Author - unwiredcp

Key trends in the post-pandemic workforce

The Covid-19 pandemic that brought the world to a standstill last year is now the main accelerator for one of the greatest workplace transformations ever!

How and where we work has changed forever, as corporations battle to balance new employee expectations and the benefits of flexibility with the need to nurture a strong corporate culture and continue driving innovation. Workforce planning has also changed, with accelerate business transformation and heightened economic volatility making it more important to ensure the business has the right number of people with the right skills, experiences, and competencies in the right jobs at the right time. Leading organizations are therefore re-thinking their workforce mix, including the role of full time versus part time employees, and the mix of permanent, temporary and gig-based workers.

The last 24 months have also seen an accelerated adoption of technology across functions and layers in the organization, as companies move to drive productivity and make businesses more resilient to external shocks. This has placed a higher onus on upskilling and reskilling at scale, both in the boardroom and at the frontline.

With the pandemic having impacted some sections of the workplace more than others, diversity and inclusion is in focus now, more than ever, as its benefits become increasingly evident. Driving D&I to the next level however requires a deep transformation in how organizations not just hire, but also develop and reward talent.

The Economic Times Future Workforce Webinar

The webinar will have some of the sharpest HR minds, global business leaders and renowned futurists share their views on how winning companies will navigate the above trends.

The event will explore practical, forward-thinking strategies to continue to attract top talent, manage the volatility, boost engagement & retention, and drive productivity in the economic boom to come.

Ajit Isaac
Executive Chairman
Quess Corp

Amit Chincholikar
Global CHRO
Tata Consumer Products

Amit Kumar
CEO OLX Autos India
OLX Group

Amrit Jaidka Arora
Head, Human Resource
Digit Insurance

Asif Sadiq MBE
SVP and Head of Equity and Inclusion International
WarnerMedia

Dharmender Kapoor
CEO & MD
Birlasoft

Lohit Bhatia
President, Workforce Management
Quess Corp

Manoj Kohli
Country Head – SoftBank India
SoftBank Group International

Nikita Zutshi
Vice President Human Resources
MakeMyTrip

Nitin Dave
CEO
Quess General Staffing

Rajesh Nair
Executive President & CHRO
Polycab India

Rajeshwar Tripathi
Chief Human Resource Officer Auto & Farm Sectors, M&M Ltd. & Member of the Group Executive Board

Rohit Pathak
CEO – Copper Business
Hindalco Industries

Sekhar Garisa
Chief of Emerging Businesses and Corporate Development

Sumit Sood
CEO, APAC
GlobalLogic

Sunitha Lal
CHRO
Ather Energy

Suraj Moraje
Managing Director & Group CEO
Quess Corp

Vijay Sivaram
CEO
Quess IT Staffing and Quess Search & Recruitment

Vinod Mehta
CHRO
Teleperformance (India)

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Enterprise focus on moving to the cloud has been growing steadily in recent years as they understand the benefits a cloud-led strategy can deliver. Now, in the wake of the pandemic, this shift has accelerated. The increase in remote operations, emergence of a digital economy and evolution in the technology ecosystem and capabilities around cloud have boosted the pace of change.

The shift to the cloud enables unique opportunities for enterprises, but navigating the shift needs the right strategy and expertise to succeed, as they look to move large and complex workloads to the cloud. Leaders must manage both the potential (e.g. unique use cases enabled by IoT in manufacturing, data and analytics capabilities on cloud) with a keen focus on the emergent risks as well (e.g. focus on cyber security) to benefit from the true potential of a cloud-led transformation.

In association with AWS and Deloitte, The Economic Times is proud to host a four-part focused executive engagement series featuring some of India’s largest enterprises, where we will hear from the C-Suite on how they are reimagining business models through digital enabled by cloud, align their strategic vision of digital transformation with on-ground outcomes for the customers, and what are the key factors for success.

Theme – Powering business growth with a modern data strategy

Data and technology have transformed business operations in recent years. With ease and speed of network access, the data gets collected at every step of the organization’s activity. Businesses have realized the need to harness the power of data and analytics to improve operational efficiency, make more informed decisions, manage risk, and accelerate innovation. They are investing in the modern technology solutions like AI and machine learning. However, they lack the proper tools and systematic frameworks to implement the solutions.

