SNP SE, a leading provider of software for AI-enabled digital transformation, automated data migration and data management in the SAP environment, announced the appointment of Neeraj Athalye as Managing Director, India. Based in Mumbai, Athalye will be responsible for leading SNP’s expansion helping customers build the data foundations for business AI using SNP’s Kyano® platform and Bluefield® approach.

SNP Appoints Neeraj Athalye as Managing Director for India Strengthening its Partner First and Best-Data-for Business-AI Strategy

Athalye brings with him more than 30 years of experience across enterprise software, SAP, cloud technologies and business leadership, having held senior positions at SAP, MatrixOne (Dassault Systèmes), Honda, John Deere, SUSE and, most recently, Icertis. His track record in building partner ecosystems, scaling high‑growth businesses, and driving customer‑centric innovation positions him perfectly to lead SNP’s next phase of expansion in India.

The appointment comes as SNP expands its presence in Asia Pacific and continues to invest in AI-enabled capabilities for SAP transformations. At its annual flagship event “Transformation World” in Heidelberg, Germany, in July, SNP introduced new capabilities for its Kyano platform to customers, partners and experts from across the global SAP ecosystem. Kyano brings together software for data management, migration and continuous assessment of SAP landscapes, supporting organizations throughout their SAP transformation journey. The platform also supports migrations from different ERP source systems and integrates partner capabilities through its ecosystem and Marketplace.

Among the new capabilities is Kyano Lorna, an Agentic AI Layer that draws on more than 30 years of SNP’s data transformation expertise to provide real-time insights and project-specific recommendations. Embedded directly into transformation projects it helps customers execute transformations faster while maintaining the highest levels of accuracy, reliability and compliance. Kyano Oros extends the platform to unstructured data which accounts for approximately 80% of enterprise data volumes and has largely remained inaccessible to traditional transformation tools. This provides a critical foundation for preparing enterprise data landscapes for modern AI applications. Together, these capabilities help India’s organizations accelerate and simplify SAP transformations while preparing their data for business AI.

India continues to see growing demand for SAP transformation projects, driven by cloud adoption, digital transformation initiatives and increasing investment in AI. This makes the country an important market within SNP’s Asia Pacific strategy. Following its partner-first approach, SNP plans to further expand its ecosystem of consulting, hyperscaler and technology partners, combining Kyano with local delivery and industry expertise to support customers throughout their transformation projects and accelerate time-to-value.

Phillip Miltiades, President & Managing Director, Asia Pacific & Japan, SNP Group: “We see significant growth potential in India and across the Asia Pacific region. India represents one of the most exciting opportunities for SNP, with growing demand for solutions that simplify complex SAP transformation programs while minimizing business disruption. Neeraj’s experience will help us further expand our market presence and strengthen our partner-first strategy to deliver scalable, software-led transformation outcomes.”

About SNP

SNP (ticker: SHF.DE) is the global technology platform leader and trusted partner for companies seeking unparalleled data-enabled transformation capabilities and business agility. SNP’s Kyano^® platform integrates all necessary capabilities and partner offerings to provide comprehensive software-based experience in data migration and management. Combined with the Bluefield^® approach, Kyano sets a comprehensive industry standard for restructuring and modernizing enterprise data faster and more securely while harnessing AI-driven innovations based on over 30 years of experience.

The company works with more than 3,000 customers of all sizes and in all industries in over 80 countries, including numerous DAX 40 and Fortune 500 companies. The SNP Group has more than 1,700 employees worldwide at over 34 locations in 22 countries. The company is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and generated revenues of around EUR 297 million in the 2025 fiscal year.

More information is available at www.snpgroup.com

Acumatica team with Vista Equity Partners and Summit Consulting Services at Hyderabad
 

The Hyderabad GCC joins Acumatica's existing operations across the United States, Canada, Serbia, and Sri Lanka. Initially focused on engineering, the center also creates opportunities for Acumatica to expand into additional disciplines over time and support continued regional growth.
 

"We have created the core of our growth engine in India with an initial seed, and we look forward to it becoming a mature tree and a major contributor to the success of Acumatica customers and Acumatica itself,” said Miten Mehta, Chief Engineering Officer of Acumatica. “India’s deep engineering talent pool, thriving technology ecosystem, and growing reputation as a destination for global innovation centers makes Hyderabad the ideal home for this next chapter of how we deliver value to small and mid-sized businesses.”
 

The new office provides a collaborative environment where Acumatica’s India-based team can develop products and capabilities that benefit customers around the world. The new center reflects Acumatica's long-term commitment to building a diverse, globally distributed engineering organization capable of driving sustained growth and customer impact.
 

Acumatica’s Hyderabad center is established in partnership with Summit Consulting Services, an ANSR company, recognized leaders in building and scaling GCCs. The collaboration brings structured capability design, talent strategy, and operational scaling expertise to Acumatica’s Hyderabad expansion.
 

Acumatica is actively hiring engineering talent for the Hyderabad GCC. To explore career opportunities, visit www.acumatica.com/careers/.

About Acumatica

Acumatica Cloud ERP is a comprehensive business management solution that was born in the cloud and built for more connected, collaborative ways of working. Designed explicitly to enable small and mid-market companies to thrive in today’s digital economy, Acumatica’s flexible solution, customer-friendly business practices and industry-specific functionality help growing businesses adapt to fast-moving markets and take control of their future.

For more information, visit acumatica.com or follow us on LinkedIn.

MAHE, Microsoft & Hitachi Systems India leadership at the launch of the AI Lab at TAPMI Manipal

The Microsoft Labs will be established at T A Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Manipal; T A Pai Management Institute (TAPMI), Bengaluru; Manipal School of Commerce and Economics (MSCE), Manipal; Manipal Institute of Commerce, Finance and Economics (MICFE), Bengaluru; and Manipal Law School (MLS), Bengaluru. The labs will provide students and faculty with access to cutting-edge technologies and hands-on learning experiences, while supporting interdisciplinary research and industry-academia collaboration.

The labs will provide access to AI and other digital technologies, creating dedicated platforms for hands-on learning, experimentation, interdisciplinary research, and innovation. The initiative will also strengthen industry-academia engagement by enabling students and faculty to align academic learning with evolving industry requirements and real-world applications.

The event was attended by Mr Puneet Chandok, President and CEO of Microsoft India and South Asia; Mr Raj Kamal Singhal, CEO of Hitachi Systems India; and Mr Venkat Krishnan, Executive Director at Microsoft Corporation (India) Pvt. Ltd. Dr Sharath K. Rao, Vice Chancellor, MAHE, chaired the event.

The two-day programme included interactions between the leadership of Microsoft and Hitachi Systems India and the MAHE community. The discussions focused on emerging opportunities in artificial intelligence, digital education, research, and the preparation for future skill requirements.

As part of the launch programme, MAHE also hosted a panel discussion titled “Beyond the Hype: How AI Is Reshaping Work, Business, and Society.” The discussion explored AI’s growing impact across workplaces, businesses, education, and society, and highlighted the need for responsible adoption and future-ready capabilities.

Dr H S Ballal, Pro Chancellor, MAHE, said, “MAHE has always believed in staying ahead of change rather than reacting to it. The launch of these AI Labs, in partnership with Microsoft and Hitachi, is a continuation of that founding vision, building an institution where innovation and ethics advance together.”

Dr Sharath K. Rao, Vice Chancellor, MAHE, said, “The MAHE-Microsoft Partnership marks an important step in our journey towards creating a technology-enabled and future-ready higher education ecosystem. Artificial intelligence and cloud technologies are transforming the way we learn, work, and innovate, and it is essential that our students and faculty engage with these technologies through meaningful, hands-on experiences. The establishment of Microsoft Labs across five of our constituent institutions will strengthen opportunities for experiential learning, interdisciplinary collaboration, research, and innovation.”

Speaking on the occasion, Mr Puneet Chandok, President, Microsoft India and South Asia, said, “India’s young talent has the potential to shape the next wave of AI-led innovation, and partnerships between academia and industry are critical to unlocking that potential. Our collaboration with MAHE will bring students and faculty closer to the technologies, tools, and skills that are shaping the future of work. The Microsoft Labs across five MAHE institutions will provide a platform for hands-on learning, experimentation, and innovation, helping learners move beyond understanding AI to applying it responsibly to solve real-world challenges.”

Mr Raj Kamal Singhal, CEO, Hitachi Systems India, said, “The convergence of technology, education, and industry is essential to building the workforce and solutions needed for a rapidly evolving digital economy. We are pleased to be part of this initiative with MAHE and Microsoft, which brings together academic expertise and industry capabilities to create meaningful opportunities for learning and innovation. As AI and cloud technologies continue to transform businesses, initiatives such as these can help students develop practical skills, embrace continuous learning, and apply technology to address problems.”

“As AI rapidly moves from experimentation to real-world application, building the right combination of technology capabilities, practical skills and industry understanding will be critical. Our association with MAHE and Microsoft provides an opportunity to bring industry perspectives closer to academia and help students understand how emerging technologies can address real business and societal challenges. At Hitachi Systems India, we believe such collaborations can play an important role in developing future-ready talent while fostering responsible and meaningful technology-led innovation.”              

The MAHE-Microsoft Partnership enhances technology-driven education and innovation, creating an environment where academic knowledge, industry insights, and emerging technologies converge to equip learners for the evolving needs of the global economy.

About Manipal Academy of Higher Education

Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) is an Institution of Eminence Deemed to be University. MAHE offers over 400 specialisations across the Health Sciences (HS), Management, Law, Humanities & Social Sciences (MLHS), and Technology & Science (T&S) streams through its constituent units at campuses in Manipal, Mangalore, Bengaluru, Jamshedpur, and Dubai. With a remarkable track record in academics, state-of-the-art infrastructure, and significant contributions to research, MAHE has earned recognition and acclaim both nationally and internationally. In 2020, the Ministry of  Education, Government of India, awarded MAHE the prestigious Institution of Eminence status. Currently ranked 3^rd in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF) 2025 rankings, MAHE is the preferred choice for students seeking a transformative learning experience and enriching campus life, as well as for national and multinational corporations seeking top talent.

About Microsoft India

Microsoft India enables individuals and organisations to achieve more through innovative cloud, AI, productivity, and digital transformation solutions. The company works closely with educational institutions, enterprises, startups, and government organisations to drive technology-led growth and innovation.

About Hitachi Systems India Pvt. Ltd.

Hitachi Systems India Pvt. Ltd. is a leading IT services and digital transformation company and a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Systems, Ltd., leveraging deep domain expertise, advanced technology capabilities, and the strength of the Hitachi Group. The company provides end-to-end services spanning cloud, cybersecurity, data centre, and network services, observability services, managed services, and enterprise technology solutions across India.

Vineet Jain, CEO, BlueRose Technologies
 

“Every breach in physical custody shares the same root cause—somewhere along the chain, someone gained unauthorized access without immediate detection,” said Vineet Jain, CEO of BlueRose Technologies. “Diamond makes undetected intrusion impossible. It doesn’t just lock high-stakes consignments away; it actively stands guard, enforces multi-factor custody protocols, and reports anomalies in real time. That is the level of assurance secure physical logistics has always required.”

The Core Problem: The Silent Threat in Physical Transport

For governments, legal institutions, financial organizations, and regulatory bodies, transporting confidential paper documents and high-value materials remains a critical vulnerability. Traditional chain-of-custody protocols rely heavily on manual processes, padlocks, paper trails, and basic physical seals - leaving a dangerous blind spot where quiet, undetected access or copying can occur during transit. Diamond replaces these passive security measures with an intelligent, active ecosystem that automatically enforces strict rules of custody.

How Diamond Guarantees Secure Physical Delivery

• Geo-Fenced Locking: Each Diamond unit is programmed with the exact geographic coordinates where it is permitted to unlock. Transported anywhere else, the unit remains immutably sealed, ensuring contents are released exclusively within authorized target locations.

• Time-Locked Custody: Every unit operates on a precise temporal window. Materials cannot be accessed before the scheduled time, eliminating early-access exposure, and automated tracking flags any failure to open on schedule.

• Dual-Control Access Control: Unlocking a Diamond container requires two authorized officials acting in tandem, each utilizing cryptographic credentials linked to their personal registered devices. This multi-factor principle eliminates single-point insider threats.

• Continuous Fleet & Journey Monitoring: From dispatch to final arrival, each unit streams status updates to confirm its location, structural integrity, and route alignment. Every step of the journey is logged for complete end-to-end traceability.

• Tamper-Proof Hardware Architecture: Should an intruder attempt to force, breach, or interfere with a unit, Diamond permanently records the event in its onboard memory and triggers an immediate alert—even if power or communications are disrupted. When the container arrives, stakeholders know with complete legal certainty whether the seal held unbroken.

Powered by Advanced Security Technologies

Diamond brings together an enterprise-grade convergence of hardware, software, satellite positioning, real-time fleet telematics, and tamper-evident sensor systems into a single, field-ready platform.

Built with a multi-layered defense architecture, defeating any single safeguard leaves an intruder facing additional security controls and ensures a permanent digital audit trail. The innovations underlying Diamond rely on patent-pending technology, establishing a new standard for physical information security and verifiable custody.

Universal Applications Across High-Stakes Industries

While designed to safeguard the transport of confidential paper records, Diamond’s architecture is purpose-built for any scenario where chain of custody, exact timing, and absolute trust are non-negotiable:

• Education & Academics: Examination materials, standardized test papers, and confidential university certification evaluations.

• Legal & Financial: Classified court filings, sensitive merger-and-acquisition documentation, and confidential contracts.

• Government & Defence: Classified communications, sensitive policy documents, and secure physical keys/credentials.

• High-Value Assets: Regulated materials, high-worth commodities, and sensitive physical media.
   

Wherever institutions need to answer "Who opened this, where, and when—and can it be proven?" Diamond provides an undeniable answer.
 

Availability

Diamond is available now for enterprise, institutional, and government partners. To arrange a briefing or a live demonstration, contact BlueRose Technologies via the details below.
 

BlueRose Technologies Pvt. Ltd.: Ria Jain | email: ria.jain@bluerose-tech.com | Phone: +91 6364 247273
 

Success in today’s payment landscape requires issuers to enhance both the customer experience and the efficiency of their internal operations. 

For cardholders, payment experiences are expected to be instant, seamless, and connected across both physical and digital channels. Customers increasingly demand faster card delivery, premium personalization, instant activation, real-time card controls, instant digital issuance, push provisioning to mobile wallets, and secure frictionless payments—all directly accessible through their banking applications.

For issuers, these expectations require modern infrastructure that supports real-time issuance, production, tracking, digitization capabilities, and API-driven issuance operations to support stock and forecast management. Banks and fintechs require standardized APIs to support instant issuance and digital use cases and simplify integration by minimizing connections to third-party platforms and mobile apps.

Personalization as a Service: The digital backbone of modern payment card journeys
Since March 2025, IST has rolled out a new suite of APIs that modernize how issuers, IST personalization centers, and delivery systems interact. These APIs enable every step of the card issuance process—from order to delivery—to be tracked in near real-time. Card personalization APIs redefine what’s possible by converting a static production step into a dynamic, connected service. This shift creates the digital backbone that powers real-time issuance, automated workflows, and an entire ecosystem of real-time digital services throughout the payment credential lifecycle.

“The shift to API-based personalization is about unlocking new value potential for our customers. It unlocks operations from batch constraints, real-time innovation for customer experience teams, and frees up workflows from manual silos. Issuers don’t just become more efficient; they become more agile, more responsive, and better equipped to deliver the personalized experiences customers now expect. That’s the real power of this transformation,” said Elyette Roux, EVP Payment Services, IST.

A comprehensive API suite covering the full card lifecycle
Building on its personalization capabilities, IST is expanding its offering with a new suite of APIs that spans from physical card personalization to full digitalization services and beyond. These modular building blocks enable issuers to easily access, combine, and scale a comprehensive set of payment capabilities, accelerating innovation while reducing integration and operational complexity.

Designed to connect seamlessly with issuer back-end systems (including Card Management Systems and Authorization Servers) as well as mobile applications, the IST APIs are organized into five core service families aligned with the card lifecycle.

• Issuance APIs: Enables issuers to orchestrate and automate the complete card issuance lifecycle covering the creation, personalization, provisioning, and delivery of physical and digital payment cards. For physical cards, these APIs support card pulls, inventory management, PIN/CVV generation etc.

• Lifecycle APIs: Allow issuers to manage the full physical and digital card lifecycle in real-time, including production and shipment status updates, PIN services, renewals, replacements, and tokens and wallet management. Issuers can also securely process and orchestrate proximity and remote digital payment transactions and card services in real-time, including wallet interactions, workflow authorizations, tokenized payment transactions, and fraud controls.

• Authentication APIs: Enables strong and secure end-user FIDO-based authentication, especially in the context of online operations and agent-initiated payments.

• Customer Experience APIs and Mobile SDKs: Exposes mobile-first card services designed to enhance cardholder experiences directly within banking applications, including card art selection, card delivery tracking, access to digital inserts, card activation, secure display of card details and PIN, virtual card generation, push provisioning to mobile wallets, mobile authentication, and tap-to-pay enablement.

• Payment Cryptography & Key Management APIs: Enables banks to secure their payment card issuance infrastructure with our HSM-as-a-Service, managing cryptographic keys, encryption, and transaction signing. Issuers can also access the IST test environment to explore the quantum-ready cryptographic library and build future-proof applications.

With more than 700 million physical payment products issued in 2025, IST combines proven expertise in large-scale physical card issuance with advanced digital payment capabilities. As a major independent tokenization provider, the company has now provisioned more than 500 million payment tokens across a wide variety of digital payment use cases. Built on PCI-certified, resilient, secure, and scalable SaaS platforms, IST’s API-driven services enable issuers to accelerate innovation while benefiting from a flexible business model and modular approach, allowing issuers to select and consume only the services they need.

Nicole Eberhardt, Global Chief Executive Officer, Asset Vantage

Today, Asset Vantage supports more than 400 families across 10 countries, helping manage over USD 400 billion in assets through a unified platform that brings together data aggregation, accounting, portfolio reporting and analytics, and document management. The platform provides family offices and their trusted advisors, including Certified Public Accountants (CPAs) and Multi-Family Offices (MFOs), with a single source of truth across entities, currencies, and asset classes. By bringing together the general ledger and the investments book, it delivers secure, audit-ready data while ensuring clients retain complete ownership and control of their information. In addition, the platform safeguards highly sensitive financial information while supporting the governance needs of modern family offices.

Nicole's appointment comes as family offices navigate increasing complexity across global investments, governance, reporting and cross-border structures, while artificial intelligence reshapes the future of wealth management. She brings more than 25 years of experience in financial services technology. An accountant by training, Nicole has spent her career building and scaling the accounting and reporting platforms relied upon by family offices, alternative investment managers and their trusted advisors.

Sunil K. Dalal, Founder & Chairman, UNIDEL Group, said, “Asset Vantage was founded on a simple belief - that family offices deserve technology built around their real-time financial operations needs. As we look to the future, our ambition is to evolve on the back of our deep domain expertise, continuous innovation, and enduring client trust. Nicole embodies these values. She brings the experience, judgement and leadership to guide Asset Vantage through its next phase of growth while remaining true to the principles on which it was built.” 

Nicole Eberhardt, Global Chief Executive Officer, Asset Vantage, said, “Clients today expect more than technology - they need a trusted partner with stable ownership that helps them navigate increasing complexity with confidence. Our focus will be on continuing investments in a platform that gives clients greater clarity, control and agility as their needs evolve, and helping family offices, complex asset allocators, CPA firms, and MFOs, manage wealth with confidence across generations. I am excited to lead Asset Vantage into its next chapter, continuing to strengthen our capabilities and create long-term value for family offices around the world.”

Originally developed to manage the family office of UNIDEL's founder, Asset Vantage remains one of the few platforms built on a native general ledger architecture rather than disconnected reporting systems. By combining accounting and reporting in a single platform, it enables family offices to operate with greater transparency, efficiency, and confidence.

About Asset Vantage
Asset Vantage, a UNIDEL Company, founded in 2011, empowers families and their trusted advisors with integrated solutions that deliver deep insights into investments and enhanced control over their financial legacy. Powered by integrated general ledger capabilities and advanced performance reporting, the platform delivers a complete, real-time view of assets, liabilities, and overall wealth, enabling principals and their trusted advisors to make confident, informed decisions. Today, Asset Vantage supports more than 400 families across 10+ countries and helps oversee more than USD 400 billion in assets.

For more information, visit www.assetvantage.com.

DS Group Leads the Digital Transformation Dialogue in FMCG with ASCEND 2026

The event showcased practical applications across Artificial Intelligence, Generative AI, Agentic AI, Machine Learning, Data Analytics, Cloud, Cybersecurity, Data Privacy, Enterprise Applications, Robotic Process Automation, Industry 4.0 and Sustainability Technologies. Leading technology partners including SAP, Microsoft, Salesforce, Snowflake, PwC, EY, Deloitte, Grant Thornton, Bizom, Mitsubishi, PeopleStrong, o9 Solutions and others demonstrated how emerging technologies are creating measurable business impact across industries. Employees experienced interactive technology showcases, live demonstrations, expert sessions, workshops, panel discussions, innovation labs and immersive learning experiences designed to encourage experimentation and accelerate digital adoption across every function.

