VARINDIA IT MAGAZINE

Accenture Completes Acquisition of BRIDGEi2i:  Accenture (NYSE: ACN)   has completed its acquisition of   BRIDGEi2i , an   artificial intelligence (AI)   and analytics firm headquartered in Bengaluru, India. The financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition, announced last month, strengthens  Accenture’s global capabilities in data science , machine learning and AI-powered insights, and adds more than 800 deeply skilled professionals to Accenture’s Applied Intelligence practice.   Founded in 2011 and with a presence in India, the US and Australia, BRIDGEi2i specializes in data-driven digital transformation for companies across industries and global markets by combining data engineering, advanced analytics, proprietary AI accelerators and consulting services. About Accenture Accenture is a global professional services company with leading capabilities in digital, cloud and security. Combining unmatched experience and specialized...

KPMG in India and Forcepoint strike an alliance to offer information protection services:  With an aim to offer information protection services to businesses in India,   KPMG   in India and Forcepoint have announced a strategic alliance. The partnership will bring together KPMG in India’s cyber security services along with Forcepoint’s data-first cybersecurity innovations which enable enterprises and government agencies to protect their critical data anywhere it is accessed.   According to KPMG’s 2021 India CEO Outlook Report – Towards a digitally-driven and purpose-led recovery, as many as 14 percent CEOs in India compared to 12 percent globally saw cyber security risk as one of the greatest risks to growth today. KPMG in India’s experience in information protection advisory, understanding of various data privacy requirements and adoption of data protection technology measures on different technology platforms coupled with Forcepoint’s skills in delivering modern cy...

Praveen Jonnalgadda designates as CIO at Commscope:  Praveen Jonnalgadda has recently been promoted as Chief Information Officer (CIO)   at Commscope.   Commscope  is a global company with operations in India as well and Praveen was key in opening its capability centre in Hyderabad in 2013, creating employment opportunities in Telangana. Praveen, who hails from Miryalaguda, holds a master’s degree and PhD in Artificial Intelligence from the department of Mathematics, Osmania University.   Praveen has over 20 years of experience in leading global teams in product engineering, software development, manufacturing, supply chain and information technology. At Commscope, he is responsible for implementing a digital strategy. He joined CommScope in 2008, having previously filled leadership roles at Ford Motor Company and Sun Microsystems. The CIO Executive Council named Praveen one of their 50 ‘Ones to Watch’ technology leaders in 2018.   “It’s a great responsibil...

IBM Launches Cloud Satellite:  IBM Cloud® Satellite   helps you deploy and run applications consistently across all on-premises, edge computing and public cloud environments from any cloud vendor. It standardizes a core set of Kubernetes, data, AI and security services to be centrally managed as a service by IBM Cloud, with full visibility across all environments through a single pane of glass.   The result is greater developer productivity and development velocity. Lumen Technologies partners with IBM to integrate IBM Cloud Satellite with its edge platform enabling clients to harness hybrid cloud services and build innovative solutions at the edge. It will integrate IBM Cloud Satellite with its edge platform enabling clients from 180,000 connected enterprise locations to harness hybrid cloud services and build innovative solutions at the edge.   With the Lumen platform and  IBM Cloud Satellite , customers can now deploy data-intensive applications across highly...

Pega buys Qurious.io for AI-powered Speech Analytics:  Pegasystems Inc.   announced its acquisition of   Qurious.io, Inc ., a cloud-based real-time speech analytics solution powered by artificial intelligence (AI) for customer service teams. Terms of the deal are not being disclosed.   Qurious.io’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering uses speech-to-text, natural language processing (NLP), and emotion detection capabilities to analyze the dialog within each customer service call as it happens. The software then provides agents with real-time insights and coaching so they can improve customer interactions, make better recommendations, and boost customer loyalty and sales. The company was founded in 2016 in San Francisco by recent Forbes 30-Under-30 winners  Sabrina Atienza, CEO , and  George Ramonov, CTO .   “With its deep customer service and AI pedigree, Pega will enable us to bring our intelligent speech analytics software to hundreds of the most im...

For 90s school kids pursuing Math and Coding, Artificial Intelligence spurred the imagination of a whole generation as the “coolest” frontier of Technology and Computer Science. It’s been 21 years since IBM Deep Blue defeated Gary Kasparov at Chess in 1997, about 7 years since IBM Watson won Jeopardy in 2011 and just a couple of years since Google Deepmind’s AlphaGo defeated Lee Sedol at Go in 2016. Role of Capital and Money backing AI The trend in the timeline is pretty clear–Artificial Intelligence is being able to do unimaginable things much sooner than expected. Even for the industry, the word is out. Companies who will be able to leverage AI will be much more competent and in a position to dominate markets than ones who don’t. Many people must have seen that a lot of companies show intent to leverage AI at the level of top management but the outcomes on KPIs seems not that great yet. So what’s really holding them back?   There are multiple reasons for this, b...