In an age where data is the most valuable asset, managing, securing, and making sense of that data is vital now more than ever. Organizations face the challenge of converting it to a usable form and making insights from it. A Data strategy gives employees the way ahead, enabling them to use the data more efficiently. But creating an effective data strategy is not so simple. Organizations need to build a scalable and robust data infrastructure that accelerates moving data and workloads to the cloud. Accelerating the adoption of the cloud will enable them to meet evolving customer needs, enhance the resiliency of systems, reduce costs, and capitalize on advanced computing capabilities.

Join the session with The Economic Times, AWS and Deloitte and our esteemed panelists as we hear from them unravel the secrets to an efficient modern data strategy

• Utilizing data as an asset for autonomous decision making
• Deploying AI/data platforms across operations with a reimagined operating model build on cloud.
• Nurturing a diverse talent ecosystem that innovates to reimagine work
• Enhance trust across stakeholders with an ethical AI/Data framework supported by proper security and data governance controls.

Ritesh Arora
CDO
CEAT

Vivek Kaul
Head IT Infrastructure
Indigo

Shyam Seshadri
Head Innovation Lab
Tata AIG

Jai Daga
VP IT
Sony Pictures Network India Pvt Ltd

Rajesh Kathuria
AVP-Information Technology
Shemaroo Entertainment

Madhusudan Kohli
Vice President & Head – User Experience and Group IT Engagement
Bennett Coleman and Co. Ltd

Guru Bala
Head of Solutions Architecture
AWS Specialized Services
Amazon Internet Services

Ankit Saran
Partner, Consulting | AI – Data & Analytics (India)
Deloitte

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription

Software controls much of the world we live in, but huge corporate investments in the process of software development have been hugely disappointing. Those investments were supposed to increase productivity and operational efficiency, improve business agility and customer engagement and more. But as time goes on, dissatisfaction with the ROI from these investments grows. BCG reports that 70% of digital transformations fall short of their objectives, with incumbents still getting disrupted. The App Direct Survey result reveals that 90% of these enterprises said they face significant obstacles in their digital transformation journeys.

Large entreprises face unique challenges. They have the inertia of big ships. Here are a few notable ones:

• Unlike digital natives, large incumbents have an application and infrastructure footprint. They have everything from mainframes, containers, Kubernetes etc.  and next gen smartphone apps.
• Processes and practices vary across the environment, making governance a huge challenge.
• You have a range of disconnected products in your toolchain. They don’t span the life cycle and they don’t scale beyond the team level to meet the needs of Fortune 500 customers.
• Not only are teams and tools siloed, so is the data. Often data is not integrated into a data lake. Even when it is, it is not curated to produce, role-based insights, so that all the key personas can know what they need to know to do what they need to do. We don’t often see serious use of machine learning to provide predictive insights and help make decisions to get to the next level of performance and application development and delivery.

Digitizing your business is not enough. Businesses must do that, and more to become a digital business. Businesses must transform and reinvent their business to and maximize customer value. Digital transformation involves the goals that enterprises set for the digital transformation, the outcomes they seek. DevSecOps is the key to achieve this transformation, where security and continuous testing pays an important role from reliability and quality business value delivery.

Currently there are wo trends are emerging to help businesses drive greater return on investment for digital transformation initiatives:

• Organizations are moving from disparate toolchains to value stream delivery platforms/VSM with fewer moving parts and much tighter integration and orchestration between them.
• Platforms are providing a powerful intelligence layer that is end-to-end and analytically complete. The platforms support descriptive, predictive, and prescriptive analytics. But it needs to do more.

VSM is a set of lean principles and practices that optimize the application of people, process, and technology to improve the flow of business value continuously, from ideation to customer delivery. In 2020, the pandemic made every organization realize the need to become a digital business. Since then, the accelerated rate of change has pressured organizations to become extremely agile. Accomplishing this goal requires aligning business and development value streams to operate together with a shared mission, vision, and cadence.

Deepak Bhosale
General Manager IT
Asian Paints

K V Dipu
President & Head of Operations and Customer Service
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance

Shiv Kumar Bhasin
COO & CTO (Digital Transformation Leader)
National Stock Exchange (NSE)

Sunil Shah
Vice President Asia Pacific & Japan
Digital.AI

Udayraj Prabhu
EVP Business Transformation
Marico

Zak Murad
Chief Technology and Information Officer
CRISIL

Amit Kumar
Partner
KPMG
Moderator

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription

As businesses around the world become more global and enter the fourth industrial revolution, the volume and complexity of attacks continue to grow. Protecting a company in today’s environment has become more difficult. This is also because manufacturing is rapidly entering the fourth industrial revolution where the old, complex and formerly closed environments, solutions and systems meet new, connected and more open ones. While this offers immense possibilities for the industry, it also exposes the systems to risks, cyber risks.