Over the last three years, DS Group has significantly accelerated its digital transformation journey by doubling its technology investments, expanding its technology ecosystem from nearly 20 partners to over 50, and implementing enterprise-wide digital solutions across multiple businesses. As it approaches its centenary, the DS Group plans to triple its investments in technology, recognising digital innovation as a key enabler of future growth. 

Santosh K Singh, Senior Vice President, Information Technology, DS Group, said, “Technology today is not merely about digitising processes; it is about reimagining the way businesses create value. At DS Group, every technology investment is guided by one principle, business impact. Whether it is AI-powered decision-making, intelligent supply chains, cloud transformation or enterprise-wide data capabilities, technology must enable faster decisions, greater efficiency and sustainable growth. As we move towards becoming a Rs. 20,000 crore organisation by our centenary year, technology will be one of our strongest growth enablers. Our objective is to build a future-ready enterprise where innovation is embedded across every business, every function and every employee. ASCEND 2026 reflects that vision by bringing together people, ideas and technology on one platform to accelerate learning, collaboration and transformation.”

ASCEND also reflected DS Group’s commitment to responsible growth. Conducted as a paperless, digital-first event, it demonstrated how technology can simultaneously enhance operational efficiency while supporting sustainability goals. More than a technology showcase, ASCEND 2026 represented a cultural shift, one that encourages curiosity, continuous learning and cross-functional collaboration. It highlighted DS Group’s commitment to staying ahead of the technology curve by adopting new technologies and best practices in the industry, ensuring the organisation remains relevant, resilient and future-ready in an increasingly digital world.

With the successful conclusion of ASCEND 2026, DS Group has strengthened its position as one of the few FMCG organisations driving an enterprise-wide conversation on digital transformation, demonstrating that the future of business will be shaped not just by products and brands, but by the intelligent application of technology across the entire value chain.

About DS Group
The DS Group (Dharampal Satyapal Group) is a one of the leading FMCG conglomerates and a Multi-Business Corporation with a strong Indian and International presence. Founded in the year 1929, it is an inspiring and successful business story that blends a remarkable history and legacy with visionary growth. It has an extensive and diverse portfolio with presence in Food and Beverage, Confectionery, Mouth Freshener, Hospitality, Agri, Luxury Retail businesses, and other investments. Catch, Pulse, Pass Pass, Silver Pearls, Ksheer, Rajnigandha, Ovino, L’Opera, Le Marche, Birthright, LuvIt, Chingles, Golmol, Namah are some of the leading brands, the Group proudly shelters today.

As a corporate, DS Group is guided by a clear set of values that are built on a strong foundation of collective good to give back to society and protect the planet. The DS Headquarters has been awarded Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification, under the USGBC (US Green Building Council) existing building O&M (Operation and Maintenance) program version 4.0. The DS Headquarters has also received LEED Zero Carbon Certification, by the USGBC. DS Group has aligned its financial performance with global ESG priorities with the launch of a pioneering Double Materiality Assessment across all businesses. Further demonstrating its environmental leadership, the DS Group has a water positivity index at 1.8 across its business units in 30 locations of India.

For details, log onto www.dsgroup.com

This expansion featured the availability of Agentforce, Salesforce's platform for building, deploying and scaling AI agents, and Data 360, the engine that unifies data and insights, giving AI the context it requires. Core applications like Agentforce Sales, Agentforce Service, Slack, and Tableau Next are also included, providing a complete foundation for customers.

By purchasing Salesforce products in AWS Marketplace, businesses in India can simplify procurement and IT management processes while benefiting from features such as consolidated billing, customized pricing, and a centralized view of their technology investments. This collaboration between Salesforce and AWS, first established in 2016, underscores both companies' commitment to delivering innovative solutions powered by data and agentic artificial intelligence. These technologies empower businesses to integrate advanced capabilities into their daily operations securely and responsibly.

Comments on the news
Mankiran Chowhan, Managing director at Salesforce India, said, "Indian enterprises are no longer asking if AI will transform their business, they know it will. The challenge is turning that ambition into action. Complex procurement processes, siloed data, and disconnected systems often slow down AI adoption. By bringing Salesforce to AWS Marketplace in India, we are making it easier for businesses to access and deploy our solutions through an infrastructure they already trust and use. This will help customers move faster, maximize their existing cloud investments, and accelerate time-to-value from their AI and digital transformation initiatives."

Customers in India can now purchase Salesforce products directly through AWS Marketplace today. For more information about product availability and details, visit www.salesforce.com/partners/aws.

About Salesforce
Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation. Visit www.salesforce.com/in/ for more information.

Pricing and packaging are subject to change. Availability may vary by region and is governed by customer agreements. Customers should base purchasing decisions on products and services currently available.

About Amazon Web Services India Services Private Limited 
Amazon Web Services India Private Limited undertakes the resale and marketing of AWS Cloud services in India.

^{*Salesforce, the #1 CRM, powered by AI technology and capabilities.}

According to the research, customer expectations are rising rapidly as organizations seek integrated outcomes across AI, cybersecurity, hybrid cloud, automation, analytics and managed services. Vendors and partners increasingly struggle to meet those market demands independently with solutions requiring cross-platform integration, multi-vendor coordination, lifecycle support and operational consistency.

The GTDC and Channelnomics report validates distribution's position as the connective layer that closes these execution gaps. Through partner enablement, technical resources, financing, marketplace operations, compliance support, lifecycle management and ecosystem orchestration, distributors empower vendors and solution providers, allowing channel partners to deliver outcomes that no single organization can efficiently provide alone.

"Technology innovation is creating tremendous opportunities, but it is also making go-to-market execution more complex," said Frank Vitagliano, CEO of GTDC. "Distributors have continued to invest in the platforms, programs, services and expertise needed to help vendors and partners bring AI, cloud, cybersecurity and other advanced solutions to market more efficiently. This research reinforces what we see every day across the IT ecosystem: distribution is becoming more valuable because it helps turn innovation into scalable execution."

According to the report, distribution can raise execution capability to more than 80% across key go-to-market functions and motions. Vendors leveraging distribution strategically also improve operational efficiency, partner readiness, sales velocity, market reach, forecasting discipline and customer retention. The research further identifies meaningful economic benefits, including 15%-52% cost savings and 4x-8.5x ROI.

"Customers are no longer buying isolated products or stand-alone services; they expect integrated outcomes delivered across increasingly complex ecosystems," said Larry Walsh, CEO and Chief Analyst at Channelnomics. "That creates a gap between what clients need and what vendors or partners can consistently deliver on their own. Distribution overcomes those obstacles by aggregating the resources, capabilities and operational infrastructure required to execute at scale."

The study highlights several key findings, including:

• Execution is a true constraint. The market challenge is less about innovation and more about delivering integrated outcomes consistently at scale.

• Customer expectations exceed channel capability. For example, 76% of customers see multi-vendor systems support as a critical need, but only 22% believe IT partners have that capability. While 70% value AI integration, only 38% see sufficient expertise in this area.

• Vendors need strategic distribution support. Top vendor priorities include demonstrable ROI and value visibility (88%), strategic GTM alignment (85%), and partner recruitment and enablement (83%).

• Partners need distribution to manage complexity. The top priority is ecosystem access, multi-vendor integration and solution bundling (91%), followed by AI-driven technical support (89%).

• Distribution is becoming a force multiplier. In addition to helping vendors scale ecosystem selling, distributors reduce operational friction, support recurring revenue, expand reach and improve customer outcomes.

The report also outlines a vendor playbook for scaling ecosystem execution, recommending that vendors align distributors to their go-to-market strategies, build ecosystem-led sales models, accelerate AI readiness, expand marketplace and lifecycle operations, improve API and workflow integration, and modernize performance measurement.

The full report, The Evolving Role of Distribution in Technology Go-To-Market Models, as well as other industry research and resources, is available at no cost on the GTDC Knowledge Hub.
 

About the GTDC
The Global Technology Distribution Council is the industry consortium representing the world's leading tech distributors. GTDC members drive more than $200 billion in annual worldwide sales of products, services and solutions through diverse business channels. GTDC conferences support the development and expansion of strategic supply-chain partnerships that continually address the fast-changing marketplace needs of vendors, end customers and distributors. GTDC members include AB S.A, Arrow Electronics, CMS Distribution, Computer Gross Italia S.p.A., D&H Distributing, ELKO Group, Esprinet S.p.A., Exclusive Networks, Infinigate, Ingram Micro, Intcomex, Logicom Public Limited, Mindware, ​Nexora, Redington Limited, SiS Technologies, Tarsus Distribution, TD SYNNEX, TIM AG, VSTECS Holdings Limited and Westcon-Comstor.

SwiftPAL earns a place in the Global EdTech Prize 2026 top 25 shortlist, spotlighting its mission to close learning gaps at scale across India

Judged by educators themselves, the prize provides a vital platform to help companies and organisations scale their products, tools, or services and their impact worldwide. It celebrates EdTechs that are making a real difference to the next generation and champions innovative tech solutions that actually work for the people who matter most – educators, their students, and their communities.

The prize is awarded in three categories: Majors, Start-ups, and Non-profits, with winners announced live at the World Schools Summit in London on January 17, 2027.

Vikas Pota, Founder of T4 Education and the Global EdTech Prize, said, “I want to congratulate SwiftPAL from ConveGenius.AI in India on being named in the Top 25 shortlists for this, the second Global EdTech Prize.

Technology in the classroom holds the enormous potential to close learning gaps and fully equip today’s young people for the rapidly emerging workplace of tomorrow. But we can only harness technology effectively when it is made to work for educators to tackle the challenges they face every day.

Judged by educators themselves, the Global EdTech Prize exists to bridge the gap between technology and teachers and give a global platform to the solutions that are making a real impact in classrooms so that impact can be scaled worldwide.”

Shashank Pandey, Co-Founder, ConveGenius.AI  said, Over the last decade, we have learned that learning outcomes at scale improve when policy, budgets, programmes, technology, and people work in harmony. Technology and AI can be powerful accelerators when aligned with national priorities and implemented well.

Independent third-party research shows that students using ConveGenius’ PAL platform learn 2.3 times faster, helping bridge years of accumulated learning gaps.

Being named a global finalist for the Global EdTech Prize 2026 is a tremendous honour. It validates a decade of conviction, execution, and partnership with state governments to create a level playing field for every child.

About SwiftPAL by ConveGenius

SwiftPAL is ConveGenius's personalised adaptive learning platform, built for learners of Bharat to support them with their journey towards their grade-level outcomes. SwiftPAL starts the journey with each learner at their present-day level, moving with them at their pace.

We are all aware that ASER 2024 found that only 23.4% of Std III children in government schools can read a Std II-level text, even though 98% of children that age are enrolled in school. Globally, the World Bank and UNESCO describe this as "learning poverty", estimating that 70% of 10-year-olds in low- and middle-income countries cannot read and understand a simple text. This is the specific gap SwiftPAL has been built to close: the gap between being enrolled in school and actually learning at grade level.

SwiftPAL works by first diagnosing what a learner actually knows, rather than what their textbook assumes they should know by now, using adaptive assessments that identify missed concepts and gaps from previous grades. Based on this diagnosis, it builds an individual learning path unique to each learner instead of assigning the same grade-level content to everyone. A learner who is lacking in understanding and application of a particular concept is given ample guided practice followed by opportunities to demonstrate their gained mastery. Students work through videos, practice questions, hints and retries on the devices inside school ICT labs, dedicating two class periods a week to catching up with their grade-level concepts via SwiftPal. This is how SwiftPAL supports learners demonstrating measurable learning gains and catching up with their grade-level concepts.

An independent randomised controlled trial by the University of Chicago's Development Innovation Lab, led by Nobel laureate Dr Michael Kremer, tracked SwiftPAL across 120 schools in all 26 districts of Andhra Pradesh over 17 months. The study validated that students using SwiftPAL learned 2.3 times faster than expected, clocking in close to two additional years of learning.

In Uttar Pradesh, under India's first outcomes-based financing model in public education, students using SwiftPAL outperformed peers by 16 to 54 percentage points across subjects, evaluated independently across 280 schools, covering 72,000 students.

In Rajasthan, the programme has scaled from a 60-school pilot to more than 3,700 schools on government mandate.

SwiftPAL now reaches over 4 million students across 15,000+ schools, in 22 Indian states and 145 districts, at a cost of USD 10–35 per student per year. The programme has been recognised with the CIPS Innovation Award 2025, named a Government of India GeM Top Seller in the Startup Category, and awarded Best Personalised and Adaptive Learning Solution at the 16th World Education Summit.
 

About T4 Education

We believe every child, everywhere, deserves a good education. We are building the world's largest community of teachers and schools to achieve this. Together. Our digital media platform provides opportunities for educators to network, collaborate, share good practices, and support each other's efforts to improve learning and school culture. We work to amplify teachers’ voices because the world we want to see will only be built by listening to those at the heart of education.

What’s Next?

The Global EdTech Prize is awarded annually in three categories: Majors, Start-ups, and Non-Profits, recognising outstanding EdTech products, tools, or services based on rigorous criteria.

The top 10 finalists for each of the three categories will be announced in September, with finalists invited to the World Schools Summit, where they will showcase their work before an expert panel comprising leading figures in the technology and education sectors, including investors and policymakers from around the world.

The expert panel will narrow down the final 3 per category who will present their products and tools before educators at the World Schools Summit. Educators will vote by secret ballot to determine the winner of each category, and they will be announced live on stage at the culmination of the summit.

Under the agreement, Fikra Ventures is Glimmer’s exclusive commercialisation, marketing and distribution partner in the Gulf region. Fikra Ventures will use that position to build a new portfolio company to deploy Glimmer’s FinomeAI suite for enterprises across the region.

The new company will develop Arabic-language and regionally compliant solutions on top of Glimmer’s products, reducing the localisation and compliance burden on customers and shortening deployment timelines. Fikra Ventures will provide the venture-building, capital, and commercial infrastructure, with Glimmer providing the underlying technology.

Glimmer’s products already operate at production scale, processing more than 1,000,000 loan applications each month across live financial services deployments. To date, the suite has delivered:

• Fraud investigation turnaround reduced from one to two days to 20–30 minutes per case at a financial institution, with an audit-ready log trail generated automatically

• An 8% lift in onboarding conversion for a non-bank lender, with customer acquisition spend held flat

• A ~6% improvement in portfolio collection rate at low incremental cost per asset

Glimmer’s enterprise AI platform supports a broad range of complex and regulated workflows, spanning document intelligence, decisioning, conversational journeys, voice automation, personalised video, model development, policy intelligence and enterprise knowledge access. Its products include Data Quotient for explainable, audit-ready decisioning; ConvFlow for guided conversational journeys across customer acquisition, onboarding and servicing; Klaris for end-to-end voice automation across high-volume customer interactions; SynthVid for personalised video at scale; and Meridian for faster model development and deployment.

The new company will run regional go-to-market and customer support, from pilots through production deployment. Early focus areas span collections, customer acquisition, onboarding, servicing, marketing outreach, underwriting, fraud investigation and regulatory workflows.

“Fikra turns proven global technology into regional companies. Glimmer’s platform processes over one million loan applications a month, giving us the foundation to build a significant Gulf business,” said Wael Aburida, Founder & Managing Partner of Fikra Ventures. “Banks, lenders, telecom operators and large enterprises here are actively looking for solutions that improve conversion, reduce costs and deliver better customer outcomes at scale. This partnership gives us the technology, venture-building structure and commercial access to pursue that opportunity.”

The initial commercialisation effort will focus on financial services and lending, where institutions face pressure to modernise collections, customer communication, underwriting and operating workflows without compromising governance or control. Over time, the companies see scope to extend these capabilities to other high-volume enterprise environments facing similar challenges around automation, decision-making and customer engagement.

“Our partnership with Fikra Ventures gives us the regional relationships, market understanding and commercial platform to take our capabilities to enterprises across the Gulf,” said Saurabh Nigam, Chief Executive Officer of Glimmer Technologies. “Enterprise AI creates real value when it moves beyond experimentation and becomes part of the workflows that businesses depend on every day. We have built and proven our technology in complex, high-volume environments where accuracy, governance and measurable outcomes matter. Together, we can help enterprises use AI to make better decisions, automate critical processes and deliver more intelligent customer experiences at scale.”

The companies will begin with Arabic-localised product demonstrations and market-specific pilots for enterprise customers in the Gulf, with plans to extend into the greater MENA region. Initial demonstrations will include Arabic and bilingual use cases across collections, marketing outreach, conversational onboarding, voice automation and document-led decisioning.

The partnership extends Fikra Ventures’ model of turning commercially relevant AI into companies with clear pathways to regional adoption and international scale.

About Glimmer Technologies

Glimmer Technologies is an enterprise AI company building the future of financial intelligence. Operating at the intersection of deep AI capability and real-world enterprise workflows, Glimmer develops intelligent platforms that help businesses interpret complex data, make faster decisions, automate operations, and deliver better customer journeys.

Its ecosystem brings together FinomeAI, a GenAI intelligence platform for document processing, risk insights, compliance, customer journeys, and operational automation; Flo, a configurable lending stack for digital credit operations across LOS, LMS, and modular workflows; and ZestMoney, one of India’s widely known Buy Now, Pay Later platforms.

To know more, please visit: www.glimmertech.in

About Fikra Ventures

Fikra Ventures is a global AI-native venture studio that builds and scales applied AI companies. The studio combines venture ideation, technical execution, strategic partnerships, founder development, and commercialisation support to create ventures with clear market relevance.

Fikra Ventures works with founders, technical leaders, corporates, governments, universities, investors, and strategic partners to turn commercially relevant AI opportunities into scalable companies. Fikra Ventures Holdings Limited is registered in the Abu Dhabi Global Market (ADGM).

For more information, visit www.fikra.ventures and follow us on @fikraventures #fikraventures.

SAP Learning Hub, student edition

A student graduating in Bengaluru or Pune might, within months, be collaborating with colleagues in Berlin or clients in Singapore. Workplaces have moved faster than classrooms in this respect, and that gap is exactly why continuous learning now matters almost as much as the degree itself.

Enterprise technology is a big part of that gap. Large organizations run on integrated systems that touch everything from finance and procurement to supply chains and customer service. Most students never encounter these systems until they’re already on the job, at which point they’re expected to learn them on the fly.

SAP thinks students shouldn’t have to wait that long. Through SAP Learning Hub, student edition, eligible final-year college and university students in India get free access to premium SAP learning resources once they complete academic verification — no subscription, no hidden cost. Students pick learning journeys based on what interests them, sit in on expert-led sessions, get hands-on time with real practice systems, and join a learning community that stretches well beyond their own campus. The program also covers two SAP Certification exam attempts, so students walk away with credentials employers recognize internationally.

“Today's careers are rarely confined to one geography,” says David Chaviano, Program Manager, SAP Learning Hub, student edition. “Students who understand how businesses operate, and who keep learning throughout their careers, will be better prepared to succeed in an increasingly connected economy.”

None of this is limited to engineering or computer science students, either. Whether you’re studying commerce, management, or a technical discipline, there are learning paths in finance, procurement, HR, supply chain, customer experience, analytics, and business technology. The goal isn’t to churn out software users, it’s to help students understand how modern organizations actually function.

Global careers, it turns out, usually start with local preparation. Getting a head start on industry-relevant skills before graduation can make that first jump from campus to workplace feel a lot less daunting, and considerably more rewarding. For India’s graduates entering an increasingly connected economy, understanding how global businesses work may end up mattering just as much as the degree hanging on the wall.

Eligible final-year students can register for SAP Learning Hub, student edition at https://learning.sap.com/free-student-edition

Agentforce Sales brings structure and visibility to the revenue engine. Instead of relying on spreadsheets, manual updates or one individual to maintain customer records, businesses get a real-time view of every lead, opportunity and pipeline. Automated lead assignment, workflow automation and mobile access help sales teams move faster, while built-in AI capabilities—including opportunity scoring, forecasting and intelligent recommendations—help teams focus on the opportunities that matter most without requiring specialist expertise.

For many SMBs, the biggest challenge isn't adopting new technology—it's getting people to use it. That's where Slack becomes a powerful advantage. Already familiar and loved by many growing businesses, Slack has evolved beyond team messaging to become the "work operating system" where employees collaborate, make decisions and keep work moving. From sales and customer support to HR, IT, operations and external collaboration, teams work together in one place. For smaller businesses, where employees wear multiple hats, every hour saved has an outsized impact on productivity and growth.

Tableau completes the picture by turning business data into actionable insights. Rather than waiting for static reports or manually compiled spreadsheets, founders and business leaders can monitor pipeline health, revenue trends and business performance through live, mobile-friendly dashboards. Its intuitive drag-and-drop interface makes analytics accessible to every business user, while native connectivity with Salesforce provides real-time visibility into sales performance without the complexity of separate data warehouses or extensive integration projects.

