Shibabrata Mondal, Founder and CEO, Wizergos

AWS pumps $2.77 bn in India to retain cloud supremacy

Amazon Web Services (AWS) has committed US $2.77 billion (INR 20,761 Crores) to strengthen its cloud infrastructure services in India. Amazon’s cloud computing arm will use this money to launch a new cluster of data centers in Telangana, Hyderabad.

“Happy to announce the largest Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the history of Telangana! After a series of meetings, AWS has finalized an investment of Rs 207.61 bn ($ 2.77 bn) to set up multiple data centers in Telangana. The @AWSCloud Hyderabad Region is expected to be launched by mid-2022,” tweeted Telangana state minister for information technology and industries, KT Rama Rao (KTR).

Within its lexicon, AWS identifies its data centers cluster as Availability Zones. AWS set-up two data centers in Mumbai in 2016. It added another data center in Mumbai last year. Across the Asia Pacific, AWS already has 26 Availability Zones spanning India, Australia, Greater China, Japan, Korea, and Singapore.

The investment will further enable AWS’s position as a leader in India. AWS currently has around 30% market share of India’s cloud service market, followed by Microsoft’s Azure.

AWS leases server space and bandwidth to enterprises of all sizes with cloud computing capabilities. This allows businesses to accelerate their digital transformation goals without building up their in-house servers or data centers.

Growing cloud services market in India

Over the last few years, Indian enterprises are quickly embracing cloud computing services to upsurge agility, deliver innovations, and modernize their infrastructure. With businesses focusing on well-carved out cloud strategy in the wake of the digital transformation rush, there is a bigger emphasis on getting experts on-board who have the experience to help organizations prepare for a new tomorrow. (See: Bharti Airtel gears up for digital transformation opportunities and IBM to split into two companies for better cloud opportunity)

The pandemic-induced work-from-environment has made the market even more lucrative, and cloud players are taking strong initiatives to strengthen their presence in India. These fast-evolving dynamics have made India one of the biggest and fastest-growing cloud services markets in the Asia Pacific, which is likely to touch $10 billion in another five years. Industry body NASSCOM projects that the market will grow to $7.1 billion by even 2022. (See: Technology trends for businesses in 2020)

The top players dominating the Indian market include Microsoft, Amazon, IBM, Google Cloud, and Nutanix. Amongst all, Amazon and Microsoft are leading the market and intensely vying to be the market leader in India’s cloud services market. While AWS’s position at the top is indisputable, both Azure and Google are growing at a remarkable rate, posing a threat to Amazon’s dominance in the cloud services space.

Early this year, Amazon and Bharti Airtel, India’s leading telecom player, entered into a strategic collaboration to deliver cloud computing solutions to enterprises. The partnership was formed to combat a similar engagement announced by Microsoft and Reliance Jio to provide enterprise cloud solutions powered by Microsoft Azure.

AWS had the first-mover advantage as it started its operations seven years earlier than many of its competitors. It gave Amazon an opportunity to get its offerings tested and make it more functionally rich as compared to the others.

In August 2019, Amazon inaugurated its biggest campus globally in Hyderabad, which supports 15000 employees. Through its AWS Academy and AWS Educate initiatives, AWS has also been providing ready-to-teach curriculum to higher universities in India to upskill local developers, students young IT professionals.

AWS’s client in India includes Ashok Leyland, Aditya Birla Capital, Axis Bank, Bajaj Capital, ClearTax, Dream11, Druva, Edelweiss, Edunext, Extramarks, Freshworks, HDFC Life, Mahindra Electric, Ola, Oyo, Policybazaar, Quantela, RBL Bank, redBus, Sharda University, Swiggy, Tata Sky, YuppTV, Zerodha, and several others.

AWS registered a 29% year-on-year growth in revenue to posting $10.8 billion in revenue in the second quarter of 2020.

RPA-led tools helping enterprises sail safely through a storm

The unprecedented COVID-19 environment has thrown up several challenges for industries across the globe. The growing distributed workforce environment is pushing businesses to deploy new-age digital operational methodologies to deliver a tailored and personalized experience to their customers.

Amidst the digital transformation wave, a technology that has been swiftly gaining ground worldwide to enable businesses to revolutionize their conventional processes is Robotic Process Automation (RPA). The pandemic has made organizations rethink their operational models and integrate artificial intelligence and automation in their processes to ensure that there is no pause.

Incorporating AI and machine learning capabilities, RPA uses software robots that allow organizations to automate multiple high-volume, repeatable tasks. It includes calculations, approvals, invoice creation, server maintenance, merging data from other sources, and copying and pasting data.