Intelligence is a critical underpinning of a comprehensive cloud security strategy, so you can understand potential weaknesses: where they occur, how criminals attempt to exploit them, and what you can do to stop them.

The need of the hour is to develop more maturity in an intelligence-driven operation across all environments. Security analysts, whether performing incident response or general threat research, need automated tools with intelligent rules to help find, organize and filter the most relevant information for their primary task.

Explore insights from the brightest minds in the cybersecurity industry at an ET Unwired Session, Assess, Reduce & Manage Your Security Risk in Industry 4.0 Era, powered by IBM.

Within the security operations centre (SIOC), analysts and incident response engineers use threat intelligence to quickly isolate the signal from the noise.

So, let’s take a deep dive and identify real problems and their fixes and prioritize remediation efforts.

Join us for an exclusive, by invitation only gathering of senior personnel from the manufacturing industry to debate and share best practises about –

Key Takeaways:

• Roadblocks to Industry 4.0
• Relevance and need for OT security in a connected landscape
• Best practises on cyber risk management in this transformation

The pandemic has pushed organisations across the globe to move more quickly in transforming their businesses to meet a dynamic and uncertain operating environment. Increasingly, competitors, investors, and boards are also applying pressure to evolve.

While the imperative to transform may be clear, the path is challenging. Management is pressed to prioritize digital solutions that meet the needs of the present while building a platform for innovation and competitive advantage. This can require changes in processes and infrastructure, such as shifting workloads to the cloud, deploying artificial intelligence (AI) across the enterprise, and revaluating how, where, and by whom work is done. However, not all digital transformation efforts succeed.

Organizations need meticulous strategic and tactical plans in place to drive enterprise-wide digital transformation. And this necessitates organizations to reinvent themselves into a strategically agile organization—one that is operationally efficient and focusses on innovation.

Join our panellists in an interactive ET Unwired Webinar, as they discuss how low code platforms can help organizations inch closer to their digital goals by empowering the IT workforce to develop high-velocity complex enterprise-wide apps.

Vinod Bhat
Chief Information Officer
Vistara

Pawan Chawla
CISO
Future Generali India Life Insurance

Gagan Singla
CMO and CDO
HDFC Securities

Ritesh Varma
Global Head, Business Consulting
Newgen Software

Sachin Seth
Partner
EY, India, Digital & Fintech Leader

Piyush Jain
VP and Global Delivery Head – Software and Digital Services
QuEST Global

Raghav Sehgal
Strategic ISV Account Manager
AWS

Yogesh Jiandani
Founder
Vir2lize
Moderator

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription

Pandemic-fuelled cloud adoption has forced the banking & Insurance industry to provide a hyper-personalized customer experience at scale. Consumers are increasingly demanding online transactions – voice commands, touchless digital payments, QR code scans, and so on – and banks are responding by accelerating their digital transformation initiatives.

Leaders from these domains are now adopting a hyper-growth mindset in determining their institution-wide transformation and providing superior digital experiences compared to their competition.

Their industry’s demand to use digital tools for onboarding new customers has dramatically transitioned towards an omnichannel digital banking experience.

As pandemic continues to prevail, we are opening a conversation with Industry leaders in our upcoming roundtable to exchange perspectives on –How cloud-enabled transformation is the next hyper-growth opportunity for the banks and Insurance sector in 2021 and beyond.

Ajay Vernekar
CTO
Aditya Birla Sun Life Insurance

Pankaj Pandey
Head IT
SBI General Insurance

Prasanna Lohar
Vice President Technology
DCB Bank

Shyam Seshadri
Head – Innovation
Tata AIG General Insurance

Sriram Naganathan
Strategic Advisor Insurance Practice
Blazeclan

Amit Roy
Managing Director – Insurance & Allied Businesses
PwC India
Moderator

With data growing exponentially, enterprises handle massive amounts of business-critical data. They require storage systems that are highly scalable, offer unlimited connectivity & support multiple platforms. There are multiple approaches to data storage to choose from, including SANs, NAS, DAS and cloud storage. Newer approaches and technologies that are currently disrupting the market include hyperconverged storage and flash technologies such as NVMe. This trend stems from the increased amount of horizontal scalability and reduced latency these methods offer. Storage for containers is also becoming a stronger selling point, as well as enterprise storage based on composable and disaggregated infrastructure concepts, which combine individual resources at the hardware level and then assemble them at the software level by using APIs.