Together, Agentforce Sales, Slack and Tableau create a connected operating system for growth—helping Indian SMBs sell smarter, collaborate faster and make confident decisions, all from a single platform that can be deployed in just four-six weeks. The SMB Growth Kit will be available immediately and includes structured onboarding, hands-on setup and post-go-live support. Teams can adopt AI-ready systems without turning implementation into another operational burden. The offering will be delivered in collaboration with select Salesforce reseller partners across India, helping ensure SMB customers receive a consistent onboarding, implementation and go-live experience.

Additional Comments on the News:

Mankiran Chowhan, Managing Director, Salesforce India, said, “India’s SMBs are moving quickly toward AI, but ambition alone is not enough. Many businesses are investing in AI, but far fewer have implemented it because their customer data, team conversations and business insights are still scattered. SMB Growth Kit gives growing businesses one connected system where sales activity, team conversations and live insights work together — helping teams act with more confidence, fewer blind spots and less guesswork.”

Swaroop Kaja, RVP - Sales, Salesforce India, said, “We launched SMB Growth Kit to give growing businesses one connected way to run sales, collaborate on deals and understand business performance in real time. With Agentforce Sales, Slack and Tableau working together, teams can spend less time chasing updates and more time moving customers forward. That is the immediate value: clearer pipeline, faster decisions and fewer blind spots. As these businesses grow, that connected data foundation also gives them a stronger base for using AI in ways that are trusted, useful and grounded in the reality of their business.”

Availability

SMB Growth Kit is available in India for small and medium businesses, exclusively through select Salesforce reseller partners. Salesforce teams support customers with structured onboarding, hands-on setup and post-go-live support, with businesses designed to be live and operational within four-six weeks of starting.

*Salesforce, the #1 CRM, powered by AI technology and capabilities.

About Salesforce

Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation.

Visit www.salesforce.com/in/ for more information.

Disclaimer: Pricing and packaging are subject to change. Availability may vary by region and is governed by customer agreements. Customers should base purchasing decisions on products and services currently available.

CloudifyOps | MIXIMO

Built with an AI-first approach, MIXIMO helps organizations understand their infrastructure and applications, map dependencies, and make migration decisions based on real utilization data rather than guesswork. Supporting AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform as both source and target environments, it enables both on-premises-to-cloud and multi-cloud transformation through one platform.

Sushanth Bellapu, Founder and CTO, CloudifyOps / MIXIMO, said, “The industry has long treated cloud migration as a logistics problem. MIXIMO reframes it as an intelligence problem. Built by engineers who have navigated large-scale transformations firsthand, MIXIMO applies AI to understand applications, dependencies, and modernisation opportunities before a single workload moves. The result is predictable outcomes, lower risk, and infrastructure that is truly cloud-native not just cloud-hosted.”

MIXIMO combines automated infrastructure and application discovery, portfolio assessment, dependency mapping, and AI-driven instance and service recommendations in one platform. Discovery supports agent-based, agentless, and repository-based approaches, enabling assessment at scale.

The platform supports three migration strategies: Rehost, Replatform, and Refactor, making it suitable for different cloud transformation journeys. Its tri-mode instance recommendations provide 1-to-1, cost-effective, and high-performance mapping based on actual source utilization. MIXIMO also automatically generates a visual and actionable End State Blueprint for individual workloads, helping teams plan their migration architecture with greater clarity.

“We are not entering the migration tooling market; we are creating the migration intelligence category,” said Vaitheeswaran Krishna Subramanian, CEO, CloudifyOps. “MIXIMO turns years of migration expertise into a platform, making intelligence-led migration available to any engineering team, at any scale.”

MIXIMO is designed for startups, SMBs, and enterprises across healthcare, BFSI, SaaS and technology, e-commerce, logistics, and manufacturing. For organisations with data sovereignty and compliance requirements particularly in BFSI and healthcare MIXIMO supports self-hosted and hybrid LLM deployment, ensuring sensitive infrastructure data remains within the organisation's own environment.

With MIXIMO, CloudifyOps aims to make cloud transformation more intelligent, predictable and accessible for businesses at every cloud maturity stage.

CloudifyOps is India's leading AI Transformation Partner, helping enterprises move from manual complexity to autonomy through AI, cloud, and intelligent operations. Founded in 2016 and headquartered in Bengaluru, with offices in Chennai, Dubai, and the United States, CloudifyOps combines over a decade of mission-critical cloud engineering with purpose-built AI capabilities.

An AWS Advanced Consulting Partner and one of the few organisations in India to hold the AWS AI Services Competency across both Generative AI and Agentic AI, CloudifyOps serves businesses across BFSI, healthcare, SaaS, and enterprise technology sectors in India, the Middle East, and the United States. With a team of over 150 cloud and AI specialists, CloudifyOps delivers AI Transformation, Cloud Transformation and Managed Services.

For more information, cloudifyops.com and miximo.ai.

Union Bank of India Engages Leegality's Consentin for DPDP Compliance

The DPDP Act (Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023) is a new data protection law that strictly regulates how businesses in India can collect, process and use customer data. The Act and accompanying rules have a compliance deadline of May 13, 2027. Every business that handles personal data in India will soon be required to implement systems for consent, data processing, and governance.

Banks handle large volumes of sensitive financial and personal data, making early action on the DPDP Act especially important for the sector. With the compliance deadline approaching, banks are increasingly expected to have their consent and data governance systems ready well ahead of time.

The engagement has already shown initial results, with Cookie Consent being successfully implemented on Union Bank of India’s Corporate Website. Cookies are small files stored by a visitor's browser to remember preferences and track behaviour and under the DPDP Act, they can only be set after a visitor gives clear, informed consent. With the DPDP deadline approaching, businesses across India are now racing to ensure that cookie practices are compliant - making it an early and visible marker of a company's broader compliance efforts.

The implementation of Consent Management and Data Discovery capabilities is currently underway across the Bank’s applications to support its broader data privacy and compliance initiatives. 

Consentin consolidates all of an enterprise's DPDP needs - spanning consent management, privacy notices, data retention and withdrawal, cookie compliance, privacy assessments, third-party risk management, and regulatory breach reporting - into a single, easy-to-use platform. A unified dashboard gives compliance teams complete visibility into consent status and data flows across the organisation. It can be deployed on-prem or as a SaaS solution, depending on the enterprise's infrastructure.

"We're proud to be trusted by an institution of Union Bank of India's scale with its DPDP compliance foundation," said Shivam Singla, CEO, Leegality. "We believe their move will help set the pace for how the wider banking sector approaches privacy compliance." 

About Consentin

Consentin is a DPDP compliance platform, developed by Leegality, built to meet the full spectrum of privacy compliance needs for Indian enterprises through one unified, secure platform.

Leegality is a document infrastructure platform that is used by more than 5000 Indian companies to build paperless workflows for agreements, forms and other legal documents. Every year, Leegality processes over 50 million eSigns and 3 million eStamps.

About Union Bank of India

Union Bank of India is one of the country's leading public sector banks, headquartered in Mumbai and established on November 11, 1919. Today, Union Bank operates a network of 8,675+ domestic branches, 8,650+ ATMs, 73,600+ employees and 26,000+ BC Points with a total business of Rs. 23.85 Lakh Crore.

• Map Lineage: Build comprehensive, interactive family trees that trace ancestral roots and connect extended relatives worldwide.

• Archive Oral Histories: Document complex migration journeys, record grandparents' stories in their own words, and pass down treasured family traditions.

• Preserve Cultural Identity: Securely store private photographs, heirloom recipes, and milestone memories within their true historical context, free from the noise of public social media.

Left to Right: Vineet Jain, Co-Founder and CEO, Tulasidasappa, Co-Founder and COO

The founders envisioned LifeTree as a conscious structured movement to ensure that no family loses its stories, culture or identity to the passage of time. "Over the years, we realized that while technology has helped us stay connected with the world, it has not necessarily helped us stay connected with our own families," said Vineet Jain, Co-Founder & CEO of BlueRose Technologies. “We are aiming to tell the world how to digitally preserve your grandparents’ stories or “Using new tech to break through genealogy brick walls.”. He further continued "Many of the stories, traditions, and experiences that define who we are slowly disappearing. LifeTree was created as a conscious effort to help families preserve those memories and create a legacy that future generations can cherish."

Tulasidasappa, Co-Founder & COO shared that, “It’s been my personal passion and a simple thought that my children to have documented evidence of who are their ancestors and thus LifeTree was created to help families document their past, celebrate their present, and preserve their future, In a world where families are more connected digitally than ever before” LifeTree was born from a shared realization among its founders. Reclaiming the Family Circle from Public social media Unlike conventional social networks engineered for public broadcasting and viral engagement, LifeTree operates as a closed, private ecosystem. The platform addresses a growing global fatigue with mainstream social media, where intimate family moments are often exposed to public scrutiny, data tracking, and algorithmic distractions. By shifting the focus from "likes" to legacy, LifeTree creates a safe space dedicated entirely to authentic family connection."

YouTube link: youtu.be/s3WILRrgsmw?si=hwZxYNQAHU3D9fRz

Built on a foundation of absolute privacy, LifeTree introduces a clean, distraction-free environment. The platform features an uncompromising commitment to data integrity: it contains zero advertisements, employs no data-selling monetization models, and uses no algorithmic feeds to vie for user attention. Control remains entirely in the hands of the family, ensuring that personal data and historical records are never commoditized.

As families continue to evolve and spread across the globe, LifeTree serves as a permanent, living repository, ensuring that a family's unique history, culture, and values are seamlessly preserved and safely passed down to future generations.

About BlueRose Technologies

BlueRose Technologies (BRT) is a Bangalore-based technology enterprise specializing in innovative enterprise solutions and digital platforms. Driven by a commitment to data privacy and user-centric design, the company develops cutting-edge tools that address real-world challenges in connectivity, automation, and digital preservation.

About LifeTree

LifeTree is the brain child of BlueRose Technologies - a global transformation partner delivering IT Consulting, Solutions, managed services across 25 Countries including US, Europe, APAC and Middle East. LifeTree is an app built on the thought to preserve the memories that slip away in the current trend of joint families to nuclear homes distancing from their roots about cultural learning and family bonding. LifeTree is an initiative to build, connect, preserve and celebrate the family traditions and heirloom.

For more information, please contact BlueRose Technologies: +91 99455 26669

Keeper protects over 95,000 organizations, which includes many Fortune 500 enterprises and public sector agencies. The company is quickly emerging as the market standard for AI-native identity security for enterprises globally with its leading zero-trust and zero-knowledge identity security platform. In 2025, leading analyst firm Gartner recognized Keeper as the second-fastest-growing security software competitor globally, second only to Google.* This recognition underscores Keeper’s rapid market expansion in addressing identity security challenges created by cloud transformation and artificial intelligence adoption across enterprise infrastructure and endpoints.

Keeper is now growing at over 4x the industry average.

Keeper Security is now growing at over 4x the industry average

This market-leading growth is driven by the explosion of identities in the agentic AI age and relentless focus on innovation to protect customers, as evidenced by the release of its unified privileged access management and identity security platform, KeeperPAM®, which protects both human and Non-Human Identities (NHIs), including service accounts, machine identities, databases, AI agents and agentic workloads. Since the launch of KeeperPAM in February 2025, KeeperPAM revenue has exhibited 10x year-over-year growth and Keeper has seen industry-leading new customer growth, adding an average of 850 new organizations every month. In the last fifteen months, Keeper added over 400 innovative features and products to KeeperPAM.

“Identity is the new security perimeter,” said Darren Guccione, CEO and Co-founder of Keeper Security. “As enterprises increasingly deploy AI agents and autonomous systems, the number of privileged identities and machine credentials is growing exponentially. Organizations need a modern, unified platform that secures every identity – human and non-human – and governs every privileged interaction. Our growth reflects the market’s demand for a platform purpose-built to address these challenges.”

Keeper’s cloud-native cybersecurity platform delivers a comprehensive approach to identity security and privileged access management by unifying enterprise password management, secrets management, privileged session management, database management and endpoint privilege management in a single platform. Keeper’s AI-native identity security strategy seamlessly extends these capabilities to non-human identities and agentic AI environments, enabling organizations to discover, manage and secure machine credentials and autonomous workloads with the same rigor applied to human users.

As enterprises adopt AI technologies at scale, the proliferation of non-human identities is rapidly outpacing that of human identities by 150:1, according to reports, thereby creating new attack surfaces and operational complexity. Keeper’s platform helps organizations establish identity-first security strategies that provide security, visibility, governance and least-privilege controls across their entire identity ecosystem.

"Autonomous agents, frontier LLMs and machine-to-machine workflows are operating inside enterprise environments right now – without adequate governance, secrets management or access controls,” said Craig Lurey, CTO and Co-founder of Keeper Security. “Keeper is purpose-built to solve this problem at scale.”

The company’s continued growth and market recognition reinforce its position as one of the cybersecurity industry’s most innovative and fastest-growing providers of AI-native identity security and privileged access management solutions. Keeper’s financial profile combines best-in-class growth, profitability and a debt-free capital structure and is an asset positioned to efficiently lead identity security in the agentic AI age.

"Surpassing USD 225 million in ARR confirms what we've heard in every enterprise conversation – that securing non-human identities is the defining security challenge of the AI era," said Darren Guccione, CEO of Keeper Security. “We have established an accelerated path to USD 1 billion in ARR which, coupled with our technology roadmap, will provide optionality for a public offering.”

Source Citation:

Gartner, Market Share Analysis: Security Software, Worldwide, 2025, Rahul Yadav, Deepali, 11 May 2026

Gartner is a trademark of Gartner, Inc. and/or its affiliates.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's Business and Technology Insights Organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

About Keeper Security

Keeper Security is the leading zero-trust and zero-knowledge identity security solution, trusted by millions of people and thousands of organizations globally. KeeperPAM® is Keeper's privileged access management platform that unifies password and passkey management, secrets management, privileged session management and endpoint privilege management in a single cloud-native platform, protected with quantum-resistant encryption. KeeperAI delivers real-time, AI-native threat detection across every privileged session. As AI agents proliferate and identity becomes the defining attack surface, Keeper governs access for humans, machines, non-human identities and AI agents, serving as the unified control plane for access, compliance and visibility across the enterprise.

For more information, visit KeeperSecurity.com

L to R: Gaurav Jain, Achintya Gupta and Piyush Agarwal

Unlike traditional datasets that rely on static job titles or company-level segmentation, Reo.Dev’s Developer Knowledge Graph maps engineers based on what they are actively building, the technologies they use, the projects they contribute to, and the signals they leave across the internet. The system unifies fragmented developer footprints into a continuously evolving intelligence layer that reflects real technical behavior rather than inferred roles.

Today, the Developer Knowledge Graph includes 100M+ engineers, 30,000+ technologies, and 250+ tech functions, built by aggregating and correlating data from sources such as GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, X, and specialized technical datasets. This enables DevTool companies to move beyond outdated outbound models and instead target developers based on real-time technical context and intent.

At the core of the platform is a fundamentally new approach to B2B technical intelligence: instead of relying on titles like “backend engineer” or “platform architect,” Reo.Dev builds a living map of engineering activity, capturing what systems developers are building, what frameworks they are adopting, and what technical problems they are actively solving. This allows go-to-market teams to identify audiences with far greater precision and relevance.

“Building and selling into technical audiences has always been difficult because the right data simply didn’t exist in one place,” said Achintya Gupta, Co-founder and CEO of Reo.Dev. “For example, if you’re an observability platform, you don’t just want to reach engineers with certain titles, you want to reach the ones actively building in the environments you support. That level of clarity was missing. With the Developer Knowledge Graph, we’ve brought together signals from across GitHub, Stack Overflow, LinkedIn, X, and technical ecosystems to finally make that possible.”

Achintya added, “Today, we’re at over 100 million developer profiles mapped across 30,000 technologies and 250+ technical functions. And this is just the beginning—the graph deepens with every developer action, making it more accurate and more powerful over time. For companies selling into technical teams, this changes the probability of reaching the right audience strongly.”

The platform is designed to solve one of the most persistent challenges in technical go-to-market strategy: building accurate, high-intent audience lists. By understanding the technologies developers are using, the projects they are contributing to, and the problems they are solving, Reo.Dev enables companies to align outreach with real engineering context, whether that involves LLM infrastructure, observability, DevOps, or application performance optimization.

The announcement comes as part of “Launch Month” at Reo.Dev, with the Developer Knowledge Graph serving as the foundational layer for a broader suite of upcoming capabilities aimed at redefining how DevTool companies’ approach GTM intelligence.

Reo.Dev continues to position itself at the intersection of AI-native intent systems and developer-first go-to-market infrastructure. Founded in 2023 and backed by Heavybit, the platform is already trusted by over 100 leading DevTool companies worldwide.

As the company puts it, the goal is simple: to build a living universe of developers—one where every signal brings go-to-market teams closer to the right engineer, at the right time, with the right context.

The announcement builds on the strategic partnership between Neurealm and CoreStack established in 2025, expanding the collaboration through enterprise-ready GovernOps offerings designed to help organizations optimize, govern, and scale cloud and AI environments with measurable business outcomes.

The GovernOps portfolio combines Neurealm's AI-led managed services, platform engineering, cloud transformation, and operational expertise with CoreStack's AI-powered governance and automation platform to deliver continuous optimization across CloudOps, FinOps+, SecOps, and AI governance.

GovernOps Portfolio: Purpose-Built Enterprise Offerings

The initial GovernOps portfolio includes three bundled enterprise offerings:

• Cloud Visibility & Cost Baseline - Designed to help organizations rapidly gain visibility into cloud environments, identify optimization opportunities, and establish governance baselines.

• FinOps Optimization Program - A managed optimization offering focused on continuous cloud cost reduction, policy enforcement, operational efficiency, and financial governance.

• Kubernetes Optimization & Resilience Operations - A platform engineering and operations offering designed to improve Kubernetes efficiency, resilience, scalability, and BC/DR readiness.

Together, the offerings help enterprises move from fragmented cloud management approaches toward intelligent, AI-driven operational models with continuous governance and optimization.

"Organizations are looking for operational models that can keep pace with accelerating AI and cloud adoption," said Harmeet Chauhan, CEO of Neurealm. "Through NeuGAIN and our collaboration with CoreStack, we are bringing together intelligent governance, automation, and operational expertise to help enterprises scale securely, efficiently, and with greater operational visibility."

"At CoreStack, we believe the future of enterprise operations will be driven by intelligent governance, automation, and continuous optimization," said Ezhilarasan (Ez) Natarajan, CEO of CoreStack. "Our partnership with Neurealm enables enterprises to move beyond visibility into real operational outcomes through AI-powered governance and intelligent cloud operations at scale."

GovernOps offerings will be delivered through Neurealm's RunOps, Cloud Transformation, AI Engineering, and Cybersecurity Practices, with an initial focus on healthcare, financial services, and other regulated industries.

About Neurealm

Neurealm is an AI-first technology services company helping enterprises build the intelligent systems that power the future. We work across the full Physical AI to Agentic AI spectrum, from edge devices to autonomous agents, and help enterprises move from AI experimentation to production-grade deployment, powered by NeuGAIN, our unified AI platform. Our outcome-driven, engineering-led approach spans AI, Engineering, Data, RunOps and more, serving 250+ enterprises worldwide.

About CoreStack

CoreStack is the leading Agentic Governance OS for FinOps, security, and compliance in the AI-accelerated enterprise. It enables organizations to achieve Velocity with Control by continuously and intelligently governing cost, risk, compliance, and operations across cloud, SaaS, and AI-driven systems - operating at machine speed so enterprises can scale faster without increasing risk or cost. Trusted by over 1,000 global enterprises and partners across 40+ countries, CoreStack governs more than USD 3B in annual cloud consumption and is a Microsoft Azure (Legacy) Gold Partner, AWS Technology Partner with Cloud Operations Competency, Oracle Cloud Build Partner, and Google Cloud Build Partner.

Nicholas Kirk, CEO, PageGroup

39 percent hiring managers are prioritising skills over education or career history pushing the candidates to apply for job adverts promoting skills, underscoring that capability now beats credentials. While the adoption of skills-based hiring is growing, it is not yet widespread.

AI has moved from novelty to normality, changing processes, behaviours and outcomes for both sides. 47 percent of professionals reported using it regularly at work in the 2024 Talent Trends survey, a figure that has now risen to 73 percent this year.

In today's dynamic job market, candidates are making decisions through the lens of trust, demanding transparency around pay, flexibility, and working conditions that align with their lives. While expectations are comprehensive, the drive for work-life balance is paramount – a consistent trend highlighted in last year's 2025 Talent Trends report where it was considered important by 81 percent of professionals.

Skills: Capability Over Credentials

Finding the right skills remains the core hiring challenge & candidates are responding accordingly too - 77 percent say they are more likely to apply when skills are highlighted as the most important element in a job advert, though 32 percent of Indian employers still prefer degrees or a linear career path, and 42 percent weigh both equally.

