VARINDIA IT MAGAZINE

Sundar Pichai, who has been associated with Google for the past two years, has now been appointed as a board member of Alphabet Inc., parent company of Google.  Prior to his appointment, he has served Google as its Chief Executive Officer and now has got another role as Alphabet’s board member. His appointment represents a vote of confidence and trust founders place in him.  “Sundar has been doing a great job as Google’s CEO, driving strong growth, partnerships, and tremendous product innovation,” Larry Page, Chief Executive Officer of Alphabet Inc., said in a statement. “I really enjoy working with him and I’m excited that he is joining the Alphabet board.” Read More

Check Point has announced its product integration of Check Point SandBlast Mobile with Microsoft Enterprise Mobility + Security (EMS) to secure mobile devices in the enterprise.  Cyberattacks have evolved beyond the enterprise perimeter, breaching mobile environments; yet only one percent of enterprises have deployed mobile security technologies. The integration of Check Point SandBlast Mobile with Microsoft’s Intune enterprise mobility management (EMM) platform, provides businesses with a comprehensive approach to manage mobile devices and protect against advanced mobile attacks.  Andrew Conway, General Manager for Enterprise Mobility + Security, Microsoft Corp., added, “As attacks continue to become more sophisticated, many customers are looking at how mobile threat defense solutions, such as Check Point, can help them thwart threats on mobile devices. The integration between Check Point and Microsoft Intune will help secure mobile devices from advanced cyberthre...

The internet has been a life line of young generation in India, in the era of technology disruption it not only has created tens of millions of market and job opportunities but also a more equal society, providing an opportunity for everyone to enjoy the changes brought about by information and content sharing.  Content sharing is very common with the peers and colleagues , SHAREit, one of the three leading apps in India, has received the most attention from users as well as from the market, and its rapid growth is closely related to the development of India's internet market. In just a few years, SHAREit has featured on Google Play's homepage over 700 times and has gained more than 1 billion users worldwide, of which approximately 300 million are from India, a user base that is greater than 70 percent of India's total internet users, evidencing SHAREit's massive share of the country's content sharing market.... Read More

Persistent Systems has announced acquisition of PARX, a Salesforce Certified Platinum Partner in the DACH market of Germany, Austria and Switzerland that focusses on its customers' business models, strategic and operational objectives. This marks a continuing global expansion for Persistent, which includes the recent openings of development centres in Mexico, Israel and new locations in the U.S. The acquisition of PARX follows last year’s acquisition by Persistent of Australia’s leading Salesforce consulting partner, PRM Cloud Solutions. Persistent is a Salesforce Certified Platinum Partner.  Sudhir Kulkarni, President of Digital at Persistent Systems, says, “PARX is particularly compelling because of its exclusive focus on born-in-the-cloud platforms and technologies with no footprint in legacy technologies or services. Bringing PARX into Persistent deepens our Salesforce expertise, further strengthening our global capabilities to deliver digital transformation for ...” Re...

Union Minister for Panchayati Raj, Rural Development, Drinking Water & Sanitation, Narendra Singh Tomar and ILO Deputy Director General (Policy) ILO, Deborah Greenfield launched the publication and Mobile App for Road Maintenance, “Aarambh”:  The app aims at use of GIS based mapping for making road inventories, condition surveys, and producing cost estimates and other relevant data for preparation and monitoring of annual road maintenance plans.  Its usage would greatly enhance the service delivery of the state level institutions in planning and implementing performance based rural roads maintenance contracts.... Read More

Accelerated computing is quickly gaining traction in the enterprise as businesses embrace these technologies to overcome the limitations of CPUs says IDC.  Accelerated computing is the ability to accelerate applications and workloads by offloading a portion of the processing onto adjacent silicon subsystems such as graphics processing units (GPUs) and field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).  Accelerated computing is gaining traction in the enterprise as businesses seek solutions for overcoming the limitations of central processing units (CPUs) for workloads that require data processing acceleration. Such apps/workloads rely on (single stream) pipeline processing where data locality is important for quick handoffs between various components.... Read More

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has unconditionally approved the merger of the telecommunications businesses of Vodafone India Limited, and its wholly-owned subsidiary Vodafone Mobile Services Limited, with Idea Cellular Limited. The US$23-billion transaction is the largest transaction in terms of value in the history of Indian M&A.  Shardul Amarchand Mangaldas & Co. acted for Vodafone India Limited and Vodafone Mobile Services Limited before the CCI.  The telecommunications sector in India is witnessing significant consolidation after the entry of Reliance Jio last year. This merger will allow the parties to invest more significantly in improving coverage and capacity in telecom infrastructure, thereby enabling Vodafone-Idea to offer a better, more innovative and attractive range of services to Indian consumers, fuelling the Digital India initiative of the Government.... Read More

Sanjiv Gupta has taken over as the CEO, National E-Governance Division (NeGD), ministry of electronics and information technology, Govt. Of India. He is at present the additional secretary, Department of Industrial Policy and Promotion.   Speaking on this new position , he said, "While I am optimistically looking forward to contribute my bit to the vision of Digital India, there's a sense of trepidation due to huge expectations everyone has."He further added, "Having remained associated with IT related assignments throughout the career, it is some kind of home coming for me." Read More

In a bid to gear up the promotional activities pertaining to “Digital India”, the Central Government has allotted e-payment targets to the ministries and states.  Aiming at setting up a cashless economy soon, Union Finance Minister Arun Jaitley has announced a mammoth target of 25 billion transactions by March 2018, i.e. the end of this financial year. For fulfilling this target in a balanced manner, the government has now allotted targets to specific ministries and states depending on their on-ground reach.  Reportedly, ministries with higher social and physical reach have been entitled to higher responsibilities as per the decision.... Read More

Domestic handset vendors like Huawei, Vivo, Oppo and Xiaomi have captured around 87% of Chinese smartphone market in Q2, 2017 according to a study by Counterpoint.  The smartphones shipments in China grew a modest 3% annually during Q2 2017, registering second consecutive quarter of annual growth this year.  Commenting on the results, James Yan, Research Director, Counterpoint said, “June seasonally is a strong month for China as it is usually buoyed by portfolio upgrades from major brands such as Oppo, vivo and Xiaomi. The top four Chinese brands now capture close to 69% of the market as these brands have raced ahead of international and other local brands with expansive distribution reach and exciting portfolio.” Read More

The total IT spending by small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) will exceed $676 billion in 2021 according to IDC report. "SMB IT spending growth continues to track about two percentage points higher than GDP growth across regions. But beneath that slowly rising tide are faster moving currents that reflect the changing ways SMBs are acquiring and deploying technology," said Ray Boggs, Vice President, SMB Research, IDC. Boggs noted that while SMBs, especially smaller ones, have immediate tactical needs to sharpen performance, they are also looking to coordinate resources in a meaningful way. For many this will be an important step towards Digital Transformation (DX).... Read More