In the era of digital transformation, organizations of all sizes are challenged to meet higher performance, agility, availability, and scalability requirements while staying within strict budgetary constraints. Adapting to the demands of digital transformation is not a choice anymore, at least for the organizations moving towards data-centric business models. To best support the business on its digital transformation journey, IT must be able to respond faster to take advantage of changing market conditions and new business opportunities and enabling:

• increasing use of big data and analytics (real-time and otherwise)
• more personalized interaction with customers
• around-the-clock operations
• better use of innovation to drive competitive differentiation.

IDC says, ‘prompted by the demands of digital transformation, almost 70% of organizations are planning to modernize their server, storage, and/or data protection infrastructure in the next several years and are looking to specific technology to help streamline IT infrastructure while meeting all these new requirements”. These technologies include SDS, cloud, cybersecurity enhancements, NVMe and AI/ML.

Driving Business Value Storage:

• Enabling development and business activities through enhanced storage availability and agility
• Improving employee productivity levels by delivering better application performance
• Reducing storage costs for running equivalent applications by leveraging increased access to flash storage, enhanced data compression and data deduplication capabilities, and extended storage life spans
• Requiring less IT storage staff time for day-to-day activities by improving performance levels and delivering new software-based management capabilities

Kiran Samudrala
Chief Data and Analytics Officer
Equifax

K P Vinod Kumar Nair
Channel Storage lead for South
Dell Technologies

Manjunath Prasad
Head IT
TVS

Prince Joseph
CIO
SFO technologies – a NeST group company

Ramanujam Srivathsan
Director
Archon Consulting Systems

Vijay Anand
Vice President I Global IT & IS
Visionary RCM-CorroHealth

Vijay gurumurthy
VP IT
Capgemini

Sheena George
Partner
EY India
Moderator

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription

Going digital has currently become a necessity. The growth of the direct-to-consumer (D2C) model has flourished in India. There is an enormous rise in the adoption of this model as it eliminates the middle-man entity, giving the brand complete control. Additionally, it helps them directly engage with the customers and learn more about them. As the brands entering the D2C space continue to increase, it has also led to the rise in e-commerce enablers to help them set up a personalized online store. With these enablers helping the brands with resources to fulfil their consumer demands, we anticipate that more and more brands will leap into the D2C model for 2022 and beyond.

The evolution of the D2C landscape with e-commerce has added to challenges, opportunities, and trends. While switching to the pandemic-induced D2C model is profitable, it requires new tools and techniques to survive and thrive. Partnering with the right players can help elevate customer service opportunities and further reduce the cost.

The crisis has gifted D2C brands an opportunity to connect with consumers directly but this opportunity is bound with effective order fulfilment. Poor inventory management can have a huge impact on cost management. Brands require technology that gathers and consolidates real-time omnichannel user data on a single dashboard for clear visibility of inventory. A strong supply chain and warehouse management system is the backbone of any brand and plays a decisive role in the brand’s success. Finding the right logistic partner plays a vital role in error-free timely deliveries of their products. As technology upgrades, brands need to evolve and innovate to develop a strong consumer relationship in the long run.

The Economic Times in association with Vinculum and AISPL will be rewiring your understanding of D2C for sustained growth and bulletproof your brand with improvement opportunities to stay ahead of the competition.