The struggle to find qualified talent is intensifying. The lack of required skills is the biggest recruitment challenge over the past year. This growing gap is prompting a shift towards skills-based hiring, an approach overwhelmingly supported by 99 percent of its adopters who report clear benefits, including better capability identification (49 percent) and improved matching to current and future needs (48 percent). Momentum is building, as 39 percent of hiring managers plan to move towards skills-first models.

AI: Embedded on Both Sides of Hiring

GenAI adoption among Indian professionals has grown rapidly — from 47 percent in 2024 to 64 percent in 2025, and now 73 percent in 2026. It is equally present in the hiring process: 76 percent of job applicants use AI to tailor their applications, while 78 percent of hiring managers use it to draft job descriptions and candidate communications. Yet as AI-polished CVs become the norm, a blind spot is emerging — while 81 percent of hiring managers believe they can identify AI-generated applications, 19 percent admit they cannot. As differentiation on paper becomes harder, the real edge shifts to what AI cannot replicate: judgement, lived experience, and genuine two-way conversation. Structured tasks and scenario walkthroughs are increasingly essential to reveal true capability.

Professionals' Priorities: Flexibility, Trust, and Transparency

Work-life balance and job satisfaction jointly top what professionals value most at work (87 percent each), followed by a good salary and career success (85 percent each) — signalling that professionals are not choosing flexibility over ambition, but expecting both. Yet 43 percent fear they would sacrifice work-life balance by changing roles, a concern that outweighs pay, job security or progression. When flexibility slips in a current role, 61 percent say they would actively start looking elsewhere. Pay transparency matters equally: around one in three active job seekers come from organisations with non-transparent salary structures, while globally, 50 percent of employers with transparent pay say hiring has been more straightforward. First impressions also carry significant weight — 45 percent of new hires consider leaving on their very first day due to a poor onboarding experience.

Nicholas Kirk, CEO, PageGroup said, “The world of work continues to shift at pace. Markets remain unsettled, expectations are evolving, and technology is fundamentally reshaping how employers and candidates connect. Our latest Talent Trends report reinforces that hiring today is more complex and more competitive than ever—but it also reveals where the real opportunities lie.

Globally, 64 percent of professionals are now using GenAI at work, with India leading at 73 percent. Yet what genuinely matters is cutting through the hype to focus on what really counts: skills, clarity and good judgement. We’re seeing this shift in action - 77 percent of Indian candidates are more likely to apply for a role when the job description prioritises skills over credentials, compared to 62 percent globally. This skills-first approach creates stability and confidence, even in unpredictable times, and represents a fundamental evolution in how talent and opportunity find each other.”

"Hiring today is more complex, more competitive and more human than ever. Contracting and agile workforce models are becoming an increasingly important part of workforce planning. With continued uncertainty, many organisations particularly MNCs, are leaning on contract and interim talent to stay flexible, respond quickly to change and access specialist skills when they’re needed most,” added Nilay Khandelwal, Senior Managing Director – India & Singapore, Michael Page.

The report's central message is clear: the future of hiring is not humans versus technology — it is designing processes where AI supports efficiency and people lead decisions. Organisations that combine skills-first thinking with transparency and human-led assessment will be best placed to attract and retain the talent that makes a real difference.

Methodology:

All figures, unless otherwise stated, are from an online survey conducted by PageGroup. The Talent Trends 2026 survey is a quantitative online study gathering the views of 60,000 professionals globally over 170 countries. The India sample comprised 3,552 survey participants.

DigiDoc, backed by Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (StockHolding) and integrated natively within the Melento.ai platform, is a modern digital stamping solution that enables enterprises to generate legally compliant stamp papers in real time through a seamless, API-driven workflow.

The launch addresses one of the most operationally fragmented areas in enterprise documentation — stamp paper procurement and execution — by eliminating traditional dependencies on physical procurement, manual coordination, and multiple vendor integrations.

With a single integration through Melento, enterprises can now access digital stamping capabilities across multiple States / Union Territories while remaining compliant with State / Union Territories-specific regulations.

A key differentiator of StockHolding DigiDoc is its Digital Mode, which delivers a completely paperless stamping experience across multiple States / Union Territories in India. From stamp generation to document delivery, the entire process is executed electronically without physical intervention.

The platform also supports a Hybrid/Physical Mode for organizations operating in workflows that require partial physical execution.

What Enterprises Gain with StockHolding DigiDoc + Melento

• Real-time generation of legally compliant stamped documents

• Automatic calculation of stamp duty based on state-specific laws

• API-driven workflows eliminating manual processing and vendor dependency

• Unified multi-state digital stamping access through a single integration

• Prepaid wallet-based payment processing for operational efficiency

• Support for fully paperless and hybrid execution workflows

Speaking about the launch, Krupesh Bhat, CEO of Melento, said, “Melento becoming one of the leading companies to introduce StockHolding DigiDoc in the Indian market is a significant milestone in the modernization of enterprise documentation infrastructure. Enterprises today are looking for intelligent, scalable, and compliant workflows that reduce operational friction while accelerating execution. By integrating StockHolding DigiDoc within Melento, we are enabling organizations to move from fragmented, manual stamping processes to real-time digital execution at enterprise scale.”

Mr Atul Saxena, MD & CEO, Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (StockHolding), added, “StockHolding Digidoc represents the next evolution of compliant digital stamping infrastructure, along with providing an end-to-end document execution in India. The collaboration between StockHolding and Melento combines trusted digital stamping capabilities with modern enterprise workflow automation, helping organizations simplify execution, improve compliance readiness, and accelerate digital transformation initiatives.”

The introduction of StockHolding DigiDoc further strengthens Melento’s vision of building an AI-powered enterprise workflow infrastructure that combines contract intelligence, governance automation, compliance, and digital execution within a unified platform.

The solution is expected to benefit enterprises across BFSI, insurance, fintech, procurement, legal, and other regulated sectors where document execution, compliance, and operational speed are critical.

As organizations increasingly move toward AI-led and digital-first operating models, StockHolding DigiDoc on Melento provides a scalable foundation for modernizing one of the most compliance-sensitive enterprise processes in India.

About Melento
Melento (formerly SignDesk) is the world's first AI-powered collaborative intelligence platform that helps enterprises streamline contracting workflows, improve governance, reduce operational complexity, and unlock strategic insights through automation and AI. They serve 3000+ brands globally, processing over 75mn+ transactions annually.

For more information, please log on to https://melento.ai/

About StockHolding Corporation of India Limited
Stock Holding Corporation of India Limited (StockHolding) is a leading financial services institution providing trusted technology-led infrastructure and digital services across domains, including e-stamping and digital documentation solutions in India.

For more information, please log on to https://www.stockholding.com/

The APMEA Direct Booking Friction Report 2026

The report maps, for the first time, exactly where and why hotels across APMEA are losing direct bookings before a guest ever reaches checkout, uncovering friction across visibility, pricing, booking experience, and guest trust. The findings also reveal sharp regional differences in digital maturity, pricing discipline, and booking experience readiness across APMEA markets.

What the Audit Found

• Before the journey begins: Visibility: 42% of hotels don't appear on Page 1 for unbranded search queries. Nearly half the market is invisible to high-intent travelers before consideration even starts.

• At the comparison stage: Reputation and rates: 63% of properties list higher rates on their own website than on OTAs, actively losing guests to third-party platforms on price.

• At the booking stage: Speed and experience: 72% of hotel websites fail the 3-second load benchmark. Average mobile load times reach 4.1 seconds. When a guest does persist, they face an average of 4 clicks to confirm a reservation against a global benchmark of 3. Every additional second and every additional click is a door left open for abandonment.

• At the commitment stage: Trust and transparency: 44% of hotels withhold taxes and fees until the final payment screen, the single largest checkout abandonment trigger in the study. And 1 in 3 properties expose guests to a URL or domain disconnect between their website and booking engine, introducing security anxiety at the precise moment trust is most fragile. 

“The findings of this report highlight a growing gap between where guests are actually being lost. The direct booking journey has become too fragmented across search, pricing, booking engine, and guest experience, while travelers increasingly expect a seamless experience across every touchpoint. What makes this moment urgent is that AI search is changing the rules of visibility faster than most hotels realize. Brands moving to unified platforms to fix these systematic gaps are already seeing up to 5X growth in direct revenue within 90 days, while hotels operating disconnected systems risk becoming invisible before the booking journey even begins,” said Ashish Sikka, Business Head - UNO Platforms, RateGain. 

The report also found significant regional variation across APMEA markets. Singapore and Thailand set the regional benchmark with average load times of 2.9 seconds and the strongest direct price parity discipline. The Maldives recorded the highest friction scores across speed, OTA bundle dominance, and pricing opacity.

The Direct Booking Friction Report 2026 is available for free download at www.uno.rategain.com/direct-booking-friction-report-apmea-2026. Benchmark your property against other hotels and identify which friction points are costing you the most.

Report Methodology
The Direct Booking Friction Report 2026 evaluated booking journeys across 65 hotel properties in India, the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Maldives, analyzing visibility, pricing parity, website performance, booking flow efficiency, and checkout transparency benchmarks across the direct booking journey.

About RateGain
RateGain Travel Technologies Limited is a global provider of AI-powered SaaS solutions for travel and hospitality, working with 13,000+ customers and 700+ partners across 160+ countries. RateGain helps travel and hospitality businesses accelerate revenue generation through acquisition, retention, and wallet share expansion.

Today, RateGain is one of the world’s largest processors of electronic transactions, price points, and travel intent data, enabling revenue management, distribution, and marketing teams across hotels, airlines, destination marketing organizations, online travel agents, metasearch companies, package providers, car rentals, travel management companies, cruises, and ferries to drive better business outcomes.

Founded in 2004 and headquartered in India, RateGain works with 33 of the Top 40 Hotel Chains, 4 of the Top 5 Airlines, 7 of the Top 10 Car Rental companies, and all leading DMOs, OTAs, and metasearch platforms, including 25 Global Fortune 500 companies, unlocking new revenue every day.

Expansion strengthens ATOSS’ global AI capabilities and supports future product innovation

ATOSS is opening its new hub at International Tech Park Bengaluru (ITPB), dedicated to building the next generation of agentic AI for intelligent workforce management solutions. The Bengaluru hub brings together a highly skilled team of experts focused on multi-agent systems, conversational AI, reinforcement learning, large-scale optimization, and forecasting, all directed toward AI agents that can plan, simulate, and orchestrate work in real time for customers. They will work in close collaboration with the R&D units in Munich, Germany, as well as Sibiu and Timișoara in Romania.

Bengaluru is a prime hotspot for AI and software development – an ideal environment to attract the brightest minds for ATOSS’ vision and to reinforce the company’s ambition to be a technological frontrunner.

“With our new location in Bengaluru, we are investing specifically in the future of our technology stack and expanding our position in AI-powered workforce management software,” says Pritim Kumar Krishnamoorthy, COO of ATOSS. “This new hub will bring top talent into our network, working hand-in-hand with our teams worldwide to deliver on a global scale. By combining unique perspectives and expertise, we’ll innovate faster and design smarter – together,” he continues.

The opening of the technology hub in Bengaluru represents another important milestone in the company’s international expansion and AI-first innovation strategy and underlines ATOSS’ commitment to actively shaping the future of work through intelligent technologies, consistent investment in innovation and deep expertise.

Press information and images are available for download here: www.atoss.com/en/news-press.

About ATOSS
ATOSS Software SE is a provider of technology and consulting solutions for professional workforce management and demand-optimized workforce deployment. Whether time and attendance management, self-services, mobile apps, workforce forecasting, sophisticated workforce scheduling or strategic capacity and requirement planning. ATOSS has just the right solution – both in the cloud, on-premises and for SAP users. The modular product families feature the highest level of functionality, technology and platform independence. With around 21,100 customers, ATOSS workforce management solutions make a measurable contribution to increased value creation and competitiveness. At the same time, they ensure greater planning fairness and satisfaction at the workplace. Customers include companies such as Barry Callebaut, C&A, Charite, City of Munich, Decathlon, Deutsche Bahn, Lufthansa, OBI, Primark and W.L. Gore & Associates.

Further information: www.atoss.com.

ATOSS Software SE
Nadine Steible
Rosenheimer Street 141 h
81671 Munich, Germany
public.relations@atoss.com

ATOSS Software India Private Limited
Discoverer Building – 5^th Floor, Unit-7
International Tech Park
Pattandur Agrahara Whitefield
Bangalore 560 066, India

The move signals Gameday's view that India's sports economy has reached an inflection point: audiences are large and growing, commercial interest is rising, but the data and technology infrastructure that converts fan attention into durable commercial value has not kept pace.
 

Nicole Junkermann: India’s sports future will be built on data, technology and audience infrastructure
 

"India generates some of the most intense sports consumption data in the world. The problem is that most of it disappears. Every match watched, every highlight shared, every fantasy team assembled produces a signal. But across India's sports ecosystem, those signals are fragmented, undercaptured and largely invisible to the leagues and investors who could use them most."
 

Gameday's platform approach, developed through its partnership with Lega Volley Femminile in Italy, centres on building what Nicole Junkermann describes as the infrastructure layer beneath sport: content automation, audience analytics, fan identity platforms, direct engagement tools and modern sponsorship measurement systems.
 

At LVF, Europe's leading women's volleyball league, the platform has supported a significant expansion in digital reach, content output and commercial partnerships since Gameday became the league's largest shareholder. The approach is now being applied to new markets, with India identified as the most significant near-term opportunity.
 

The data infrastructure gap

Junkermann argues that the gap between India's sporting ambition and its data infrastructure represents one of the most addressable structural problems in the country's sports economy.
 

The Indian Premier League consistently ranks among the most-watched sporting events globally. Football, kabaddi, volleyball and women's sport are adding new audiences at pace. Internet users are expected to exceed 900m within the next few years, with mobile-first consumption as the default across the country.
 

But the commercial infrastructure to capture, structure and monetise that audience behaviour is underdeveloped relative to the size of the opportunity.
 

"Compare what India's leagues have built to what the NFL, NBA and Premier League have developed over time. Their competitive advantages today aren't primarily about the sport. They're about the sophistication of the systems beneath it: personalisation engines, loyalty platforms, second-screen experiences, sponsorship measurement tools built on years of granular audience data. India can build those systems. It doesn't have legacy infrastructure to protect, which means it can build the right ones from scratch."
 

Leagues as data platforms

Gameday's approach treats leagues as data platforms rather than sports administrators. The commercial implications are significant: leagues that understand their audiences directly, rather than through intermediaries, can price sponsorship more accurately, distribute content more efficiently and build year-round fan relationships rather than seasonal spikes.
 

For India's growing portfolio of professional leagues, that shift in approach could materially change the long-term economics of the sector.
 

Gameday will share further details on its India market plans, including specific league and technology partnerships, in the coming months.

About Gameday by NJF Holdings

Gameday by NJF Holdings is a sports investment and strategic platform founded by Nicole Junkermann. Focused on building long-term value across leagues, media and sports technology, its approach centres on structural growth, digital transformation and scalable fan ecosystems.
 

Gameday is the largest shareholder in Italy's professional women's volleyball league, Lega Volley Femminile (LVF), where it is supporting league-level commercial and digital development.
 

For more information, visit gameday.team.

Inkers Technology, a construction intelligence company today announced the launch of Kael, an AI-native platform designed to transform how construction and real estate projects are planned, monitored, and delivered. Kael introduces a predictive intelligence layer that enables teams to anticipate risks, model financial impact, and act before issues escalate into delays or cost overruns. 

Inkers Technology Launches Kael, India’s First AI-Native Construction Intelligence Platform

Speaking about the launch, Argenio Antao, Chief Business Officer, Inkers Technology. said, “At a time when the global construction industry faces a productivity gap estimated at over $40 trillion, Kael is addressing one of the sector’s most fundamental challenges: the lack of actionable intelligence even as the industry generates ample data. Construction projects today generate massive volumes of fragmented information across schedules, drawings, site reports, and communication channels, often making decision-making reactive and inefficient.”

He further added, “Kael’s AI-powered project management platform unifies this data into a single intelligence layer, enabling real-time, decision-ready insights that drive operational excellence across projects. By combining product innovation with deep consulting expertise, Kael is paving the way for a more strategic advisory role in the industry, where technology and consulting come together to help businesses move from managing projects to transforming outcomes.”

Unlike traditional project management tools or consultancy-led models, Kael is built as an AI-led orchestration engine. It continuously scans millions of data points across project workflows, detects emerging risks, and routes actionable insights to the right stakeholders. This allows project managers to move from manual reporting cycles to intelligence-led decision-making.

The platform is complemented by Observance, Inkers’ operational intelligence solution that leverages computer vision, LiDAR, and real-time analytics to create a live digital twin of construction sites. Together, Kael and Observance bridge the gap between site-level activity and boardroom strategy, delivering end-to-end visibility, predictive foresight, and execution control.

“Construction is data-rich, the opportunity lies in turning that information into actionable intelligence,” said Rohan, CTO, Inkers Technology. “With Kael we’ve built an AI-native system that doesn’t just analyse information, but understands context, predicts outcomes, and orchestrates action. The shift we’re enabling is fundamental: from dashboards that report the past to intelligence that actively shapes the future of a project. That’s the difference between seeing risk and staying ahead of it.”

Early deployments have demonstrated measurable impact across project teams. By automating reporting and surfacing critical insights, Kael enables project managers to reclaim up to 3–4 hours daily. More importantly, early risk detection helps avoid cascading delays and cost escalations, while providing leadership with unfiltered, real-time visibility into project health.

As India continues to see rapid infrastructure and real estate expansion, with significant capital deployed across sectors, Kael aims to bring predictability and control to project delivery at scale. Globally, the company sees this as a defining moment where AI moves from experimentation to real-world orchestration in construction.

About Inkers Technology
Inkers Technology is a construction intelligence company focused on transforming project delivery through AI-led platforms. By combining deep industry expertise with advanced artificial intelligence, Inkers is building systems that turn fragmented project data into predictive, decision-ready intelligence enabling faster, smarter, and more reliable construction outcomes.

What Red Hat announced

With today’s general availability of Red Hat Desktop, Red Hat is providing commercial support for the Red Hat build of Podman Desktop, creating a more reliable foundation for local container and AI development. Red Hat Desktop also includes capabilities for isolated AI agent sandboxing, an initiative designed to help developers execute and test autonomous agents in a protected sandbox on their local hardware, preventing unverified agent actions from affecting the host OS. Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite also adds new capabilities, including a trusted software factory, Red Hat Trusted Libraries and AI-driven exploit intelligence to modernize security across the software supply chain. These new features use AI to determine if known vulnerabilities in generated code are relevant to a specific application runtime, allowing developers to prioritize remediation based on actual risk.
 

Why this matters

As the volume of AI-generated code increases, developers need a workflow that balances local experimentation with enterprise-grade deployment. Whether developers start locally with Red Hat Desktop or in a cloud-based development environment via Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, they receive the same consistency and governance required for enterprise production. By unifying these environments and transitioning to production scale with Red Hat OpenShift, Red Hat enables teams to treat AI agents as tier-one applications. This approach provides a security-driven path to production, enabling developers to move from experimental local sandboxes to verified, scalable innovation across the hybrid cloud.
 

What Red Hat experts are saying

"The transition to agentic AI expands the requirements for modern application development," said James Labocki, Senior Director, Product Management, Red Hat. "By establishing a trusted production path across the hybrid cloud with Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite and providing consistent environments through Red Hat Desktop and Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, we’re helping developers accelerate and own their AI strategy with the same rigor they apply to their core IT applications."

Key takeaways

• Standardized AI lifecycle: Red Hat provides a more consistent experience from local machines to the cloud, helping organizations move AI from experimental projects to repeatable production workflows.

• Maintain developer choice: Red Hat has expanded support in Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces, a Red Hat OpenShift feature, to include integration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) Kiro coding assistant (technical preview). This joins existing integration for Microsoft Copilot, Claude CLI and more, providing the flexibility to use preferred coding assistants and environments from local machines.

• Shift security left: Built on Red Hat Hardened Images and Red Hat Trusted Libraries (both available with SLSA Level 3 origin and integrity), these tools provide a software supply chain that is transparent and verifiable before code is even written.

• Sandbox-first testing: Developers can execute autonomous agents in an isolated environment, providing a safety layer to observe agent behaviors before cluster deployment.

Deeper details:

Red Hat Desktop and Podman integration
Red Hat Desktop delivers an enterprise-supported environment for local container and AI development centered on the hardened and supported Red Hat build of Podman Desktop. Developers can easily access the full library of Red Hat Hardened Images from their laptop, while connecting to local or remote OpenShift clusters for unit testing. This ensures that the container running on the developer's machine is architecturally consistent with the one running in production. Developers looking to test sandboxed AI agents can find more information at www.openkaiden.ai.
 

Flexible coding assistants

Red Hat OpenShift Dev Spaces now provides an extensible framework that allows developers to integrate preferred AI-driven tools directly into their cloud-based IDE. This includes new support for the AWS Kiro coding assistant (technical preview), alongside existing integrations for Microsoft Copilot, Claude CLI, Cline, Continue, Roo and more. By supporting both proprietary and open-source assistants, Red Hat enables teams to use frontier models or host private models, helping to align developer productivity tools with corporate security and sovereignty requirements.
 

Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite enhancements
The latest version of Red Hat Advanced Developer Suite introduces the developer preview of a trusted software factory based on accepted CNCF best practices and Red Hat’s internal build processes. This provides a standards-based CI/CD implementation that customers can use as-is or tweak and replicate to meet specific needs. Additional features include:

• Red Hat Trusted Libraries: Curated Python packages built on SLSA Level 3 infrastructure with added  software bill of materials (SBOMs) and cryptographic signatures to help provide a more transparent and verifiable software supply chain.

• Exploit intelligence: Developed using the NVIDIA AI blueprint for vulnerability analysis, this capability uses AI-driven code reasoning to determine if a vulnerable function is actually reachable in an application's runtime environment. By isolating exploitable code paths from broader vulnerability data, Red Hat helps developers prioritize fixes that actually impact security.
   

Red Hat Summit

Join the Red Hat Summit keynotes live on YouTube to hear the latest from Red Hat executives, customers and partners:

• The next platform is choice — Tuesday, May 12, 8:30-10 a.m. EDT

• The AI-ready enterprise is here — Wednesday, May 13, 9-10 a.m. EDT
   

Learn more:

• OpenShift: Consistent integration for the hybrid enterprise

• Red Hat Hardened Images Accelerates Cloud-Native Development and Zero-CVE Strategies

• Red Hat Desktop brings Kubernetes-aligned development to the desktop

• From experimentation to production: Building trust in the agentic AI era

• Learn more about Red Hat Summit

• See all of Red Hat’s announcements this week in the Red Hat Summit newsroom

• Follow @RedHatSummit or #RHSummit on X for event-specific updates

Connect with Red Hat

• Learn more about Red Hat

• Get more news in the Red Hat newsroom

• Read the Red Hat blog

• Follow Red Hat on X

• Follow Red Hat on Instagram

• Watch Red Hat videos on YouTube

• Follow Red Hat on LinkedIn

About Red Hat

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance.  These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

Red Hat, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, the Red Hat logo and OpenShift are trademarks or registered trademarks of Red Hat, LLC or its subsidiaries in the U.S. and other countries. Linux® is the registered trademark of Linus Torvalds in the U.S. and other countries.

Leo Digital wins digital mandate for Olectra Greentech Limited

This partnership marks a strategic milestone in Leo Digital’s continued expansion across the electrification and sustainability ecosystem — spanning energy infrastructure, distribution, and now, electric mobility.

Olectra, led by Managing Director, Mahesh Babu has been at the forefront of India’s transition to sustainable public transportation, with a strong focus on electric buses and large-scale mobility solutions. Through this collaboration, Leo Digital will lead the brand’s digital strategy, communication, and platform presence — with a clear focus on strengthening leadership positioning, enhancing stakeholder engagement, and building a future-ready digital ecosystem.

Both organizations share a common vision of accelerating India’s clean mobility narrative through the convergence of technology, storytelling, and digital innovation.

Commenting on the partnership, Suhas Shankarappa, Group Head, NxG World said, “At Leo Digital, we’ve always believed in partnering with brands that are driven by purpose and long-term impact. Our vision is to enable the next generation of growth - sustainably - by bringing together technology, data, and meaningful storytelling. Olectra represents exactly that intersection, leading India’s transition towards clean mobility at scale.”

Leo Digital would work closely with Anand Kumar, Head of Brand, Marketing, Digital & Communications in strengthening the brand presence across Markets. The partnership will focus on building an integrated and future-ready communication ecosystem spanning brand strategy, community management, and market-facing campaigns - further reinforcing Olectra’s positioning as a leader in India’s rapidly evolving electric mobility sector.

With a shared commitment to innovation and sustainability, the partnership is set to drive meaningful impact — shaping the future of mobility while reinforcing Olectra’s position as a category leader.

About Leo Digital

Leo Digital is part of NxG World - a global consulting and innovation-led firm focused on enabling next-generation, sustainable growth for enterprises across industries.

With deep expertise across digital strategy, performance marketing, and platform development, Leo Digital partners with large enterprises in building scalable, future-ready digital ecosystems that drive measurable business impact.

Nicole Junkermann - AI needs a moral framework

Drawing on her work with technology companies and policymakers across Europe and Asia, investor and NJF Holdings founder Nicole Junkermann argues that the next phase of AI development will depend less on oversight frameworks and more on the values embedded into the technology itself.

“Regulation can limit harm after the fact,” she says. “But it doesn’t determine what gets built, or why. That’s a question of incentives, design choices and ultimately moral judgement.”

India is emerging as one of the most important testing grounds for this shift.

With its combination of engineering talent, digital infrastructure, entrepreneurial energy and public sector ambition, the country is not simply adopting AI. It is actively shaping how it is developed and deployed. Initiatives such as the IndiaAI Mission are accelerating investment into sovereign AI capabilities, from compute infrastructure to research and startups, with an explicit focus on responsible and inclusive deployment.

At the same time, a new generation of Indian AI companies is beginning to take shape. Firms such as Sarvam AI and Krutrim are focused on building models and systems tailored to India’s linguistic, cultural and economic context, rather than replicating Western approaches. Their focus is less on frontier scale alone, and more on real-world applicability.

That combination creates a unique opportunity.

While much of the global AI ecosystem is concentrated in the United States and China, India is not locked into either model. It has the space to define its own approach, one that integrates innovation with societal priorities from the outset.

“India doesn’t have to retrofit ethics into AI later,” Nicole Junkermann says. “It can build them in from the start. That’s a structural advantage.”

This matters because the limitations of current governance models are becoming clearer. Regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s AI Act focus heavily on classification, compliance and enforcement. These are necessary tools, but they are reactive by nature.

They struggle to address deeper questions: what kinds of systems should be built, what outcomes should they optimise for, and how should trade-offs between efficiency, fairness and human agency be resolved.

In practice, many of these decisions are already being made at the design stage by engineers, product teams and private companies.

That is where India’s opportunity lies.

By embedding ethical frameworks into education, research and product development, India can influence AI not just at the level of policy, but at the level of architecture. This includes aligning incentives for developers, setting expectations for corporate behaviour, and integrating ethical reasoning into technical training.

The implications extend beyond India itself.

As AI systems become globally distributed, the norms and principles embedded within them will travel across borders. Countries that shape those norms early will have disproportionate influence over how the technology evolves.

“AI is becoming a foundational layer of the global economy,” Nicole Junkermann adds. “The question is not just who builds it, but what values it reflects.”

The global race in AI is often framed around capability and scale. But a different contest is now emerging, one defined by trust, usability and alignment with society. The United States may lead in frontier models, and China in rapid deployment. India’s opportunity is to lead in how AI is applied, integrated and governed in the real world.

For policymakers, investors and technology leaders, the message is clear. The next phase of AI competition won’t be defined solely by compute, capital or capability. It will also be defined by trust.

And trust, in the age of intelligent systems, is ultimately a moral construct.

About Nicole Junkermann

Nicole Junkermann, born in 1980, is an international investor and entrepreneur focused on technology, artificial intelligence and life sciences. She is the founder of NJF Holdings, leading its venture arm NJF Capital and Gameday by NJF Holdings.

Through NJF Capital, she has built a portfolio of more than 40 companies, with a focus on early-stage investments in artificial intelligence, deep tech and life sciences. Notable investments include SpaceX, Rippling and Revolut, as well as Groq, where Nicole was an early and major investor prior to its recent acquisition by Nvidia.

For more information about Nicole Junkermann, The Human Code and NJF Holdings, visit NJFHoldings.com

The Human Code: NJF Holdings’ Investment Philosophy

As India accelerates across AI, digital public infrastructure, healthcare innovation, entrepreneurship and advanced manufacturing, The Human Code offers a framework for ensuring that progress remains human at its core.

The Human Code sits beneath Nicole Junkermann’s work across NJF Holdings, including NJF Capital and Gameday by NJF Holdings. It is built on a central belief: the most valuable progress is progress that strengthens people, trust and long-term prosperity.

“India is one of the most exciting countries in the world right now,” said Nicole Junkermann. “The scale of ambition, entrepreneurial energy and digital transformation is extraordinary. But the strongest growth is always growth guided by purpose, trust and long-term thinking.”

AI Regulation Is Not Enough. We Need AI Morals

Nicole Junkermann has previously argued that while regulation is necessary, it is not sufficient for the AI age.

Governments around the world are developing new rules for artificial intelligence. India is building its own approach while balancing innovation, inclusion and economic growth. Across markets, industry leaders speak of guardrails, alignment and safety.

But The Human Code argues that rules alone cannot answer the deeper question of what kind of future societies want to build.

Regulation can reduce harm and create accountability. It can define standards and responsibilities. But it rarely answers why technology should exist, what values it should protect or how human dignity should be preserved.

For Nicole Junkermann, the next phase of AI leadership will require not only technical excellence, but moral imagination.

“We don’t just need smarter systems. We need wiser choices about how those systems are built, funded and used,” she said.

Why This Matters for India

India has become a global leader in technology adoption, startup creation and digital systems built at scale. From payments innovation and digital identity to health technology and AI capability, the country is demonstrating how digital infrastructure can reach hundreds of millions of people.

That creates significant opportunity for founders, investors, institutions and global partners.

But growth at scale also raises important questions:

• How is trust built across large populations?

• How should AI be deployed responsibly?

• How can innovation remain inclusive?

• How do organisations balance speed with resilience?

• What creates durable value rather than short-term hype?

• How can technology strengthen dignity rather than reduce people to data points?

The Human Code is designed to help answer those questions.

A Framework for Responsible AI and Long-Term Value

Rather than focusing only on short-term returns or market noise, The Human Code prioritises enduring value creation through trust, discipline, resilience, responsibility and patience.

It asks a different set of questions from traditional growth models:

• Does this strengthen trust or weaken it?

• Does technology extend human agency or reduce it?

• Is growth durable or cosmetic?

• Does leadership combine ambition with character?

• What happens when success arrives at scale?

• Does this make humanity stronger?

For Nicole Junkermann, those principles are increasingly relevant in fast-growing markets where AI and automation can reshape daily life quickly.

Artificial intelligence can improve productivity, widen access to expertise, accelerate research and support better services across healthcare, finance, education, logistics and manufacturing.

But if organisations pursue scale without stewardship, efficiency without ethics or growth without trust, they risk building faster without building better.

Trust, she argues, may become one of the scarcest and most valuable assets of the AI century.

Capital Has a Critical Role

The Human Code also highlights the responsibility of capital.

What gets funded gets built. Investment decisions influence which technologies scale, which behaviours are incentivised and which institutions gain power.

For Nicole Junkermann, ethical due diligence should increasingly sit alongside financial due diligence. Before asking how large a company may become, investors should also ask what dependencies it creates, what behaviour it rewards and who may be left behind.

That is not idealism, but pragmatic foresight in a world where trust can be difficult to rebuild once lost.

Long-Term Opportunity in India

India’s growth story, with its combination of talent, scale, rising ambition and digital capability, creates fertile ground for long-term investment thinking.

Some of the strongest opportunities emerge in sectors where patience is required before consensus forms. Areas such as life sciences, frontier technology, women’s sport, climate solutions and foundational infrastructure can demand conviction before markets fully recognise their value.

While short-term markets often chase attention, long-term builders create compounding advantage.

About Nicole Junkermann

Nicole Junkermann is an international investor and entrepreneur focused on technology, artificial intelligence and life sciences. She is the founder of NJF Holdings, leading its venture arm NJF Capital and Gameday by NJF Holdings.

Through NJF Capital, she has built a portfolio of more than 40 companies, with a focus on early-stage investments in artificial intelligence, deep tech and life sciences. Notable investments include SpaceX, Rippling and Revolut, as well as Groq, where Nicole was an early and major investor prior to its recent acquisition by Nvidia.

For more information about Nicole Junkermann, The Human Code and NJF Holdings, visit NJFHoldings.com.

Shajai Jacob

ANACITY was recognised as the highest-rated tech platform globally amongst the final cohort at the accelerator program. As a leading provider of real estate enterprise technology in India and the Middle East, ANACITY was selected on the strength of its developer client portfolio, which includes leading residential players such as DLF, Signature Global, Emaar India, Mahindra Lifespaces, Puravankara, Gera, Birla Estates and more, as well as major commercial asset owners like Blackstone–KRT REIT, Brigade, Embassy, Solitaire, etc. 

This extensive portfolio presents a significant market opportunity for Panasonic, offering direct access to large, established developments where engagement can be streamlined through the developer, enabling faster and more efficient deployment without the need to navigate multiple stakeholders. The selection process followed a rigorous evaluation that included vetting the various innovations with several developers across India. 

Commenting on the collaboration, Shajai Jacob, MD & CEO, ANACITY, said, “The collaboration with Panasonic is a strong endorsement of ANACITY’s vision to redefine community living through technology as well as our distribution reach and access with large Grade A developers across India and Middle East. Being chosen from a global pool of innovators reflects the strength of our tech platform, our focus on user experience, and our commitment to building secure and innovative ecosystems. We are reimagining how communities interact with technology – making it more seamless, intuitive, and impactful.”

Otaki Kiyoshi

Otaki Kiyoshi, President, Electric Works Company, Panasonic Corporation, said “As this program enters its fifth year, we are very pleased that it is gaining recognition both inside and outside the company. We aim to build a co-creation consortium and further integrate three functions: creating new value and solutions, testing hypotheses from a customer perspective, and building a co-creation platform. By combining the proactive challenges of our employees with the power of startups, we will connect these initiatives to social implementation and support the creation of new businesses as a company, so that we can contribute to society.”

This first-of-its-kind collaboration will integrate Panasonic's home IoT hardware suite – including video door phones, CCTV systems, lobby station monitors, and smart locks – directly into ANACITY's mobile-first ecosystem, enabling real-time visitor visibility, camera view at the gate and main doors, remote access management, and seamless control across all entry points from user mobiles. 

The co-creation model will enable more secure, responsive, and integrated living for over 100 enterprise real estate developers, 750,000 households, as well as enhance workplace experiences across 150 million sq.ft. of office space for ANACITY’s enterprise clients in India and globally. Unlike conventional accelerator programs, this initiative is designed as a market-moving co-creation engagement, bringing together Panasonic’s hardware capabilities, ANACITY’s real estate distribution reach of developers and its digital platform to build scalable, real-world solutions. As part of the broader roadmap, the partnership is expected to expand into Panasonic’s wellness and sustainability offerings, including HVAC systems, environmental sensors, indoor air quality (IAQ) monitoring and energy management solutions such as solar and EV infrastructure.

This collaboration reflects strong strategic alignment between the two organisations. ANACITY’s enterprise distribution reach across large developers and innovative tech platform serves as a digital backbone for communities, connecting workplace tenants, residents, developers, asset managers, and operations through a unified interface, while Panasonic’s ecosystem represents the physical infrastructure layer.

With strong and growing presence across India and the Middle East, ANACITY is purpose-built for modern residential living – and the partnership with Panasonic represents a natural expansion of IoT-enabled community operations within that ecosystem.

About ANACITY
A mobile-first SaaS platform, ANACITY leads the digital transformation of residential and commercial real estate in Middle East and globally. An integral part of ANAROCK Group, India’s leading full-stack services firm, ANACITY is unmatched provider of highly awarded enterprise technology, it creates, powers and engages communities across the post-sales, post-possession and workplace experience lifecycle. ANACITY collaborates with leading real estate developers, asset owners, and facility managers, bringing to life innovative digital interventions which deliver a delightful experience to their residents, users and employees. Please visit: www.anacity.com/about-us.

About Panasonic Corporation Electric Works Company
The Electric Works Company of Panasonic Corporation provides people cantered electrical equipment and digital solutions for all kinds of life spaces, including homes, offices, commercial and public facilities. By integrating electrical equipment with advanced digital technologies, the company delivers safe, comfortable, and sustainable environments, contributing to a better today and a better tomorrow. By integrating electrical equipment with advanced digital technologies, the company delivers safe, comfortable, and sustainable environments, contributing to a better today and a better tomorrow. Please visit: www.panasonic.net/ew.

Business Core Solutions acquires Techie2Pillar for AI scaling

This move is part of BCS’s plan to strengthen how it delivers AI solutions for enterprises and expand its Agentic Service as a Software (ASaaS) offerings, enabling organizations to move from fragmented automation efforts to more structured, scalable execution models.

The acquisition comes after six months of collaboration between the two companies. During this period, Business Core Solutions and Techie2Pillar worked on real business use cases using conversational and AI-driven agents. These engagements demonstrated how AI can move beyond experiments and be used effectively in everyday business operations, particularly in areas where real-time interaction, decision-making, and workflow execution are critical.

With this acquisition, Techie2Pillar will be integrated into BCS’ Agentic Service as a Software (ASaaS) portfolio and will form the foundation of Proxyn.ai, a newly established sister company of BCS. This integration brings together Techie2Pillar’s expertise in voice and conversational AI with BCS’ library of 400+ ready-to-deploy agent blueprints, refined across 60+ enterprise environments strengthening BCS’ ability to design and deploy outcome-driven structured and scalable enterprise AI execution.

Speaking on the acquisition, Prakash Palani, CTO of BCS, said “Many organizations have strong ideas for AI, but the real challenge lies in executing them consistently at scale. This acquisition strengthens our ability to deliver reliable production-ready AI Solutions. Through Proxyn.ai, we are enabling faster agentic use cases deployment with reduced risk, while our Agentic System Integrator model, supported by platforms like Symphony, Anugal, and deKorvai, ensures governance and scalability across the enterprise.”

Bharanish, CTO of Techie2Pillar, said, “Our collaboration with BCS has already shown how conversational AI can deliver real business impact. By becoming part of BCS’s ASaaS portfolio, we can now better design and deploy AI systems that integrate smoothly with enterprise tools.”

Together, the combined capabilities are intended to help enterprises move from fragmented automation initiatives to structured, agent-driven operations, addressing one of the key challenges in AI adoption, scaling from pilot programs to production systems.

 About Business Core Solutions

Business Core Solutions (BCS) is a global enterprise transformation company, recognized as the world’s first Agentic System Integrator. Founded in 2014, the company operates across the United States, Europe, the Middle East, Australia, and India, providing services across enterprise ecosystems including SAP, Salesforce, OpenText, AI/ML, Agentic Orchestration, Cloud, and Data Analytics.

These capabilities are complemented by its platforms, Symphony for orchestration, Anugal for identity governance, and deKorvai for data intelligence, which enable control, coordination, and visibility across enterprise systems. BCS supports organizations in improving execution efficiency, reducing operational complexity, and delivering consistent outcomes across processes.

 For more information, visit www.businesscoresolutions.com

ASBL, a tech-first real estate company, was a platinum sponsor at the Python Conference Hyderabad 2026. The event was held on March 14 and 15, 2026, at the Engineering Staff College of India, Hyderabad. It brought together developers, engineers, and technology professionals from across the country.

Abhijith Reddy, CTO of ASBL at Python Conference Hyderabad 2026

At the conference, Abhijith Reddy, CTO of ASBL, explained how technology in real estate is solving real challenges across construction, sales, and resident living. He highlighted that the industry still struggles with basic but critical problems in construction, such as maintaining budget discipline, managing material and labour payments, detecting delays early, and ensuring consistent quality.

ASBL is addressing these challenges using advanced prop tech solutions. The company has developed a digital twin system along with mobile apps and planning tools. In simple terms, every building is mapped digitally, and each task is clearly assigned. Teams know what work needs to be done, where it should happen, and in what order. Once a task is completed, proof is uploaded and verified before moving forward. This approach improves control, increases accountability, detects delays faster, and strengthens quality checks.

The same approach is applied to sales. Abhijith Reddy explained that the focus is on identifying the right customers, understanding buyer needs, automating outreach, and simplifying financing. By using structured data, automation, and AI in real estate, ASBL is making the sales process more efficient and responsive. This also creates a smoother experience for both customers and sales teams.

He also spoke about life after handover, where many real estate processes remain manual. In gated communities, there are multiple moving parts such as residents, staff, visitors, service requests, and amenities. Managing all of this can be complex without the right systems in place.

ASBL addresses this through Homes by ASBL, its dedicated resident management app. The app allows residents to manage daily activities in one place. From booking amenities to raising service requests and receiving updates, everything is handled digitally, making daily living simpler and more organized.

ASBL has also digitized the entire home-buying journey. Documentation workflows, approvals, and customer communication are handled through technology. This reduces the need for physical visits and makes the process easier, especially for NRIs purchasing homes from abroad.

By leveraging AI, they automate repetitive tasks, speed up development, and reduce errors, which allows them to focus on solving real-world real estate challenges. In a month alone, they used 3.8 billion tokens, a testament to how cursor usage drives innovation and efficiency across all the processes.

ASBL believes it is not a real estate company doing tech, but a tech company doing real estate. By supporting the Python community and showcasing the use of AI in real estate and prop tech, ASBL reinforced its vision of building better homes and better customer experiences through technology.

