Forbes India - Tech Conversations
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The Big Picture: Alok Nanda on the future of sustainable aviation and GE Aerospace's work in India
In this episode, Alok Nanda, CTO of GE South Asia and CEO of GE's India Technology Center, talks about the next decade of growth of the aviation and aerospace industry—a lot of which will happen in India. Over more than the last two decades, GE Aerospace's Indian team has made significant contributions to every important engine platform the company has developed, Nanda says. He also gives his perspective on where the industry is headed in sustainable aviation, ranging from the development of planet-friendly fuels to using AI to more accurately estimate when engines need repair
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Sean Duca at Palo Alto Networks on the company's growing prospects and ops in India
Sean Duca, vice president and regional chief security officer for Asia Pacific and Japan at Palo Alto Networks, one of the world's largest cybersecurity technologies providers, talks about how while businesses can differ in their products and services, their security needs are similar. As bad actors become more brazen, Sean wants to impress upon everyone that the threats are real. He also talks about some of the products at the company that are seeing strong demand and how the company's Indian operations have expanded strongly, with both enterprise customers and product development
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SwitchOn's founders on how they're helping ITC, Unilever and SKF automate quality checks on the go
In this episode, Aniruddha Banerjee and Avra Banerjee, cousins-turned co-founders, talk about how the quality inspection processes at some of the world's largest manufacturers are ripe for innovative interventions, as much of those remain manual. To that end, they're building an IoT, computer vision and machine learning-based platform at their five-year-old venture, SwitchOn, with customers such as ITC, Unilever and SKF. SwitchOn has recently raised $4.2 million in series A funding, and the Banerjees are looking to increase their revenue by 10X this year to $15 million
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Vishal Salvi at Infosys on why the company's cybersecurity practice team has grown 5X in four years
In this episode, Vishal Salvi, chief information security officer and head of cyber security practice at Infosys, talks about the increasing complexity of cybersecurity as it often evolves separately from the business-oriented technologies and digital solutions used by enterprises. He explains how security is becoming more "sentient" as the need for real-time context increases with the scale of operations of the company's multinational customers; and how this all adds to the challenge of finding experienced people in this area, making it an evergreen field for any young aspirant
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PupilMesh's founders on their dream of building Iron Man's helmet for Indian soldiers
In this episode, Riya Gangamma, Milind M Manoj, and Pradeep Parthasarathy, co-founders of PupilMesh in Bengaluru, talk about their augmented reality hardware technologies company. The trio started straight out of college, got incubation support at IIMB, won a DRDO programme and got to work on a multi-purpose augmented reality headset. One important application would be as a soldier assistance device. Along the way, they also developed a hands-free navigation aid for two-wheeler drivers, which they are already commercialising in partnership with MapMyIndia
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Pari Natarajan, tech whisperer, on India's shift from the world's back office to global innovation sandbox
In this episode, Pari Natarajan, founder and CEO of the consultancy Zinnov, talks about how India's tech industry is changing. Once seen as the world's back office, India's IT services sector today prides itself as a digital transformation partner to the world's biggest companies. Pari is among the figures who played an important role in the metamorphosis of India's tech services industry itself. Today, Indian techies are ready for the next phase of this evolution, as every global CIO has an India playbook, he says.
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CynLr's Nikhil R and Gokul NA on how far they've come, the launch of H.I.V.E, and what's next
In this episode, Nikhil Ramaswamy and Gokul NA, co-founders of CynLr, talk about how far they've come, chasing their dream of building a deep-tech hardware engineering company out of India. The duo has been developing a machine learning and computer-vision-based platform to make industrial robotic arms far more versatile than they are today. Their technology has shown early promise and drawn interest from potential multinational customers. Recently, they launched H.I.V.E, their state-of-the-art R&D centre. They are also only two months away from commercialising their first product
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The Big Picture: Ashwin Yardi on the global, multi-cultural opportunities for Indian techies at Capgemini
In this episode, Ashwin Yardi, CEO of Capgemini Technology Services India, talks about how the Covid pandemic validated and boosted the offshore IT outsourcing model. Today it's more common, even for Capgemini's European customers to directly engage with engineers in Bengaluru, for example, where the Paris headquartered company has its largest Indian operations, Yardi says. He also talks about how the company, with a track record of growing with big acquisitions, offers a global, multi-cultural opportunity for aspiring young Indians considering the tech services space
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Manish Jethani on his deepest reasons for starting up, again, and a data problem he's tackling at Hevo
In this episode, Manish Jethani, co-founder and CEO of Hevo Data, talks about what drove him to jump back into entrepreneurship, about two years after selling his first venture to what was then Grofers. With about $43 million in funding from investors including Sequoia, Qualgro and Chiratae, Manish and his friend Sourabh Agarwal are close to $10 million in ARR today at their no-code software platform company that helps businesses quickly build the pathways they need to pull data from different sources together
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Venwiz's founders on plans for their industrial services SaaS platform after a recent funding
In this episode, Rajesh Reddy and Sandesh Paturi, founders of Venwiz, in Bengaluru, talk about how their own experience in figuring out the right vendors for various manufacturing projects validated their idea that there was an opportunity to drag industrial services into the internet age — connecting large buyers with MSME vendors across the country. The duo have raised $8.3 million in Series A funding led by Sorin Investments with existing investors Accel and Nexus Venture Partners joining in. They had previously raised $3 million in seed funding
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The Big Picture: Debashis Chatterjee on completing LTIMindtree's integration, and strategy ahead
In this episode, Debashis Chatterjee, CEO and managing director at LTIMindtree talks about the successful integration of LTI and Mindtree that has resulted in a $3.5 billion IT services enterprise, ready to take on larger rivals for bigger orders, while retaining the characteristics of a smaller, nimbler operator. Chatterjee, widely credited with successfully integrating the two diverse companies, explains why he thinks LTIMindtree has what it takes to become a significantly larger IT provider over the next few years