Shashwat Singh
Chief Information Officer
Boat

Himanshu Verma
Chief Product & Technology Officer
Licious

Yash Dayal
Chief Technology Officer
Zivame

Deep Ganatra
Chief Technology Officer
Good Glamm Group, My Glamm

Kumar Gaurav
Chief Technology Officer
Wakefit

Sumit Karranji
Country Sales Head – India (New Business)
Vinculum

Navdeep Manaktala
Director & Head, Startup Business, Asia-Pacific & Japan
AWS

Amit Khanna
Partner – Advisory
PwC India
Moderator

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription

With data growing exponentially, enterprises handle massive amounts of business-critical data. They require storage systems that are highly scalable, offer unlimited connectivity & support multiple platforms. There are multiple approaches to data storage to choose from, including SANs, NAS, DAS and cloud storage. Newer approaches and technologies that are currently disrupting the market include hyperconverged storage and flash technologies such as NVMe. This trend stems from the increased amount of horizontal scalability and reduced latency these methods offer. Storage for containers is also becoming a stronger selling point, as well as enterprise storage based on composable and disaggregated infrastructure concepts, which combine individual resources at the hardware level and then assemble them at the software level by using APIs.

In the era of digital transformation, organizations of all sizes are challenged to meet higher performance, agility, availability, and scalability requirements while staying within strict budgetary constraints. Adapting to the demands of digital transformation is not a choice anymore, at least for the organizations moving towards data-centric business models. To best support the business on its digital transformation journey, IT must be able to respond faster to take advantage of changing market conditions and new business opportunities and enabling:

• increasing use of big data and analytics (real-time and otherwise)
• more personalized interaction with customers
• around-the-clock operations
• better use of innovation to drive competitive differentiation.

IDC says, ‘prompted by the demands of digital transformation, almost 70% of organizations are
planning to modernize their server, storage, and/or data protection infrastructure in the next several years and are looking to specific technology to help streamline IT infrastructure while meeting all these new requirements”. These technologies include SDS, cloud, cybersecurity enhancements, NVMe and AI/ML.

• Enabling development and business activities through enhanced storage availability and agility
• Improving employee productivity levels by delivering better application performance
• Reducing storage costs for running equivalent applications by leveraging increased access to flash storage, enhanced data compression and data deduplication capabilities, and extended storage life spans
• Requiring less IT storage staff time for day-to-day activities by improving performance levels and delivering new software-based management capabilities

Pooraan Jaiswal
Group CTO
Entero Healthcare

Rajeev Khade
Vice President Global Information Technology
Sigma Electric Manufacturing Corp

Sudhir Kanvinde
CIO
The Supreme Industries

Sourav Dasgupta
Group Head of Applications – IT
Allcargo Logistics

Ramesh Budharup
Channel Storage lead for West
Dell Technologies

Jawahar Chakraborty
Business Head of Infrastructure
Pentagon System & Services

Acharya Vishwanaths
Advisory Systems Engineer
SPS (Storage platform and solutions) – Dell Technologies

Sheena George
Partner
EY India
Moderator

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription

More than ever, IT must balance the pressure to maintain business continuity, innovate rapidly and do more with less. They need an IT infrastructure designed to help meet growing business demands, protect data and streamline insights and automation.

A system that can adapt quickly to unforeseen disruptions, prevent security breaches and easily handle massive data growth so they can focus on the next chapter of their success story.

While the Cloud brings the promise of flexibility, agility, and openness only 20% of workloads have been moved to cloud.

Why?

Because companies need assurance that their data privacy and security will not be breached.

They urgently need a trusted partner to deliver secure, flexible, end-to-end compute, storage and OS solutions that can unlock the potential of their hybrid multicloud infrastructure.

Businesses today have clearly grasped that there can be no innovation or growth without data. However, with the sheer increase in the number of cyberattacks and the spread of the danger vector as digital transformation accelerates across industry sectors, enterprises must defend this currency that fuels growth.

Join The Economic Times Live Webinar on Embracing a Hybrid Cloud Path to Growth for Digital transformation powered by IBM to discover more about how businesses can store and safeguard data while seamlessly integrating technology into their day-to-day processes and other functions to achieve desired growth. This webinar’s speakers will discuss how new technologies could holistically help you manage, modernise, and secure your company on-premises infrastructure, and the cloud.

Key Takeaways:

• Learn how to employ security techniques effectively.
• Use cloud for more flexibility and agility in your operations
• How unlock the potential of your hybrid multicloud infrastructure
• Discover how to maximise your return on investment.

Ravi Jain
Director, Systems
IBM India – South Asia

Subhathra Srinivasaraghavan
Director
IBM India Systems Development Lab

To subscribe to The Times of India, The Economic Times, Navbharat Times, Mumbai Mirror, Pune Mirror, Ahmedabad Mirror, Maharashtra Times & Ei Samay —please click https://subscribe.timesgroup.com/subscription