The findings are based on a global survey of 335 senior decision-makers (Director level and above) across North America, Europe, APAC, and India, with the majority (97%) reporting annual revenues exceeding $1 billion.

Key Findings Highlight Why Digital Adoption Is Critical to Digital Transformation Success

• $10.9M at risk: A mid-sized organization of 1,000 employees stands to lose an estimated $10.9 million annually due to ineffective digital adoption.

• 728 hours lost per employee: Workers spend hundreds of hours navigating poorly adopted or complex digital environments. 

• AI adoption gap: While 76% of leaders prioritize AI adoption, only 27% view digital adoption as a critical enabler.

• DAP maturity drives outcomes: Proficient organizations significantly outperform emergent peers on key metrics, including improved user experience (53% vs. 28%) and ROI maximization (56% vs. 28%).

As enterprises scale AI, digital adoption maturity becomes critical. Governance, workflow integration, and measurement determine impact. Modern DAPs are emerging as the orchestrator of AI execution, embedding governance, workflow intelligence and real-time contextual guidance directly into enterprise workflows to ensure measurable outcomes at scale.

Find the full insights from the Whatfix-commissioned Forrester Consulting study here. The study also includes a Forrester-defined framework for organizations to evaluate their digital adoption maturity.

“Enterprises are buying and building AI faster than ever, but adoption is not keeping pace,” said Khadim Batti, Co-founder and CEO of Whatfix. “The real challenge is operationalizing intelligence inside real workflows with governance and measurable outcomes. Digital adoption maturity is no longer optional, it has become the difference between AI ambition and AI outcomes.”

“We treat AI as driving intelligence into whatever we do. With frequent changes in content creators, consistency and speed of delivery are critical for us. This is where AI plays a powerful role,” said Satyen Shah, Vice President – IT & Digital Solutions, JSW Steel. “AI is helping us contextualize user queries across Salesforce modules and deliver highly relevant, in-the-flow support. AI without context is of no use, and Whatfix’s roadmap around contextual intelligence and automation is creating real impact for us.”

Whatfix Momentum in 2025
Financial and Market Momentum Reinforce Category Leadership
In 2025, Whatfix continued its strong growth trajectory, registering 31% year-over-year revenue growth alongside a consistent margin expansion. Built on a foundation of robust core SaaS economics and improving operating leverage, the company continues to drive its growth agenda. This momentum was further validated by the 2025 Deloitte Technology Fast 500™, where Whatfix is recognised as the top-ranked DAP for the fifth consecutive year and rising to #279 globally, a 24% jump in ranking, achieving a remarkable 275% growth rate. Whatfix’s evolution toward an agentic product suite and AI-first innovation was also reinforced by the inclusion of its multi-product offerings—Digital Adoption, Product Analytics, and Mirror—in the 2025 Gartner Market Guides for both DAP and Product Analytics.

As the only Digital Adoption Platform recognized as a "Customers’ Choice" vendor in the Gartner Voice of the Customer report for the third consecutive year, Whatfix continues to attract market leaders. New customers continue to drive growth, accounting for 44% of the new business, with a strong expansion and new wins across a portfolio of enterprise logos, including Shell, Mercedes-Benz Group AG, Experian, Compass Group USA, Ceva Logistics, IDEXX Laboratories, Grant Thornton, and Sentry Insurance. This growth was achieved while maintaining a 99.9% CSAT score and a Net Promoter Score (NPS) of 53, reflecting deep product adoption and sustained customer value. Furthermore, Whatfix expanded its partner ecosystem to over 150 global partners, scaling AI-driven digital transformation across diverse industries and geographies.

Whatfix Product Suite: Accelerating AI Powered Digital Transformation
Artificial Intelligence
Screensense advanced as the core AI engine behind Whatfix, strengthening its ability to understand screen structure, workflow context, and user intent in real time.

Agentic Product-Suite 
Whatfix launched a unified suite of AI Agents—Authoring, Guidance, Insights, and specialized domain agents. These were designed as a native intelligence layer embedded across the Whatfix suite, transforming how enterprises create content, guide users, and generate insights across their digital ecosystems.

Early enterprise adopters are already seeing measurable impact, including:

• 30–40% reduction in content creation effort with the Authoring Agent

• 3–4x faster analysis cycles enabled by the Insights Agent

• 4–5x increase in information discovery and search usage through the Guidance Agent

More than 30% of new enterprise buyers in the second half of 2025 adopted AI Agents as part of their Whatfix rollout, signaling a clear shift toward AI-first digital adoption strategies.

Seek for Salesforce was also introduced in 2025 as the world’s first AI Agent to independently navigate workflows and complete Salesforce Trailhead Admin Challenges. This milestone marked a shift from AI that guides users to AI that executes tasks within enterprise systems—reinforcing Whatfix’s vision of governed, autonomous execution at scale.

Launched a Faster Way to Create Flows with Quick Capture Mode in DAP
Authors could now record all steps in one go, and Whatfix automatically generates the flow based on application context and user intent. Using the Authoring Agent, they can refine step titles and descriptions with AI prompts to match user needs. This reduces the number of clicks required to build guidance by 3X and cuts content creation time by up to 50%, significantly accelerating in-app guidance creation at scale.

Mirror Expands into a New Market with AI Roleplay
Mirror emerged as a major growth engine in 2025, with ARR tripling year-over-year following the launch of AI Roleplay. Mirror is now the world’s first GenAI-powered simulation and roleplay training solution that combines system simulation and AI-driven roleplay in a unified environment.

AI Roleplay addresses a critical enterprise gap of moving beyond system training to real-world readiness. By enabling teams to practice conversations, edge cases, and decision-making scenarios, organizations are reducing time-to-proficiency and improving customer experience outcomes at scale.

Product Analytics Advances from Insights to Action
Product Analytics evolved into a true Insights-to-Action platform, directly connecting behavioral data with in-app execution through the Digital Adoption Platform.

Key advancements included:

• Ask Whatfix AI maturing into an AI Analyst capable of contextual reasoning and automated action

• Real-Time Cohorts enabling instant user segmentation

• Session Replay for qualitative behavioral analysis

• Autocapture eliminating manual tagging and accelerating time-to-insight

Together, these capabilities enable enterprises to identify friction as it occurs and immediately trigger contextual flows or guidance.

2026 and beyond: 
Whatfix continues to advance the future of digital transformation by embedding AI into execution at scale. Through Whatfix University, the company has certified 6,500+ professionals, strengthening a growing global DAP community.

In early 2026, Whatfix strengthened its leadership team with the appointment of Amit Sureka as Chief Financial Officer, alongside the return of Patrick Ashamalla as Head of Product Research & Design and the addition of Vasupradha S as Head of Analyst Relations & Market Intelligence, as it scales its AI-native platform globally.

The company continues to receive recognition for its growth, AI innovation, product leadership, and customer centricity including the 2025 AI Breakthrough Award for Product Analytics, InfoWorld’s Technology of the Year Award for Mirror, 2026 Artificial Intelligence Excellence Awards finalist, G2 best software awards and ranking as a #1 DAP leader on the G2 Grid, Gold Stevie for Customer Service Department of the Year.

As enterprises scale AI, Whatfix will continue expanding its autonomous execution capabilities, positioning its platform as the orchestration layer for AI-driven digital transformation at scale. To support this next phase of AI led growth, the company will pursue disciplined expansion through sustained organic innovation and selective strategic acquisitions, further strengthening its platform capabilities and global enterprise footprint.

About Whatfix
Whatfix is an AI platform advancing  the “userization” of enterprise applications—empowering companies to maximize the ROI of their digital investments. Powered by a proprietary AI engine ScreenSense, Whatfix continuously interprets application workflow context and user intent to boost user productivity, ensure process compliance, and elevate user experience across applications and AI tools. The product portfolio includes a Digital Adoption Platform (DAP), Mirror for hands-on system simulation and AI Roleplay training, and Product and AI agent Analytics for no-code actionable insights. With seven offices across the US, India, UK, Germany, Singapore, and Australia, Whatfix supports 700+ enterprises, including 80+ Fortune 500s like Shell, Schneider Electric, and UPS Supply Chain Solutions. Backed by investors such as Warburg Pincus, Softbank Vision Fund 2, Dragoneer, Peak XV Partners, Eight Roads, and Cisco Investments, software clicks with Whatfix.

For more information, visit the Whatfix website.

Red Hat, the world's leading provider of open source solutions, today announced an expanded collaboration with Google Cloud to help organizations accelerate application modernization and cloud migrations. This expansion introduces Red Hat OpenShift in the Google Cloud console, deeper integrations with Google Cloud services and marks the general availability of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud.

Today's announcement reinforces both companies' shared commitment to provide a comprehensive application platform where enterprises can confidently build, deploy, manage and scale containerized, virtualized and AI applications on Google Cloud. Customers can operate with the assurance that both Red Hat and Google are committed to the performance, security and continued success of applications running on Red Hat OpenShift on Google Cloud.

Enhanced flexibility for workloads on Google Cloud

Red Hat OpenShift is now available within the Google Cloud console. This makes it easier for customers to find the right solution for running their workloads on Google Cloud and guiding users through a more seamless onboarding experience. Key benefits include:

• Streamlined onboarding: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated users can natively validate Google Cloud prerequisites before transitioning to a guided cluster provisioning flow within the Red Hat Hybrid Cloud Console.

• Unified billing and procurement: Organizations can use flexible, pay-as-you-go pricing through Google Cloud Marketplace that counts their Red Hat OpenShift subscription costs against their Google Cloud committed spend.

• Native service integrations: Red Hat OpenShift users can unlock the power of Google-native integrations through jointly engineered and supported integrations with key services such as Google Cloud Secret Manager, Certificate Authority Service and Workload Identity Federation among others.

Modernizing infrastructure with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

Faced with rising costs and increased complexity, organizations need solutions that let them migrate workloads today and modernize at their own pace. Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization, a built-in capability of Red Hat OpenShift, bridges the gap between legacy infrastructure and modern innovation by unifying traditional virtual machines (VMs) with containers and serverless workloads on a consistent Kubernetes platform. Users benefit from one interface, one toolset and one set of operational practices across all workloads.

Available on Google Cloud C3 bare metal instances, Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization enables organizations with direct access to CPU and memory resources for performance-sensitive or licensing-constrained workloads, helping support modernization while maintaining predictable performance in the cloud to achieve:

• Accelerated modernization: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud brings modern application development processes and tools to VMs, allowing organizations to accelerate the modernization of VM-based applications at their own pace.

• Consistent management across hybrid environments: With a unified operational model, IT teams can consistently manage VMs and containers across on-premises, cloud, and edge environments, improving efficiency and gaining flexibility.

• Simplified migration: Organizations get flexibility to migrate from traditional virtualization with minimal downtime using tools like the migration toolkit for virtualization and Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform to ease the transition to a modern offering with flexibility to bring these workloads to a consistent hybrid approach with OpenShift and Google Cloud. 

• Enhanced scalability and reliability: Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud enables organizations to gain more predictable performance, elastic scaling, and stronger SLAs, backed by a comprehensive application platform and highly scalable infrastructure.

Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud is a fully managed application platform that allows customers to focus on building and scaling applications that drive their core business. Global Site Reliability Engineers and built-in automation reduce operational overhead and improve efficiencies.

To experience these new capabilities and accelerate the modernization journey, organizations can explore Red Hat OpenShift directly within the Google Cloud console. Additionally, organizations can begin their modernization journey at their own pace with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization on Red Hat OpenShift Dedicated on Google Cloud.

Supporting Quotes

Mike Barrett, vice president and general manager, Hybrid Cloud Platforms, Red Hat, “Red Hat’s hybrid cloud vision is built on consistency – the ability to run any workload, anywhere, with the same operational model. This extended collaboration with Google Cloud further empowers organizations with comprehensive cloud-native capabilities of Red Hat OpenShift, whether they need to accelerate application development or streamline migration to the cloud. Together, Red Hat and Google provide a clear, unified path for organizations to modernize their entire application portfolio, helping them manage both their traditional VMs and containerized applications on a single platform.”

Nirav Mehta, vice president, Product Management - Google Cloud Compute Platform, Google Cloud, “Our customers are constantly looking for ways to simplify their infrastructure and accelerate innovation without sacrificing performance. We are pleased to deepen our collaboration with Red Hat for OpenShift on Google Cloud. Customers now have a smoother path, enabling them to run both virtualized and containerized workloads consistently on Google Cloud's global, secure, and performant infrastructure.”

Additional Resources

• Learn more about Red Hat’s collaboration with Google Cloud

• Find Red Hat solutions on Google Cloud Marketplace

• Explore the benefits of Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

• Modernize virtual machines on Google Cloud with Red Hat OpenShift Virtualization

• Documentation for OpenShift Virtualization

Connect with Red Hat

• Learn more about Red Hat

• Get more news in the Red Hat newsroom

• Read the Red Hat blog

• Follow Red Hat on X

• Follow Red Hat on Instagram

• Watch Red Hat videos on YouTube

• Follow Red Hat on LinkedIn

About Red Hat, Inc.

Red Hat is the open hybrid cloud technology leader, delivering a trusted, consistent and comprehensive foundation for transformative IT innovation and AI applications. Its portfolio of cloud, developer, AI, Linux, automation and application platform technologies enables any application, anywhere—from the datacenter to the edge. As the world's leading provider of enterprise open source software solutions, Red Hat invests in open ecosystems and communities to solve tomorrow's IT challenges. Collaborating with partners and customers, Red Hat helps them build, connect, automate, secure and manage their IT environments, supported by consulting services and award-winning training and certification offerings.

Forward-Looking Statements

Except for the historical information and discussions contained herein, statements contained in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are based on the company’s current assumptions regarding future business and financial performance.  These statements involve a number of risks, uncertainties and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially. Any forward-looking statement in this press release speaks only as of the date on which it is made. Except as required by law, the company assumes no obligation to update or revise any forward-looking statements.

Alkami Technology marked a key milestone in its global expansion with the launch of its India GCC, in partnership with Summit (an ANSR company)

“Alkami was very intentional in selecting the National Capital Region for our technology hub in India,” said Alex Shootman, Chief Executive officer at Alkami. “Its location offers a remarkable concentration of bank and fintech engineering skill, technical depth, and operational talent befitting to accelerate innovation and development across the Alkami Digital Sales & Service Platform. By investing in this region, we are strengthening our ability to move faster, scale thoughtfully, and deliver the technology that financial institutions need to compete and grow.”

The India hub will support platform engineering, data intelligence and cloud architecture with security at every layer for Alkami’s Digital Sales & Service Platform (DSSP), which powers digital banking experiences for more than 300 financial institutions and 22 million users across its ecosystem. Alkami is one of the fastest growing financial technology partners in the United States as the DSSP becomes the first to market in this category.

“I’ve seen firsthand the impact a global technology organization can have on accelerating growth and executing on the product roadmap,” said Deep Varma, Chief Technology Officer at Alkami. “The depth of engineering talent and the strength of the technical ecosystem in this region of India will help us scale our platform, advance our AI-driven capabilities, and deliver secure, reliable banking experiences for our customers.”

Consumer expectations continue to rise. Research shows that 46% of digital banking users wish their primary financial provider anticipated their financial needs more effectively, while half say they would switch providers for a significantly better digital experience. Alkami’s Platform is designed to help financial institutions move toward Anticipatory Banking — a forward-thinking vision that uses behavioral data, artificial intelligence and digital infrastructure to anticipate account holders’ needs before they are communicated to deliver proactive, supercharged personalized financial experiences.

“The work of skilled engineers will seal the connection between product strategy and technical execution,” said Manoj Kumar, Vice President of data engineering and country lead, India at Alkami. “By growing our engineering footprint in a market with deep expertise, we are better positioned to accelerate development across the Alkami Digital Sales & Service Platform and deliver capabilities that are performant, scalable, and aligned to the needs of financial institutions.”

To scale its India operations, Alkami leveraged the capabilities of Summit Consulting, an ANSR partner company, to design, build, and operationalize its Global Capability Center.

About Alkami 

Alkami provides a digital sales and service platform for U.S. banks and credit unions. Our unified Platform integrates onboarding, digital banking, and data and marketing—each solution can stand alone, but together they deliver more—to help institutions onboard, engage, and grow relationships. As the future shifts toward Anticipatory Banking, we help data-informed bankers meet the moment with technology that drives action.

Lt. Gen. (Dr.) M. D. Venkatesh, VSM (Retd.) Vice Chancellor, MAHE, inaugurates the launch of the MAHE Agentic Intelligent Console (MAGIC) with the ceremonial lighting of the lamp at Manipal on 20 March

The initiative is being implemented by Manipal Academy of Higher Education in collaboration with leading global technology partners, including Microsoft, Salesforce, Deloitte, PwC, and Hitachi.

Senior leadership from MAHE, technology partners, faculty representatives, and administrative teams participated in the initiative rollout and strategic discussions around the adoption of AI-driven platforms in higher education.

MAGIC is designed to introduce intelligent AI agents across critical university functions. The system will initially deploy five AI agents within the Student Life Cycle Management (SLCM) platform, enabling automated support for routine academic processes such as timetable creation, attendance management, exam planning, and performance insights. Beyond academics, AI agents will also transform operational workflows across admissions, procurement, finance, HR, and support services, helping reduce processing time, improve efficiency, and enhance user experience.

The platform will also introduce research-support agents capable of scanning academic databases, summarising literature, and suggesting citations, enabling researchers to focus on innovation rather than administrative tasks.

"In addition, AI-driven systems will support prospective students by streamlining admissions and application processing, and offering selective candidate issuance within minutes." AI-powered support agents will also provide 24/7 assistance, reducing wait times and improving response efficiency.

MAHE plans to deploy more than 50 AI agents across academic and administrative functions over the next two years, creating an integrated AI ecosystem within the university.

Lt. Gen. (Dr.) M D Venkatesh, VSM (Retd.), Vice Chancellor, MAHE, said, “MAGIC represents a transformative step in our digital evolution. By integrating agentic AI across our academic and administrative ecosystems, we aim to create a proactive and intelligent university environment where technology supports both educators and learners in achieving excellence.”

Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, South Asia at Salesforce, said, “The integration of AI agents within higher education institutions like MAHE showcases the potential of intelligent digital platforms to transform learning, research, and institutional operations. We are proud to support MAHE in building an AI-driven ecosystem that empowers students, faculty, and administrators.”

Ashwin Ballal, Leader, Deloitte India, said, “MAHE’s MAGIC initiative represents a forward-looking step in the digital evolution of higher education institutions. By integrating agentic AI into core academic and administrative systems, MAHE is building a scalable, intelligent ecosystem that enhances efficiency, decision-making, and the user experience for students, faculty, and administrators. We are proud to support MAHE in this transformative journey.”

With the launch of MAGIC, MAHE is strengthening its position as a technology-driven global university, advancing towards a future where AI, automation, and emerging technologies such as quantum computing will play a central role in higher education.

The initiative reinforces MAHE’s commitment to innovation, operational excellence, and enhanced academic experiences, enabling students and faculty to collaborate with intelligent systems and shaping a new model for digitally empowered universities.

About Manipal Academy of Higher Education:

Manipal Academy of Higher Education (MAHE) is an Institution of Eminence Deemed-to-be University, offering over 400 specialisations across Health Sciences, Management, Law, Humanities & Social Sciences, and Technology & Science. MAHE operates through its constituent institutions across campuses in Manipal, Mangalore, Bengaluru, Jamshedpur, and Dubai.

Renowned for its academic excellence, world-class infrastructure, and impactful research contributions, MAHE has earned strong national and international recognition. In 2020, the Ministry of Education, Government of India, conferred MAHE with the prestigious Institution of Eminence status. Currently ranked 3rd in the National Institutional Ranking Framework (NIRF), MAHE continues to be a preferred destination for students seeking a transformative learning experience and vibrant campus life, as well as for national and multinational organisations seeking top talent.

The campaign features companies such as BigBasket, Third Wave Coffee and Redbus, focusing on the different business realities across sectors

B2B fintech advertising has long addressed businesses as uniform friction points to be solved for. The campaign shifts this lens. When category disruptors across E-commerce, Travel, F&B, SaaS build against fundamentally different challenges - the payments infrastructure supporting them becomes a critical layer in navigating those realities.

Conceptualised by Talented and produced by At All Odds, 'One of Your Kind' spotlights the real ecosystems of people, hunger, and grit that shape every business’s journey to be unique - establishing Cashfree Payments as a payments gateway built around the distinct realities of each category it enables.

Aditi Olemann, Vice President of Marketing and Communications, Cashfree Payments said, “Ten years. A million businesses. And the single most important thing we have learned is that businesses that shape markets are, without exception, one of a kind. Each arrived at the problem differently and built something entirely their own. When you have witnessed these journeys, you stop thinking about payments as a uniform layer, but as something that must adapt to unique business ambitions. The One of Your Kind campaign is our way of saying: we see you, not as a transaction category, but as a company that built something no else built, in a way no one else would have. And these businesses deserve payments that are built to be One of Your Kind.”