There is a growing emphasis on deploying digital bots to reduce employee workloads and accelerate business transformation. Through the RPA bots, organizations are able to empower their employees to concentrate on productive tasks and respond to new challenges more effectively.

Customer centricity driving new automated models

Business process management solutions are widely adopted to streamline processes and transforming enterprise value propositions. Customer-centricity is a highly discussed subject today across the CXO boardrooms, and businesses are rapidly exploring the best ways to cut down on time lost on repetitive tasks.

By automating a business process, organizations can minimize work as it enables them to provide round the clock support to their clients from the bots.

At Better World, our recent interactions with several technology leaders and senior executives suggest that approximately 15 to 20 percent of all human hours are unexploited across industries due to repetitive tasks. The ratio is even higher in the IT sector, where about 25 percent of working hours are lost due to repetitive transactional tasks. With RPA enabled tools, companies can let employees focus on high-quality tasks with better efficiency and productivity. (See: Anshuman Tiwari, Global Head of Delivery Excellence, DXC Technology)

The RPA workforce comprises different software robot levels, performing monotonous and admin-driven tasks at an exceptional speed with minimal human intervention. Take the case of German automaker Volkswagon in India. Its Indian arm has substantially leveraged the capability of RPA to transform several of its processes. From its finance department to the customer service department, the company has automated over 80 processes successfully through RPA tools. Amongst the highlights, it deployed a bot to help its customer service team fetch real-time data that can be utilized to address customer queries.

A similar case in point is Thomas Cook India, a leading travel management firm. To navigate the lockdown-induced disruption, the company partnered with an RPA solution provider, ‘Automation Anywhere,’ to support its virtual workforce and drive automation in several of its processes.

Sectors such as BFSI, healthcare, and travel are aggressively exploring the best ways to implement software bots to improve their bottom lines and automate back-end operations.

Mushrooming market

In India, RPA growth has been primarily driven by the need to optimize various back-end processes in accounting, IT operations, and human resource management. Many companies are finding it tough to keep up with the increasing demand for services in an environment filled with anxiety. And this is where technologies like RPA are creating a strong impact.

According to several industry estimates, in the next four years, the RPA market is expected to reach around $80 million in the country, helping organizations manage growth in a sustainable manner.

The RPA vendors are expanding their presence in India, and 2021 will be a crucial year for this technology to thrive in the domestic market. The industry onlookers expect several rounds of consolidations and collaborations that will strengthen the RPA models in the country.

Besides top vendors like UiPath, Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism, and WorkFusion, several exciting startups are gearing up to make a mark in the RPA space. Most of the vendors are investing heavily in research and development efforts. There is an increased push to launch ready to deploy bot solutions that can quickly take on human-intensive transactional work.

Intel’s AI investments in India have these strategic goals

Intel is taking strategic steps in the Indian market to build a competitive advantage through artificial intelligence (AI) investments. The US-based semiconductor giant has been taking a holistic approach to developing an AI ecosystem by partnering with several leading academic institutions and governments on national AI programs. The company intends to develop a rich pool of AI talent that can help it achieve greater efficiencies and act as a catalyst to fast-track India’s AI vision.

Artificial intelligence has intrigued everyone with its vast capacity to propel a transformative new world. The concept includes deep learning, machine learning, and predictive analytics technologies that enable organizations to gather more data, analyze it, and automate processes. (See: AI in banking now geared for a takeoff and CIOs to focus on network transformation for business continuity)

Amidst the digital transformation wave, AI holds a huge potential to address several challenges of the Indian economy, comprising, healthcare, disaster management, and smart mobility. (See: AI is a must now to speed up digital transformation)

Taking an all-inclusive AI approach in India

Intel has been at the cutting edge of the AI revolution. As AI is becoming mainstream, it has been widely used in developing technologies and apps in speech recognition, virtual agents, machine learning platforms, cyber defense, biometrics, and facial recognition. (See: India gears up for AI leap in post-Covid-19 era)

With 5G technology at the doorstep, Intel, through its initiatives, preparing coders, data researchers, and analysts for the future of artificial intelligence-based technologies.

More emphasis has been given to increasing the computing power of diverse processors while simplifying their architectures. And none of this can happen without a solid talent pipeline. The company has launched programs such as AI for Youth, an initiative to prepare India’s young talent on AI-skills and Intel AI academy.