Ina. recently held conclave on the future of AI,where the speakers had stressed the need for the information technology sector to embrace Artificial Intelligence (AI). Asoke K. Laha, Founder, President and CEO of InterraIT, has emerged as a strong advocate of the adoption of cutting-edge technologies as a strategy to reorient India’s IT industries in the face of challenges posed by rampant protectionism, increased competition, and labor arbitrage in its target markets. “We need to look inward at domestic markets with a view to bringing to the table sophisticated new technologies like open-source software, cloud computing, data analytics, and now artificial intelligence.” Laha said..... Read More

New capabilities like AI, Analytics and Search Highlight power the flagship suite One year after its launch, Zoho has announced major updates to its flagship suite of applications, Zoho One, designed to put businesses completely in the cloud. Zoho One is enabling a new set of capabilities that bridge the gap between different departments and roles within an organization. In the first year itself more than 12,000 business worldwide have become Zoho One customers, out of which 36% of Zoho One users are from India. The average Zoho One customer enables 16 applications for their business, often replacing software from different vendors, preferring instead to run their business from a single cloud platform. The company has added five new apps to Zoho One in the past year Cliq, Zoho Sprints, Zoho PageSense, Zoho Flow and Zoho Backstage at no additional cost..... Read More

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...

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...

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 ...

With the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) came into effect from 25th May 2018 in Europe. Now citizens across will have the choice and more control over their personal data, including what messages they want to receive from marketers, hence it will be difficult for the corporates to share their bulk branding campaigns share through either digital or social media campaigns .The fact behind it , with the help of artificial Intelligence ( AI),when a consumer clicks the advertisement, all the user data/behaviour/profile/buying pattern can be captured. Now, the question comes on how to do impact-full marketing to reach out the target audiences. Globally, the increasing number of cybercrimes has made it imperative for companies to keep pace in hiring the right talent to combat them. Therefore, companies across the world are gearing up to ensure compliance to General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and ePrivacy requirements. While the larger technology giants are more or l...

While the new White House Artificial Intelligence (AI) Task Force formed by Donald Trump on 10 May 2018 has the potential to drive AI-enabled technological innovation and development, especially on defense issues, the benefits to key US technology segments such as telecoms remain to be seen, says leading data and analytics company GlobalData. Recent advances in AI technology are promising dramatic technological breakthroughs in virtually every aspect of society, including telecommunications. Operators are also lining up to use AI to drive innovation throughout their organizations including the launch of new digital services and augmenting the customer experience. For example, AT&T’s Atticus entertainment chatbot, working through the Facebook Messenger application, uses AI to recognize speech and automate the handling of customer requests. AT&T is testing AI-enabled drones to expand mobile LTE network coverage with the Flying Cell on Wings (COW), reaching remote areas ...

With the growth of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is become the stressed topic with in the technology companies such as Google, Apple, IBM and others ,there is radical amount of transformation ,which we could find in the works is a "For You" tab that will show nearby points of interest, with a "Your Match" feature attempting to custom-tailor recommendations. Now Google maps to get augmented reality(AR), with VPS (Visual Positioning System). With AR on, a future version of the Maps app will merge its traditional interface with a live camera view. When doing navigation, superimposed arrows will appear at each turn, making it harder to misinterpret directions. The company is even experimenting with inserting animated characters such as a fox, which would remove any doubt and make the app more entertaining. VPS is a related feature, combining the live camera view with Google's data trove to get a better sense of position than possible with just GPS. Th...

It is absolutely fact in this digital world that, you understand that your online presence can really help your offline career. Whether you’re a marketer analyzing Super Bowl ads, an investor posting about Bitcoin, or a software engineer explaining the newest technologies, you grasp the power of thought leadership to improve your career. The San Francisco-based startup, which had raised around $40 million in funding from some big-name investors, was acquired by social customer service company Lithium Technologies for a reported $200 million back in 2014. Lithium later launched a product called Reach, powered by Klout, to “put the social back in social media marketing. the Klout deal gave it access to AI and machine learning capabilities, but as a service on its own? - well, that’s a different matter. Klout, the pioneer in using big data to measure online expertise founded way back in 2008. Lithium acquired Klout and the combination brings together the 100 million consum...

Malware sophistication is increasing as adversaries begin to weaponize cloud services and evade detection through encryption. This is used as a tool to conceal command-and-control activity. To reduce adversaries’ time to operate, security professionals said they will increasingly leverage and spend more on tools that use AI and machine learning. This has been reported in the CISCO annual cybersecurity report. The report also shows 50 percent of organizations in India are reliant on automation, 53 percent are reliant on machine learning, 51 percent are highly reliant on AI. While encryption is meant to enhance security, the expanded volume of encrypted global web traffic (50 percent as of October 2017) - both legitimate and malicious - has created more challenges for defenders trying to identify and monitor potential threats. Cisco threat researchers observed more than a threefold increase in encrypted network communication used by inspected malware samples over a 12-month per...

It is a fact that, new technologies in the Information age will bring newer challenges and risk at the same time. There is a potential risk in adopting newly emerged technologies. For instance, Artificial Intelligence (AI) holds tremendous potential to automate daily risk activities, and rationalize costs. Blockchain technology will enable companies to manage and share GRC information faster than ever, whether it is around vendor risk assessments or continuous auditing. Robotics is all about automation, increasing efficiency and providing intelligence that cannot be seen with the human eye. The cloud, in turn, is enabling the seamless flow of data and Information assets include personal information. Security is one of the main enablers of data protection. It is an absolute fact that about millions of PCs are being used for stealth of cryptocurrency mining. It is advisable to block cryptocurrency mining in your browser. The threat landscape is constantly evolving and the big...