The film sidesteps corporate polish to showcase raw, lived-in growth journeys of Cashfree Payments' long-standing partners, including BigBasket, Third Wave Coffee, and Redbus. The narrative reframes success and growth as less of a spectacle, and more of a story of becoming - with Cashfree Payments’ robust infrastructure as the invisible backbone that powers it all.

Akshat Chaturvedi, Karthik Nambiar and Nikhil Unni, Brand Strategy & Creatives, Talented said, “In a category where capabilities converge, we recognised an opportunity to differentiate through perspective. Payment gateways compete on features, but businesses are rarely spoken to in ways that reflect how differently they operate. ‘One of Your Kind’ became a platform to shift the narrative - from feature-led storytelling to an archive of ambition rooted in the larger philosophy of how Cashfree builds around each business’s individuality.”

Sanjana Krishnan and Rohan Shetty, Directors add, “This was one of those rare film shoots where we didn't have sets to build - we had to inhabit real warehouses, offices, and store outlets. We moved like flies on the wall, letting the rhythm of the environment dictate the frame. The mixed-media documentary style became a careful choreography of photographs, paperwork, everyday objects, and candid human moments. Every detail had to feel intentional, even when the moment itself was unscripted.”

One of Your Kind signals how Cashfree Payments sees its role - not as a uniform layer across industries, but as infrastructure shaped around the specific pressures each category carries. Whether improving checkout conversion and managing COD risk in E-commerce, enabling seamless pre-authorisations in Travel, building robust subscription suites for SaaS, or expanding access through EMI for Education, Cashfree Payments builds around context, rather than conformity. A business shaped by the businesses it serves.

Watch the film here: youtu.be/EHXJRi9YzrY

About Cashfree Payments

Cashfree Payments is a leader in payments in India. Founded in 2015, Cashfree Payments processes transactions worth $80B annually for more than a million businesses.

Businesses use Cashfree Payments to collect payments from 100+ payment methods, make payouts, make cross border payments, improve conversions with a one-click checkout, recover abandoned carts, and predict and reduce returns. With an easy onboarding and integration process, and compatibility with popular merchant platforms like Shopify, Wix, Wordpress, WooCommerce, WhatsApp, Cashfree Payments enables businesses to start transactions within a day. Cashfree Payments directly connects with all payment networks and owns its payment processing technology end-to-end, ensuring higher success rates and reliability. Built for scale, it enables businesses to process an industry-leading 12,000 transactions per second, handling peak demand effortlessly.

Alongside payments, Cashfree Payments offers SecureID, an identity verification stack with a comprehensive suite of APIs and KYC components. SecureID enables fintechs and startups to streamline compliant onboarding and KYC flows by minimising user inputs, thus reducing drop-offs, intelligently verifying identity documents, and detecting fraud and anomalies with high accuracy.

Cashfree Payments is authorised by the Reserve Bank of India to operate as a payment aggregator for both domestic and cross-border payments, and was one of the first entities to be authorised. It is also authorised to issue Prepaid Instruments. Cashfree Payments is backed by Silicon Valley investor Y Combinator, Apis Partners, State Bank of India (SBI), KRAFTON, and was incubated by PayPal.

As nonprofits across India work with lean teams to serve large and often geographically dispersed communities, many are looking for new ways to scale their impact amid rising demand, talent constraints, and operational complexity. AI agents present a powerful opportunity to extend their reach by autonomously handling routine tasks like program management, volunteer management, donor communications, and tailored fundraising support. This allows teams to focus on what matters most: direct beneficiary engagement and program delivery across India's vast and diverse landscape. The challenge lies in accessing the technology and expertise needed to make this vision a reality.

The Salesforce Accelerator — Agents for Impact addresses this need by providing nonprofits with technology, grants, and pro bono expertise to build and deploy AI-powered agent solutions. Through a customized six-month program, selected organizations receive comprehensive support including one-on-one and group coaching from Salesforce experts and flexible grants of up to INR 6.8 crores, distributed across a cohort of four nonprofit organizations. Additionally, the selected nonprofits will receive free access to Salesforce technology for up to 18 months, and technical consulting from employee volunteers.

India Cohort Pioneering AI Solutions

The inaugural India cohort brings together four pioneering organizations developing innovative AI agent solutions to address critical social challenges:

• Antarang Foundation is developing a Career Facilitator Agent that generates personalized career counseling sessions with specific next steps based on each student's profile data, enabling scalable, customized career guidance.

• Foundation For Excellence is creating a Scholarship Agent that supports review  and processing of student applications for scholarships, helping more students get access to critical funding.

• Latika is building a Legal Navigator Agent (Asli Intelligence) that generates clear, step-by-step roadmaps for individuals to acquire disability certificates, pensions, scholarships, and tax relief—making complex legal processes accessible to all.

• Teach for India is implementing a Teaching Assistant agent that will be trained on resources from its teacher training platform, Firki. It will serve as a personal assistant to answer queries and guide teachers to relevant courses through intuitive chats and clicks.

Comments on the news:

Arundhati Bhattacharya, President & CEO, Salesforce, South Asia, said, “We believe organizations closest to India's most pressing challenges shouldn't be furthest from the tools that multiply their impact. Nonprofits are drowning in admin work when they should be focused on transformation. AI agents represent a fundamental shift: technology that doesn't just optimize workflows but reclaims human capacity for what matters most.

At Salesforce, we’ve long believed that business is the greatest platform for change.  That belief guides how we build and deploy AI as a force for good that strengthens communities. Through the Salesforce Accelerator — Agents for Impact, we're proving a new equation: when intelligent systems handle complexity, people multiply impact. Not by working harder, but by working on what only humans can do — building trust, making judgment calls, and showing up with empathy where it counts. The future of impact isn't choosing between humanity and scale. It's architecting them together."

*Salesforce, the #1 CRM, powered by AI technology and capabilities.

About Salesforce

Salesforce helps organizations of any size become agentic enterprises - integrating humans, agents, apps, and data on a trusted, unified platform to unlock unprecedented growth and innovation.

Visit www.salesforce.com/in for more information.

The Global Technology Distribution Council (GTDC), the world's largest consortium of technology distributors, has released a new research report, Distribution: The Digital Force Multiplier. Developed by CommCentric Solutions, this study examines how IT distribution has transformed and continues to evolve into a critical enabler of cloud, artificial intelligence (AI), hyperscaler and platform-driven business models across the global technology channel.

Suppliers and solution providers face mounting complexity, financial risk and competitive pressure in this new digital realm. This survey and interview-based report confirms that distributors are uniquely positioned to unify fragmented go-to-market motions, streamline subscription and consumption models, integrate multi-vendor solutions, and accelerate partner enablement, demand generation and data-driven decision-making. These benefits are ranked and detailed by supplier executives in this report, along with insightful narrative from distribution and industry thought leaders.

"Today's distributors have advanced far beyond the critical logistics and credit services mission," said Frank Vitagliano, CEO of GTDC. "Distribution is now a major force multiplier-helping cloud and AI and hyperscaler-focused suppliers reduce risk, scale faster, enter new markets and orchestrate increasingly complex digital ecosystems. Those services are layered on top of all the time-tested valued services that vendors have come to expect from their trusted distributor partners."

Cloud, XaaS, and AI-driven solutions introduce operational, financial and technical complexity that most emerging and established suppliers simply do not have the resources to scale these offerings independently. Distribution provides these organizations with operational efficiencies, financial leverage and the global reach required to succeed in today's highly competitive IT ecosystems.

Distribution's New Key Value Propositions

Several critical trends were highlighted by the global survey of vendor executives and in-depth interviews with channel leaders across North America, EMEA and APJ. The report notes a number of those movements that are forging a stronger and more valuable future for the IT ecosystem. Some of the advantages suppliers gain by working with distributors include:

Partner ecosystem growth is a priority. 80% of vendor executives rank this distribution value-add as the most important contribution to their go-to-market success, with sales enablement resources cited by 57% of respondents, reflecting the growing need for education, tools and guidance to sell and support cloud and AI-driven solutions.

Digital platform adoption is strong, with 86% of suppliers either using at least one today or actively evaluating options to support online transactions, lifecycle management and analytics.

Hyperscaler relationships continue to evolve. 60% of vendors have direct relationships with these infrastructure suppliers with 40% leveraging both a direct and distributor-supported model, underscoring the growing importance of distribution as a bridge between these organizations and the broader channel ecosystem.

Additional survey findings highlight that distributors play a critical role in risk reduction, renewal orchestration, marketplace onboarding and AI-driven analytics - essential capabilities as technology shifts more toward subscription, consumption and outcome-based models.

The full report, Distribution: The Digital Force Multiplier, as well as other invaluable industry research and resources, is available at no cost on the GTDC Knowledge Hub.

About the GTDC

The Global Technology Distribution Council is the industry consortium representing the world's leading tech distributors. GTDC members drive an estimated $180 billion in annual worldwide sales of products, services and solutions through diverse business channels. GTDC conferences support the development and expansion of strategic supply-chain partnerships that continually address the fast-changing marketplace needs of vendors, end customers and distributors. GTDC members include AB S.A, Arrow Electronics, CMS Distribution, Computer Gross Italia S.p.A., D&H Distributing, ELKO Group, Esprinet S.p.A., Exclusive Networks, Exertis, Infinigate, Ingram Micro, Intcomex, Logicom Public Limited, Mindware, Nexora, Redington Limited, SiS Technologies, Tarsus Distribution, TD SYNNEX, TIM AG, VSTECS Holdings Limited and Westcon-Comstor.

Chennai Institute of Technology's ALL-GIRLS  team wins at DeepTech Hackathon, takes home Rs. 1,00,000

A Platform Built for the Next Generation of Innovators

India has earned global recognition for its deep semiconductor design talent. As the nation now accelerates toward chip manufacturing, the imperative is clear — India must expand its capabilities across the entire semiconductor value chain to build a truly self-reliant ecosystem.

The IESA Vision Summit 2026 concluded with the DeepTech Hackathon Grand Finale, spotlighting cutting-edge semiconductor talent and Edge AI innovation

The ‘DeepTech Hackathon’ was conceived as a high-impact platform to catalyse this transition — identifying, nurturing, and fast-tracking breakthrough innovations and cultivating a future-ready talent pipeline in India. Bringing together some of India’s brightest engineering minds, the hackathon challenged participants to develop cutting-edge solutions leveraging AI-enabled EDA workflows for “Edge AI based Defect Classification System for Semiconductor Images”, reinforcing India’s readiness for design-led manufacturing and deep-tech leadership.  

The competition drew exceptional engagement from the country's engineering community, attracting 911 teams across 359 colleges — culminating in 532 high-quality idea submissions that underwent a rigorous, multi-stage evaluation process. The Grand Finale, held at the IESA Vision Summit 2026 — the most influential gathering of India's electronics and semiconductor leadership — brought together 10 finalist teams who had successfully navigated rigorous qualification rounds, mentorship sessions, and technical evaluations conducted in collaboration with industry experts from GlobalFoundries and NXP Semiconductors.

Commenting on the Mega Finale, Mr. Ashok Chandak, President, IESA and SEMI India, said, “India’s semiconductor ecosystem is at a decisive inflection point. While the India Semiconductor Mission is unlocking unprecedented investments, the true multiplier lies in talent and deep-tech innovation. This Hackathon showcases the depth of India’s semiconductor capability and the power of young engineers to solve complex challenges.”

“The momentum in AI and semiconductors is inseparable. As we build next-generation chips, we must also build responsible, human-centric AI systems aligned with the Prime Minister’s vision of MANAV — ethical, inclusive, and globally competitive. Today’s winners are not just award recipients; they represent the new face of India’s design and technology leadership. We congratulate them and thank our partners who are nurturing this innovation ecosystem that will power India’s next wave of startups, IP creation, and global impact.” Chandak added.

“GF is committed to building differentiated solutions for the semiconductor industry and our customers. Our leading foundry presence in India enables us to contribute towards building a strong tech ecosystem with our industry partners and educational institutes. The hackathon at the IESA Vision summit is a perfect platform for young talent to nurture industry-ready skills while solving real world problems using semiconductor chip design, manufacturing and AI techniques. It is inspiring to see the critical thinking, curiosity and depth of technical knowledge demonstrated by the students. I look forward to welcoming this talent to the growing semiconductor ecosystem in India and GF in particular in the coming years,” said, Jitendra Chaddah (JC), Vice President and India Country Head, GlobalFoundries.

Hitesh Garg, Vice President and India Managing Director, NXP Semiconductors added, “The DeepTech Hackathon comes at a pivotal moment as India accelerates its semiconductor and AI ambitions. This initiative reflects the kind of industry–academia collaboration that is essential to building India’s next wave of deep‑tech and manufacturing innovation. What stands out in this challenge—bringing together defect detection, Edge AI, and real fab‑level problem‑solving—is how closely it mirrors the demands of modern intelligent manufacturing. At NXP, we are proud to support platforms that strengthen India’s semiconductor and AI capabilities, especially as the industry faces a growing need for system design engineers who can integrate hardware, software, and AI into scalable, real‑world solutions. The ingenuity and technical depth demonstrated by these young engineers reaffirm that India is not just participating in the global shift toward advanced AI‑driven systems, but is strongly positioned to lead it.”

The Winners

Each winning team demonstrated exceptional command of AI enabled semiconductor design principles, systems thinking, and solution viability. A distinguished panel of jury shortlisted the top three winners at the Mega Finale — with the top spot claimed by an all-girls team from Chennai Institute of Technology.

Winning team – Chennai Institute of Technology, honored with prize money of Rs. 1,00,000

1st Runner-Up- Ramco Institute of Technology, honored with prize money of Rs. 60,000

2nd Runner-Up- IIT Indore, honored with prize money of Rs. 40,000. 

Shaping the future - IESA President Mr. Ashok Chandak (extreme left) inaugurates IESA Vision Summit 2026 alongside esteemed government dignitaries and industry leaders

The inauguration ceremony was addressed by a distinguished assembly of government leaders, industry luminaries, and stalwarts including Shri. Amitesh Kumar Sinha, (CEO, India Semiconductor Mission and Additional Secretary MeitY), Shri. Manish Chadha (JS, Ministry of Commerce & Industry, GoI), Dr. M M Tripathi (DG-NIELIT), Shri. Rahul Sharanappa, (IAS, Director, Deptt of ITBT, GoK), His Excellency, Ewout de Wit, Consul General, Embassy of Netherlands, Ajit Manocha, President, SEMI, Gilroy Mathew (CEO, UST), Mr Ashok Chandak, President, IESA, Ruchir Dixit, IESA Chairperson, VP & Country Manager Siemens EDA, Prof Tummala Rao, IDSPS and Emiretus Prof Georgia Tech, Advisor ISM.

A Theme That Defines a Movement

The 2026 edition's theme — Design to Manufacturing: Synergy of Product, Production and Skill — captures what industry leaders describe as the most critical challenge and opportunity facing India's electronics sector today: bridging the gap between world-class chip and product design capabilities and scalable, high-quality domestic manufacturing.

“India has already demonstrated global leadership in semiconductor design. The next step is clear — we must complete the value chain. We must Create, build, and manufacture world-class products at scale, with uncompromising quality and a deeply skilled workforce to sustain that growth.

India has the engineering talent to power the world. What we now need is the resolve to innovate boldly, the discipline to manufacture competitively, and the foresight to skill our people continuously — not just for India, but for the global technology ecosystem,” said Mr. Ashok Chandak, President, IESA, in his inaugural address.

“The IESA Vision Summit has, over the years, grown into far more than a conference — it has become a “national convergence platform” where ideas, partnerships, policy, innovation, and execution come together to drive real impact. This summit brings together “industry leaders, government policymakers, global investors, start-up innovators, academia, and ecosystem partners” — all united by a shared purpose: “to transform India into a global hub for semiconductor design, manufacturing, and innovation”, commented Mr. Ruchir Dixit, Chairperson IESA.

“India's electronics manufacturing has grown sixfold in eleven years — a foundation built on policy conviction, industry trust, and global partnership. As we advance into the next phase of our semiconductor mission, we do so with a long-term resolve. India is working on designing various AI applications. Under NSM, Ministry of Electronics and IT is working on design and development of infrastructure that is required for AI. In ISM 2.0, support for design, Manufacturing and packaging will continue and will further expand for semiconductor ecosystem development. Research and Development (R&D) in cutting edge technologies and skilling will also be the key focus areas. India Semiconductor Mission is not only a government initiative, this is a journey of all stakeholders with a resolve to build a resilient, trusted, and future-ready supply chain that brings stability not just to one nation, but to the world,” said Shri. Amitesh Kumar Sinha, CEO & Additional Secretary, ISM, MeitY addressing the summit.  

“Back when I stood up at San Francisco and predicted a $1 trillion semiconductor industry by 2030, I wasn't thinking big enough. We're already at $1 trillion — not by 2030, but as of today if we take in account the chips being designed and manufactured in-house by hyperscalers and major system companies-the industry has already crossed that threshold. So today, I'm putting a new stake in the ground: $2 trillion by 2035. That's not a hope. That's a strategic projection grounded in where this industry is heading — driven by AI, advanced packaging, and the insatiable demand for compute at every layer of the technology stack. We've surprised ourselves before. We'll do it again. Prime Minister Modi invoked Moore’s Law at one of our SEMICONs, calling for India’s semiconductor industry likewise to grow exponentially now that the stars are aligned. The government has done its part. Now it's up to the people of India to step up,” said Mr. Ajit Manocha, CEO and President, SEMI at the inauguration.

“The vision of sand-to-silicon ecosystems reflects India's focus on building an integrated semiconductor ecosystem. We already have strong global leadership in chip design, with several global semiconductor companies operating design centers in India, contributing significantly to global chip design talent and innovation. Global trends indicate that the semiconductor value chains are becoming increasingly diversified and resilience-oriented. Nations are seeking trusted partners for manufacturing, design, packaging, and components. Through the strategic trade agreements, market access negotiations and export promotion frameworks, we are expanding opportunities for India's electronics and semiconductor industry in the global markets. Our objective is not just participation, but leadership in targeted segments of the global electronics trade ecosystem," said Shri. Manish Chadha, Joint Secretary Ministry of Commerce and Industry at his inaugural address.

“Karnataka isn't just participating in India's electronics revolution — we're leading it. From being the first TCC in the ESDM space in 1985, to contributing 46% of national electronics sales, hosting 500+ R&D centers, 100+ chip design centers, and global giants - our story is one of pioneering leadership. Our policies — from the Karnataka ESDM Policy to being the first state with a dedicated GCC Policy — reflect our unwavering commitment to growth. The IESA Vision Summit is the ideal platform to amplify this story to the world,” said, Shri Rahul Sharanappa Sankanur, IAS, Director, Dept. of E, IT and Bt, GoK; Managing Director, KITS

“The electronics and semiconductor sector is perhaps the clearest example of what coordinated national intent can truly achieve. In over three decades of my association with this industry, I have never witnessed such an extraordinary alignment of vision and execution — with multiple central ministries, including MeitY, the Ministry of Commerce, and the Department of Science & Technology, working in sync with nine proactive state governments and industries under harmonized electronics and semiconductor policies. At IESA, our responsibility is to ensure that industry, academia, and government move forward in formation — aligned in purpose, speed, and direction.

‘Design to Manufacturing’ is not merely a theme; it is a strategic national imperative. India is positioning itself to be a Product Nation, a Production Nation, and a Skills Nation. And this summit marks the moment we confidently declare that ambition to the world,” continued Mr. Ashok Chandak, President, IESA.

The most Impactful development at the IESA Vision Summit, the official formation of IDSPS (Indian Design, Semiconductors, Packaging and Systems) — was announced as a dedicated division under IESA, marking a significant milestone for India's semiconductor R&D landscape. The division, formed with active participation from industries and Institutes will be led by Dr. Prof. Rao Tummala, appointed as CEO of the division and is envisioned to build a long-term R&D for manufacturing technology needs spanning 3, 5, and even 10 years ahead into the future — with ambitions that extend well beyond national boundaries to create global impact.

Other highlights:

One of the most significant highlights of this year’s summit included Grand Finale of the IESA DeepTech Hackathon 2026, a national competition (having 900+ registrations) that challenged India's brightest engineering minds to build practical, industry-ready solutions in the country's most strategically critical technology domains.

The summit also set the stage for one of the most anticipated traditions in India's ESDM calendar — the IESA Technovation Awards 2026, the sector's most prestigious recognition since their institution in 2008.

The Vision Summit 2026 set a landmark gathering by bringing together over 1,500 delegates alone on the 1^st day for a dynamic exchange of ideas and innovation. Featuring 30+ keynote addresses and 7 insightful panel discussions, the summit showcased 100+ booths. The vibrant Startup Zone and dedicated skilling workshops enlightened aspiring students from top engineering colleges. Along with a State Pavilion, Technovation Awards, Startup Mitra Sessions, Hackathon challenges and product launches the large-scale ecosystem exhibition offered unparalleled opportunities for networking, collaboration, and business development across the ESDM sector.