Last July, Intel invested US$253.5 million in India’s Reliance Jio platform. It is expected that this investment will support Jio’s future university projects. The next university will likely offer programs about future technologies, such as artificial intelligence, data science, and digital media.

Last month, Intel teamed up with IIIT Hyderabad, the Public Health Foundation of India, and the Telangana government to launch an applied research center in artificial intelligence. AI-powered solutions need significant capacity and power to match application demands. Intel is rapidly developing capabilities to meet the scope of AI’s future workloads.

Thanks to its AI developer education program, Intel has already trained Indian professionals on AI platforms like Machine Learning and Deep Learning. Another key initiative run by the global tech major is “Responsible AI for Youth,” which focuses on promoting artificial intelligence among Indian school students.

Attempt to win the AI race

In the post-COVID-19 world, a robust ecosystem supported by powerful computing capabilities is needed to speed up the technological change in all companies. This is where the technology company like Intel is attempting to make a difference.

Amidst growing digital transformation focus, data analysis, and innovation based on artificial intelligence have been used extensively by India’s growing e-commerce and research sectors. The tools are being rapidly deployed to understand the new digital behavior and demand trends. Besides, manufacturing firms have started to use the benefits of AI tools to control quality, reduce the size of the design team, and build predictive models for supply chains. Then, there is the healthcare sector, where AI-based tools are being used to improve diagnosis, treatment, and patient monitoring. (See: How artificial intelligence is transforming Indian retail sector)

Throughout the world, Intel has been making aggressive investments spanning technology, research and development, and collaborations with enterprises and governments, enabling efficient decision making based on algorithms. Early in May this year, Intel’s funding arm parked aside $500 million for investments in several startups that operate in business data and analytics.

In October this year, Intel purchased SigOpt, a San Francisco-based provider of a cutting-edge platform to optimize Artificial Intelligence (AI) software models at scale. Intel announced its intention to use SigOpt software technologies across Intel Artificial Intelligence hardware products to accelerate, amplify and extend Intel Artificial Intelligence software solution offerings to developers.

Intel’s latest efforts are in line with developing production-ready solutions for various enterprise-wide deployments. The company recently introduced its 3rd Gen Xeon Scalable processors and additions to its hardware and software AI portfolio to help its customers accelerate artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics workloads running in the data center, network and intelligent-edge environments.

In 2019, Intel gained over US$3.8 billion through AI-based solutions. With the AI market expected to become worth more than $30 billion in the next 3-4 years, Intel seems to be going in the right direction to capitalize on the opportunity.

Salary hikes at IT firms on cards as COVID disruption eases

Buoyed by the early signs of enormous digital transformation opportunities and demand for cloud-based solutions, salary hikes at IT firms in India appear to be returning ever since the COVID-19 disruption had made an adverse impact.

The COVID-19 led economic slowdown resulted in a monumental setback for many tech companies across the world. Low visibility of revenue growth and market gloom resulting from the pandemic forced India’s IT majors to suspend employee salary increases and promotions earlier this year. The decision was taken to control operational costs and provide business continuity, even during the crisis.

However, with optimism returning to the sector, salary hikes at IT firms, along with promotions across all grades are being considered by top Indian tech majors such as TCS, Infosys, HCL, Wipro, and Tech Mahindra.

Timeline considered for salary hike at IT firms in India
Company	Revenue in Rs crore (FY2020)	Current headcount	Salary hike effective from
TCS	1.62 lakh	453,540	1 October 2020
Infosys	93,594	240,208	1 January 2021
HCL	71,265	150,000	1 October 2020 (Junior staff) 1 January 2021 (Senior staff)
Wipro	63,862	180,000	1 December 2020
Tech Mahindra	38,060	125,000	Early 2021

Transitioning to the new normal

At the beginning of the year, most businesses put their energies on deploying a thriving remote work environment and delivering consistent services. However, beginning in the second quarter, companies have accelerated the implementation of digital transformation solutions and increased spending to meet customer expectations to remain competitive in the current environment.

These evolutionary dynamics are having a positive impact on these tech majors. Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) was the first Indian IT major to announce a salary increase for its 453,540 employees as of October 1, 2020. Quickly after the nationwide lockdown announcement, TCS rolled-out Secure Borderless Workspaces Framework, which instantly enabled 90% of its employees to work effectively and meet client expectations remotely. TCS’s consolidated revenue from operations for Q2 stood at Rs 40,135 crores, clocking a 3% year-on-year growth.

The IT Major deferred salary increases in April this year to ensure that employees are not laid off.

