journal published its initial report last month that, the people on Twitter and how it was being used. It is discovered that 5% of users accounted for 75% of all activity. This finding was based on indexing 11.5 million accounts, and then looking at the top 5% users who accounted for most number of Tweets and 32% of all tweets made by the most active Twitter users, who were generated by machine bots that posted more than 150 tweets/day. The actual percentage of machine-generated tweets among the most active users is probably higher than 32% because there are many bots that update less than 150 times/day.The most active users, 24% or one-quarter of all tweets ove

India and South Korea are expanding their business collaboration with an aim to heighten the bilateral trade to US $50 billion by 2030 by signing 11 agreements on different perspectives, the two countries' leaders said Tuesday. As per estimation the Bilateral trade between the two countries rose by nearly a quarter to $20.8 billion in the 2017/18 fiscal year that ended in March, with $16.4 billion of that in favour of South Korea. Major South Korean companies including Samsung and Hyundai Motors are everyday usual names across the country, and visiting South Korean President Moon Jae-in said he hoped that smaller companies from his country could make a replica of their success here which is an extensive growing up Trading platform in the world. Indian Prime Minister Mr. Narendra Modi enjoined their business communities to step up investments and promote joint ventures. A day before i.e on Monday, these two leaders of both the countries traveled in a metro train to Noida

The number of Twitter followers determines the popularity of an individual in the digital age and even leaders like Prime Minister Narendra Modi is among those who believe in massive following on Twitter. But the recent study conducted by Twiplomacy revealed that a staggering 60 percent of PM Modi’s Twitter followers are not real. Twitter has since the past few months stepped up its efforts to tackle the rise of fake accounts on its platform. Twitter suspended a whopping number of accounts between May and June this year. The company reportedly shut down as many as 70 million accounts in the said period. The number of suspended accounts went up to 13 million accounts. The drill of spotting a fake account is, when a suspicious account fails to pass the test of verifying their phone number, Twitter shuts down that account. Those accounts which pass are reinstated. PM Modi’s rival and Congress president Rahul  Gandhi's official twitter handle has 3,696,460 fake foll

For Microsoft Corp. acquiring GitHub Inc. the most admired coding platform where developers share and collaborate on projects, for $7.5 billion worth of Microsoft stock.This deal will intensify the company’s relationship with developers and allow its tools to hold out a broader audience within the world of open-source software, both a fling back to the company’s earliest roots and a sharp turnaround from where it was a decade ago. More than 28 million developers around the world use GitHub, Microsoft said, acknowledging the crucial role that developers have played in revolutionizing the modern economy. “Today, every company is becoming a software company and developers are at the center of digital transformation,” Microsoft said in a news release. Microsoft’s origin story lies in the market for software-development tools. Bill Gates and Paul Allen co-founded the company to give hobbyists a way to program a new micro-computer kit, the MITS Altair. Decades before former Chief

IBM have the most advanced illustrative employee performance review system around. Rather than simply honour employees on what they’ve already done, the company uses its Watson AI to speculate and advice what they’re going to do in the future. Using artificial intelligence, Watson Analytics looks at an employee’s experiences and projects to infer the potential skills and qualities each person might have to serve IBM in the future. Watson also scours IBM’s internal training system to see if an employee has gained new skills. Managers then take Watson’s assessment rating into account as they make bonus, pay and promotion decisions.  “Traditional models said if you were a strong performer in your current job that was the singular way that you got a promotion,” said Nickle LaMoreaux, vice president for compensation and benefits at IBM. “Well, we certainly still care about performance,” she said. But that now includes hypothetical future performance, too. IBM claims Wats

Yes .... the Facebook data collection scandal goes to another extend which is more Interesting …. !!! It turns out that one of the 61 companies that got an augmentation to collect certain kinds of data was a Russian tech firm with ties to the Kremlin.  Before 2015, apps like This Is Your Digital Life - the source of Cambridge Analytica's data on 87 million people - could collect information on the friends of their users.  Basically, if you have used an app, the developers could see what your friends "liked" even if they weren't users. Facebook banned the practice in May 2015, but as it revealed to Congress several weeks ago in 700 pages of written responses, it gave some apps an extension.  Now, Facebook has revealed to Wired and CNN that two of those apps were from Mail.ru Group, which is owned by a company founded by Alisher Usmanov, a billionaire on the U.S. Treasury Department's list of oligarchs with ties to Putin. Mail.ru

Red Hat has kicked off its two-day conference - the 2018 Red Hat Partner Conference Asia. The event is taking place in Bali, Indonesia from July 10-12 2018 and has witnessed the attendance of more than 225 Red Hat partners, distributors, system integrators, ISVs, OEMs and solution providers. The conference commenced with the keynote presentations by Red Hat executives - including Dirk-Peter van Leeuwen, senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific; Arun Oberoi, executive vice president for global sales and services; and Mark Enzweiler, senior vice president, partners and alliances. Other notable guest speakers include Sandra Ng, group vice president of IDC Asia Pacific practice group, who provided insights into the partner landscape and market opportunities in the region. With the theme “Stronger Together,”  the event featured several  breakout sessions on key focus areas such as application modernization and integration, IT automation, containers, hyb

Red Hat has showcased the uptake of Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform in Asia Pacific by many of the region’s leading independent software vendors (ISV). ISVs such as BoCloud (China), UEC Group Ltd. (China), Yusys Technologies Co. (China), EAB Systems (Hong Kong), Monoplus (Japan) and Biqmind (Singapore) are now offering solutions based on Red Hat OpenShift to help companies in the financial services, IT, and oil and gas sectors accelerate their innovation journey. To help enterprises in Asia Pacific capture emerging opportunities, ISVs in the region are integrating Red Hat OpenShift into products and services that can enable success for cloud-first customers. Red Hat OpenShift is built on open source innovation and standards including Kubernetes, the container orchestration engine, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and is trusted by many companies around the world. It provides a more secure and stable platform for container-based deployments without sacrificing curr

Red Hat has announced the launch of the Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program in Asia Pacific. The program aims to help system integrators (SIs) build and monetize a modern cloud-native application development and delivery practice using Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware. The Red Hat OpenShift Practice Builder Program is uniquely designed to help SIs build expertise on Red Hat OpenShift and Red Hat JBoss Middleware developer tools and enable them to build and modernize applications for the cloud, to help deliver new services at lower cost and accelerate development for faster return on investment. Red Hat OpenShift Container Platform is an award-winning application development platform that unites developers and IT operations on a single platform to build, deploy, and manage applications more consistently across hybrid cloud infrastructures. An example is the Hong Kong-based international airline, Cathay Pacific, where they have replaced their lega

Ericsson has established a Centre of Excellence (CoE) and Innovation Lab for 5G in the country at the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Delhi. This first-of-its-kind 5G innovation Lab, which has been set up by Ericsson for Indian industry and academia to leverage, is dedicated to the nation by the Hon’ble Minister of State for Communications (I/C) and Minister of State for Railways, Shri Manoj Sinha, together with Börje Ekholm, President & CEO, Ericsson, at the IIT Delhi. Ericsson conducts India’s first 5G over-the-air beam tracking demonstration on 3.5GHz spectrum using a pre-commercial end-to-end system, including 5G-NR, VRAN and VCORE. The demonstration includes 3GPP 5G NR Multiple-Input Multiple-Output (MIMO) antenna technology with adaptive beam-forming and beam-tracking techniques to deliver robust and sustained mobile broadband communications. By beam steering, a highly-focused beam, a stronger radio signal with higher data throughput is delivered over a great