For over 2,400,000 Infosys employees, salary hikes are expected to stay the same as in previous years. In recent years, Infosys has rapidly increased its digital and cloud capabilities that have helped it reach 2.2% revenue growth year-on-year, even in challenging times. The company is banking big on the large-scale digital transformation deal wins that materialized recently to accomplish higher than the average growth in the upcoming quarters. (See: Infosys buys GuideVision to boost Dx capabilities)

HCL tech joined the list recently by announcing salary hikes for its junior staff from October 2020 and senior staff from January 2021. The company’s net profit stood at Rs 3,142 crore for the September quarter, up 7.4% sequentially, and 18.5% year-on-year.

India’s fourth-largest IT Services provider, Wipro, witnessed a strong second quarter, which resulted in better margins and robust revenue growth. It celebrated the performance by announcing salary increases from December this year for 80% of its 1.85 lakh workforce. Throughout 2020, the company made a significant investment in acquisitions that could lead to substantial gains in the fiscal year 2022. (See: With Encore buy, Wipro eyes DX edge in fintech)

Tech Mahindra has announced that its employees’ salary increases will begin next year on a phased basis. The company states that the hikes for junior-most employees will be implemented first, followed by senior employees.

Big boost from fast-track digital transformation roadmaps

The sudden spike of COVID-19 cases compelled organizations to enforce fully work-from-home environments. To minimize the impact and support customers virtually within the new standard, organizations have stepped up their digital engagement strategies. The pandemic’s complex challenges are placing large and small businesses in a delicate situation that can only be solved by redefining work and developing agile business models.

During COVID-19, organizations’ dependence on digital solutions, has peaked at new heights, and at BM NXT research, we do not see the interest in digital technologies waning even when the pandemic ends. Businesses worldwide are expected to harness digital channels and continue modernizing their IT infrastructure to innovate faster and reimagine the business landscape. (See: AI-driven analytics is CIOs’ mantra in the new normal)

Going ahead, there will be a continuous rise in the adoption of cloud-based solutions and new-age technologies such as machine to machine (M2M), artificial intelligence, Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and data analytics amongst enterprises. Almost every industry and sector will need to identify new seamless digital communication channels to interact with their customers. This will further open up new revenue and growth opportunities for the IT Services firm to help enterprises build their digital resilience for any such future incident.

With Encore buy, Wipro eyes DX edge in fintech

Indian IT Services major Wipro continues its acquisition run this year to strengthen its digital transformation and cloud capabilities. After acquiring 4 companies earlier this year, Wipro has now entered into a decisive agreement to buy Encore Theme Technologies, a SaaS and Cloud solutions provider in financial services, for INR 95 crores.

Headquartered in Chennai, Encore Theme implements a broad suite of Trade Finance solutions, developed by Finastra, one of the world’s largest fintechs to bolster digital transformation support for financial institutions across the globe. The purchase will enable Wipro to further fortify its capabilities to modernize the IT and digital infrastructure of financial institutions.

The acquisition of Encore Theme is subject to customary closing conditions and likely to close in the quarter ending December 31, 2020, Wipro mentioned in a statement. This transaction represents Wipro’s fifth buyback this year, with an overall investment of INR 18 bn in purchases in 2020.

Businesses are taking rapid transformation routes toward next-Gen integrated cloud technologies such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things (IoT), and analytics. To successfully overcome the ongoing crisis and emerge stronger in the growing virtual ecosystem, enterprises seek smarter IT environments and accelerating their digital transformation efforts.

IT services companies realize the importance of network transformation-related investments that can help meet growing clients’ needs to construct agile, integrated, and insights-based network architectures. This brings a unique opportunity for the IT Services firm to bring more value to businesses.

Along with Wipro, several other IT Services firms such as Infosys and HCL are on an acquisition spree this year, utilizing their cash reserves to fortify their digital transformation and cloud offerings. (See: Infosys buys GuideVision to boost Dx capabilities)

Supporting networks modernization

Wipro’s aggressive push toward acquisitions is also likely to lead to increased investor confidence in the future. Wipro is now having much more capacity and packaged offerings to deliver its services to enormously investing in IT infrastructure modernization.

This year, Wipro’s notable acquisitions include 4C, IVIA Serviços de Informática Ltd, and Eximus Design. (See: Wipro’s 4C buy to firm up its Europe presence)

Along with the latest Encore buy, Wipro also announced its plan to expand its strategic relationship with IBM to strengthen its Hybrid Cloud Practice. The practice is an initiative led by IBM to support global system integrators and independent software vendors to enable their clients to modernize workloads for any cloud environment.

In its Q2 results announced last month, Wipro posted a 3.2 percent sequential growth in consolidated profits and 3.7 percent QoQ growth in IT services revenue, ahead of the previous industry estimates. The results reflected strong growth across all its verticals.

At BM NXT research, we expect Wipro’s revenues to get a significant boost in the next two to three years because of its strategic investments this year and the organization’s continuous efforts to build capacities for remote working. Wipro, however, will need concrete execution efforts to gain a larger market share than its peers in the industry.

How artificial intelligence is transforming Indian retail sector

As the pandemic raged on, enterprises of all scales rushed to accelerate their digital transformation efforts for maintaining business continuity. The retail sector also didn’t escape unscathed and had to take a flurry of measures to remain operational amidst rising discretionary spending by consumers. (See: AI-driven analytics is CIOs’ mantra in the new normal)

The crisis has pushed the retail organizations to take pivotal digital decisions instantly to achieve tangible business results.

One of the technologies that has garnered much attention in these tricky times is Artificial Intelligence (AI). The technology enables organizations to make well-informed data-driven decisions and predict the possible outcome of those decisions.

Translating new normal into a winning position

There is a monumental shift in consumer buying behavior due to COVID-19. Even traditional brick-and-mortar businesses are moving to e-commerce platforms. The pre-COVID online buyers have accelerated their digital shopping by around 50%. Moreover, even a majority of conventional shoppers have moved to virtual shopping to ensure safety and hygiene.

Amidst the unpredictable customer expectations and increased demand for contactless distributions, the Indian retail enterprises are fast-tracking their investments in technologies such as artificial intelligence to translate the new normal into a winning position. With AI-enabled tools and customer-centric chatbots, retail enterprises can obtain valuable insights to predict new business opportunities, identify broken supply chains, and manage customer expectations better. (See: AI is a must now to speed up digital transformation)

According to a Nasscom study, the Indian retail industry is one of the top-five retail markets in the world by economic value and likely to achieve 3X growth and become worth US $1.4 trillion by 2024. NASSCOM further observed that the industry is experiencing a phenomenal transformation due to transitioning consumer behavior, organized retail growth, and multiple global players’ arrival.

Similar sentiments are shared by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (ASSOCHAM), an apex trade association of India, in a recent report. The industry body observed that the Indian retail industry is likely to see a massive transformation technology-led disruptions driven by AI and data-led opportunities.

Besides improved customer experience, the investments in AI-enabled platforms will also be valuable for retailers as it will enable them to deliver new product design ideas and expand their markets.

Leveraging AI to read consumer’s mind

With consumers are moving to digital technologies to shop, they still need the personalized experience to meet their custom needs. AI-enabled tools and technologies are being leveraged by organizations to identify key business and customer trends; ensure hygiene; deliver the goods safely, and conduct 1:1 session with customers.

AI tools also have a great potential to give the decision-makers timely visibility to align their strategic and financial primacies with these predictions.

Some prominent Indian retailers are already forging ahead and deploying the latest tools and AI innovations to navigate the crisis. An example is the Aditya Birla Group, which manages one of the largest Indian clothing retail chains. The group implemented several AI and deep learning solutions amidst the pandemic to keep its workforce safe and ensure hygiene factors at its manufacturing units. The group has a separate data and analytics cell, which focuses on advanced technologies to deliver better efficiency in-house as for customer service excellence.

During the nationwide lockdown, the group refreshed its already proven proprietary AI platform, VEDA (Video Enabled Decision and Alerts), with advanced capabilities to meet the manufacturing units’ needs and offices post COVID. The scalable platform enables Aditya Birla Group to deploy multiple video feeds and apply advanced analytics in real-time to develop meaningful interpretations, notifications, and alerts.

Similarly, online retail players such as Amazon, Big Basket, and Grofers have enhanced their AI-powered chatbots, who act as online experts and provide instant resolution to various transactional and routine queries raised by different consumers. For complicated and specific requests, the question can be re-routed to customer care. This entire approach not only automates the process but also help companies reduce their operational expenses.

Another critical area where analytics can be a crucial enabler is inventory management. By looking at the vast sets of shopper data, retailers can oversee purchase orders, ensure they have enough stock of a particular product, and keep their inventory model agile as per the market demand scenario.

Nevertheless, to climb the AI-maturity ladder, enterprises would need to set-up a conducive framework and need strong collaboration models with subject matter experts to address the evolved customer requirements. (See: Enterprises jump on the AI bandwagon but seat belts are few)

In Focus