About IESA Vision Summit

The IESA Vision Summit is India's foremost annual event for the Electronics System Design and Manufacturing sector, organized by the India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA). Each year, the summit brings together thousands of industry leaders, policymakers, innovators, startups, and academics to shape the strategic direction of India's ESDM ecosystem. The 2026 edition is being held on February 25–26, 2026, at The Leela Bhartiya City Convention Centre, Bengaluru.

About IESA

The India Electronics & Semiconductor Association (IESA) is India's premier industry body for ESDM and Intelligent Electronics. Working at the intersection of government policy, industry, and academia, IESA's mission is to establish India as a leading global hub for electronics manufacturing and design — and to harness the power of technology to positively impact the lives of over a billion Indians.

For more information, visit: www.iesaonline.org | www.iesa-visionsummit.com

DocuGenie.AI™, SecureKloud’s Intelligent Document Automation (IDA) platform, is now available on the Google Cloud Marketplace

This milestone marks a significant step in SecureKloud’s global growth journey. The listing further strengthens SecureKloud’s SaaS strategy and opens new opportunities for global enterprise adoption. Enterprises can now discover, procure, and deploy DocuGenie.AI faster, integrating it seamlessly into their existing cloud and enterprise ecosystems to accelerate adoption and simplify onboarding.

DocuGenie.AI is an AI-native, cloud-agnostic SaaS platform built to transform how organizations process and manage business-critical documents. Leveraging advanced technologies including GenAI, machine learning, LLMs, VLMs, SLMs, RPA, and intelligent data extraction, the platform automates high-volume document workflows with speed, accuracy, and built-in intelligence.

The platform is already witnessing rapid adoption among enterprise customers across key industries. In the NBFC and banking sector, DocuGenie.AI enables automation of KYC processing and verification, bank statement analysis, financial document extraction, and end-to-end lending workflows. In the logistics and transportation industry, organizations are using the platform to automate high-volume operational documents such as Proof of Delivery (POD), trip sheets significantly reducing manual effort and improving turnaround times.

Organizations deploying DocuGenie.AI are able to handle large-scale document volumes with greater speed and accuracy, realizing measurable productivity gains and operational ROI within days of implementation. By minimizing manual intervention and accelerating processing cycles, the platform helps enterprises reduce operational costs, strengthen compliance, and improve decision quality across financial services, lending, logistics, manufacturing, and enterprise operations.

“Being listed on Google Cloud Marketplace is further validation of the enterprise readiness, security, and scalability built into DocuGenie.AI,” said Venkat Krish, CRO & Whole-Time Director, SecureKloud Technologies. “In a relatively short span, the platform has gained strong enterprise traction and enabled us to onboard marquee customers across industries. This milestone is a feather in the cap for our team and positions DocuGenie.AI on a global stage as we continue to help organizations accelerate their AI-led automation journey.”

To learn more, visit: www.docugenieai.com.

About SecureKloud Technologies

SecureKloud Technologies Ltd. (NSE: SECURKLOUD | BSE: 512161) is a global technology company with over 17 years of expertise in AI-powered digital transformation, cloud-native SaaS enablement, managed services, and cybersecurity. Its portfolio spans Intelligent Document Automation with DocuGenie.AI™, AI and Data Engineering, Cloud Transformation, FinOps, SaaS Delivery, and 24x7 Managed Services. Backed by industry-recognized certifications and compliance frameworks including SOC 2, ISO 27001:2022, GDPR, ISO 9001, ISO 20000, and CMMI Level 3, SecureKloud delivers secure, scalable, and compliant digital operations for modern enterprises.

Visit: www.securekloud.com.

Jay Bavisi speaks at the India AI Impact Summit 2026, calling on India’s IT industry to lead the national AI workforce transformation

The Summit marked a pivotal global moment in AI’s evolution, drawing more than 300,000 attendees within its first three days and bringing together some of the most influential voices shaping the global AI economy, including Jensen Huang of Nvidia, Sundar Pichai of Google, Bill Gates, Sam Altman, and other technology leaders driving frontier innovation. It arrived at a moment of unprecedented reckoning for the global technology services industry, reflecting a broader shift from experimentation to measurable implementation.

Held amid heightened unprecedented reckoning for the global technology services industry. In the days leading up to the event, AI-driven disruption fears triggered a sharp selloff across major IT services firms. India’s Nifty IT index plunged nearly 19 percent over eight trading sessions, wiping out approximately Rs. 4.8 to Rs. 5 lakh crore in combined market capitalisation, marking one of the steepest sectoral corrections in recent years. Top Indian IT companies suffered sharp double-digit declines, with one industry giant briefly falling below the Rs. 10 lakh crore market cap threshold for the first time since December 2020, while several others hit fresh 52-week lows. The carnage was not limited to India: overseas-listed shares of leading firms plunged nearly 10 percent in a single New York trading session, as global investors reassessed the long-term viability of the labour-intensive outsourcing model that has powered the sector for decades.

The stakes could not be higher. India’s IT-BPM  industry remains one of the country’s most significant economic pillars , generating approximately $283 billion in revenue in FY2025, contributing over 7 percent to national GDP, and directly employing nearly 5.8 million professionals. As AI reshapes enterprise operating models worldwide, the need to reskill and realign this workforce has become a strategic priority. Leading IT companies recorded significant declines, with several stocks hitting multi-month or 52-week lows as investors reassessed the long-term implications of AI on traditional outsourcing and services models. The correction was not limited to India, as IT services companies listed overseas also experienced notable declines, reflecting broader global uncertainty around the future of labour-intensive service delivery in the AI era.

Yet within this disruption lies what may be the most consequential workforce opportunity of the decade. The same AI technologies dismantling traditional service delivery models are simultaneously creating massive new demand for professionals who can deploy, secure, and govern AI systems at enterprise scale. The question confronting India’s $283 billion IT sector is not whether AI will transform its business but whether the nation can retool its 5.8 million-strong technology workforce fast enough to lead that transformation rather than be consumed by it. This is precisely the challenge that Jay Bavisi, Founder and CEO of EC-Council, addressed head-on at the Summit.

Bavisi, creator of the world-renowned Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) credential and a global leader in applied cybersecurity education – shifted the focus from experimentation to execution maturity, emphasizing that AI’s future will be determined not by how fast it advances, but by how responsibly it is built, governed, and secured.

Addressing the panel “Responsible AI at Scale: Governance, Integrity & Cyber Readiness,” Bavisi emphasized that as AI becomes embedded across financial systems, healthcare infrastructure, manufacturing ecosystems, digital governance platforms, and national security frameworks, disciplined workforce capability becomes the decisive factor in responsible scale.

In his broader remarks on the Summit and India’s AI trajectory, Bavisi emphasized both the scale of the event and the magnitude of the opportunity.

“This is an amazing summit that has been organized in India, the AI Impact Summit. I have not seen a summit of this size. The number of people, the number of thinkers who are here from all across the world – it is a very successful event and a dialogue that is extremely important in a world that is being transformed by AI,” he said.

Bavisi emphasized that artificial intelligence carries transformative potential, but only if managed with structural discipline. “AI has the potential to cause mayhem if it is not implemented properly,” he stated. “When AI becomes embedded into systems, responsibility becomes critical.”

He framed India’s opportunity not merely as participation in AI growth, but as leadership through capability.

“India has a phenomenal opportunity to be a supplier of talent to the world. Indian professionals are known globally for their technical ability. In the world of AI right now, it is time to wake up and serve professionals to the world who are able to adopt, govern, and defend,” Bavisi said.

“The fact that India is taking leadership in AI is a phenomenal step in the right direction,” he added. “India is one of the very few countries with professionals who are proficient in language models, and technology at scale. This is a moment for India.”

Under Bavisi’s leadership, EC-Council has expanded its global AI footprint through structured, role-based capability development aligned to real-world enterprise needs. The Enterprise AI Credential Suite and the modernization of Certified CISO v4 represent the largest expansion in the organization’s 25-year history, built for one clear reality: AI is scaling faster than the workforce trained to run, secure, and govern it.

Structured around EC-Council’s proprietary Adopt. Defend. Govern. (ADG) framework for AI, the suite includes Artificial Intelligence Essentials (AI|E), Certified AI Program Manager (C|AIPM), Certified Offensive AI Security Professional (C|OASP), and Certified Responsible AI Governance & Ethics Professional (C|RAGE). Together with Certified CISO v4, these credentials form a unified workforce architecture designed to support AI deployment, governance oversight, security resilience, and executive leadership at enterprise scale.

The strength of that architecture was reflected in the engagement following Bavisi’s session. The discussion room reached capacity, with standing-room-only attendance and sustained interaction well beyond the scheduled time. Many attendees identified themselves as CEHs, reinforcing the credential’s long-standing global recognition even within a summit dominated by frontier AI technologies.

Bavisi emphasized that leadership in artificial intelligence will not be defined solely by technological speed, but by execution maturity.

“We often measure progress in numbers,” Bavisi said. “But the larger impact lies in shaping professionals who go on to defend companies, governments, and communities. Workforce development is not transactional. It is generational.”

About EC-Council

EC-Council is the creator of the Certified Ethical Hacker (CEH) program and a leader in cybersecurity education. Founded in 2001, EC-Council’s mission is to provide high-quality training and certifications for cybersecurity professionals to keep organizations safe from cyber threats. EC-Council offers over 200 certifications and degrees in various cybersecurity domains, including forensics, security analysis, threat intelligence, and information security.  

An ISO/IEC 17024 accredited organization, EC-Council has certified over 350,000 professionals worldwide, with clients ranging from government agencies to Fortune 100 companies. EC-Council is the gold standard in cybersecurity certification, trusted by the U.S. Department of Defense, the Army, Navy, Air Force, and leading global corporations.   

Santosh Tiwari

Welcoming Santosh, Co-founder & MD TSI, Puneet Kumar said, “TSI aims to unlock India Advantage of Talent & Technology for the global enterprise and leverage its momentum in becoming top three economies in the world. With Santosh joining, we strengthen our capability in delivering our clients in such domain as AI, Quantum, Space, Biotech, Skilling and other emerging tech areas.”

Tech Setting India is powered by a leadership team that has witnessed and driven exponential growth — 10x increase in revenue, a 300x expansion in workforce, and multi-city scale across India. The leadership team have been instrumental in shaping policies and frameworks across domains including SEZ, defence offsets, renewable energy, India’s AI roadmap, agri-tech, labour reforms, economic affairs & taxation reforms and foreign investment.

Santosh has been in the senior leadership position as a Director, in APCO — a Washington DC headquartered global strategic advisory and advocacy firm. He will take over his new role as TSI CEO from March onwards.

Expressing the need for an enabling platform, Co-founder TSI, Sandeep Bhatnagar said, “TSI wants to leverage India’s efforts of tech-powered growth for clients in treading the complex dynamics of an accelerated economy.”

“Taking up mantle of TSI CEO is a huge responsible to deliver clients results based on trust, quality and partnership. I thank TSI Co-founders for this opportunity,” said Santosh Tiwari.

About Tech Setting India (TSI) Pvt. Ltd.

Website: techsettingindia.com.

Amit Gupta, Founder Rapyder and Cloudeva.ai

Built by teams with years of hands-on experience supporting cloud operations across large enterprises, Start-Ups & SMBs, the idea of the founders was to address a persistent operational blind spot. Many organizations still struggle to maintain auditable visibility into what changed in their cloud environments, who initiated them, and the business reasoning behind those decisions.

Amit Gupta (founder, cloudeva.ai), identified the pattern after years of working with leadership teams that manage complex, multi-cloud estates. Despite significant investments in infrastructure, security controls, and analytics tooling, companies repeatedly encountered the same issue during incidents, cost escalations, and audit reviews: explaining the rationale behind critical actions.

“After nearly a decade running Rapyder and working closely with CXOs, I realized most cloud problems weren’t caused by bad technology,” said Amit Gupta. “They were caused by unclear decisions - not knowing who changed what, why it was changed, who approved it, or whether it was the right call at the time. As environments scaled, this gap only widened.”

As enterprises expanded digitally across Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, governance practices fragmented across tools and teams while executive accountability remained centralized. The disconnect between operational complexity and leadership responsibility became the catalyst for building Cloudeva.ai.

“Execution without context creates noise,” said Athreya Ramadas (Co-Founder, Cloudeva.ai) “We’re building an offering that turns cloud data into governed, actionable insight - enabling organizations to scale with clarity, control, and confidence.”

Cloudeva.ai introduces a decision layer above existing infrastructure, finance, and security tooling. Rather than just reporting events, the system interprets change through business, financial, and regulatory context - helping organizations move from raw activity to accountable decision-making. The founders have opened cloudeva.ai for public preview till March 31^st 2026. Preview participants can:

• Experience AI-driven cloud decision intelligence in real environments

• Shape governance workflows for regulated operations

• Work directly with the Cloudeva.ai founding and product teams

Who It’s Designed For

• Financial services and regulated enterprises managing audits and operational risk

• Healthcare and compliance-driven organizations balancing innovation and governance

• Large multi-cloud enterprises requiring cross-team visibility

• CIOs, CTOs, CISOs, and CFOs who need explainable cloud decisions

Why This Matters Now

• Multi-cloud environments are growing faster than governance models

• Regulatory expectations around accountability continue to tighten

• Decision opacity introduces financial and operational risk

• Enterprises need clarity without slowing innovation

Cloudeva.ai exists to solve what slows modern organizations down- uncertainty. By combining deep expertise with a forward-looking approach, the company helps businesses build systems that are not just scalable, but intentional.

Cloudeva.ai aims to transform cloud complexity into clear, confident action.

For more information, visit cloudeva.ai.

About tridorian
tridorian is a Google Cloud-focused services and solutions company helping organizations modernize platforms, data, and applications. As a people-centric Google Cloud Premier Partner, tridorian specializes in building secure, governed AI systems designed for production. With operations spanning eight countries and customers across 14, tridorian ensures that technology only succeeds when the people using it do.
 

tridorian.com | www.linkedin.com/company/tridorian.

The benchmarking study addresses the growing need for standardized compensation frameworks as industry faces challenges of hiring good talent with proper compensations, evolving employee expectations, and the shift toward hybrid work models. With detailed sub-sector analysis, organizations can now compare their compensation packages against industry peers and understand market positioning within their specific domain.

The study provides critical insights into pay trends across India's dynamic tech sector. It comprehensively examines compensation data for over 200 unique job roles spanning the entire organizational hierarchy, from entry-level positions to senior leadership. The study offers detailed analysis across four key technology sub-sectors: E-commerce, fintech, large tech and product companies, and media and Gaming.

As India's technology sector continues its rapid growth trajectory, organizations need reliable compensation data to attract and retain top talent in an increasingly competitive market. The WTW India & IAMAI Comprehensive Compensation Benchmarking Study for Technology Sector provides the transparency and insights necessary for companies to make informed decisions about their compensation strategies.

The collaboration between IAMAI and WTW India represents a significant step forward in establishing industry standards. The granular insights across different technology verticals will help companies structure competitive and equitable compensation programmes.

About Internet and Mobile Association of India  

The Internet and Mobile Association of India (IAMAI) is a not-for-profit industry body with more than 750 members, including Indian and multinational corporations, as well as start-ups. IAMAI has been instrumental in shaping India’s digital economy. IAMAI advocates free and fair competition, and progressive and enabling laws for businesses as well as for consumers. The overarching objective of IAMAI is to ensure the progress of the internet and the digital economy. Its major areas of activities are public policy and advocacy, business to business conferences, research, promotion of start-ups and promotion of consumer trust and safety. 

Sitting from L-R – Ms. Neha Joson, MD, Etome, Mr. Joson Thomas, Director, Etome, Mr. KRS Jamwal, ED, TIL, and Chairman, TCE and Mr. Tarun Bhojwani, CEO, TCE

As digital transformation accelerates across the education sector, institutions increasingly seek trusted avenues to explore and evaluate solutions best suited to their needs. This collaboration aims to address that demand by establishing EdTech Experience Centres as physical hubs, enabling school leaders to explore solutions firsthand and build readiness for meaningful technology integration. The centres will also play a key role in teacher capacity building by offering structured training and skilling to enhance instructional effectiveness and support seamless digitalisation in schools.

Speaking on the strategic intent of this alliance, Mr. K.R.S. Jamwal, Executive Director, Tata Industries Limited (TIL), and Chairman, TCE, said, “I am pleased to see the progress in Tata ClassEdge toward its goal to contribute and participate materially in all the key elements of the pre-K to K-12 ecosystem. This collaboration adds the key element of phygital experience centres to this ecosystem. As edtech leads the evolution of K-12 education, such centres will play an important role in showcasing best practices tools, techniques and devices for schools and teachers across the country.”

Reimagining EdTech Discovery

While digital adoption in schools is growing, the ability to physically interact with technology hardware and software content solutions remains a gap in the market. This association addresses that need by launching a nationwide network of Experience Centres as dedicated spaces where schools can discover, experience, and evaluate EdTech solutions in a hands-on environment.

Sharing his views on the association, Mr. Joson Thomas, Director, Etome, said, “Collaborating with Tata ClassEdge is a defining moment for us. These experience centres will not just be about displaying products; they will be vibrant spaces for engagement. With TCE’s support, we are confident in our ability to create a trusted distribution network that brings the best of EdTech to institutions across the country.”

Advancing School Readiness for Digital Transformation

With digital transformation reshaping classroom practices, schools require more than just access to technology, they need guidance, exposure, and structured support.

Together, these initiative positions the alliance to elevate how schools discover and adopt technology. Adding further, Mr. Tarun Bhojwani, CEO, TCE, said, “Schools today are navigating a rapidly expanding EdTech landscape. Our centres will help them move from uncertainty to informed decision-making by offering a trusted, academically guided environment to experience and evaluate solutions. Our goal is to ensure every school adopts technology that truly serves its teaching and learning needs.”

With this direction established, the leadership team shared their perspective on what this initiative will enable for schools. 

• EdTech Experience Centres: Establishing experience centres which will serve as academic discovery zones where educators can meaningfully engage with, understand and evaluate pedagogy-driven classroom solutions.

• Teacher Capacity Building: Leveraging these centres to conduct high-quality teacher training, skill-building sessions, and pedagogical workshops that strengthen technology integration and future-facing classroom practices.

• Curated Learning Solutions Ecosystem: Developing a thoughtfully curated, multi-brand network that ensures schools have access to trusted and high-quality educational technologies aligned to learning outcomes.

• Advisory and Implementation Excellence: Ensuring that the experience centres deliver strong guidance, institution readiness support, and smooth on-ground implementation to schools with consistent quality.

Commenting on the operational vision, Ms. Neha Joson, Managing Director, Etome, added, “Our focus is on creating an environment where technology feels accessible and helpful rather than overwhelming. We look forward to welcoming educators to these centres and helping them find the right tools to enhance their classrooms.”

About the Organizations

Tata ClassEdge Limited (TCE), a subsidiary of Tata Industries Limited, is dedicated to transforming K–12 education through innovative digital and academic solutions. The company ensures seamless adoption of its academic solutions, making the transition to digital teaching and learning effortless for schools. Backed by the Tata Group's enduring commitment to education, the company’s innovations in pedagogy, technology, and content deliver engaging, meaningful, and impactful learning experiences for students nationwide.

Etome Works Limited: Etome Works Ltd, formerly Resolute, is a pioneering EdTech company with over a decade of experience in EdTech and digitalization. Through Etomosphere, India’s first EdTech Experience Centre and multi brand marketplace, the company helps educational institutions and organizations discover and adopt the right solutions. Etome Works also introduces education-focused technologies such as the Etome eNote, a digital alternative for paper in campuses, the eBoard, an eye-friendly display designed for healthier classrooms and many more innovative technologies.

Love in the digital age: How Gen Z is blending technology and emotion to redefine modern romance

Apps like Neo Astro provide free tools for love matches, moon signs, and birth charts, revealing emotional alignments through Vedic astrology. Users can enter their details to see whether their stars align at 80% or spark adventurous chemistry. This fusion of fun and astrology makes these tools especially popular for Valentine’s planning.​

Younger generations often kick off Valentine’s Day with love calculator by name pranks or challenges entering a crush’s name for hilarious 0–100% scores and sharing TikTok reactions. Apps such as Love Calculator 2026 take it further by adding photo or fingerprint matching, fueling “soulmate reveal” trends that drive engagement. Many trendy pieces also note how these results are shared as Galentine’s Day icebreakers, reflecting the fact that nearly 58% of Gen Z prioritizes platonic bonds.​

Love calculators on astrology apps like Neo Astro or Love Calculator 2026 transform simple curiosity into engaging Valentine’s activities by sparking playfulness, conversation, and shareable fun. It often begins with solo reflection—inputting your name alongside a crush or ex to observe emerging patterns, such as repeated 70% matches with water signs, and setting self-love intentions using moon sign insights. For couples, the experience becomes interactive: syncing phones for mutual calculations over wine, debating score accuracy, and discussing Venus placements before embarking on “compatibility quests,” such as mini-dates inspired by top shared traits. Some even make it a weekly ritual to re-test and track relationship growth.​

The trend scales effortlessly into group celebrations. At Galentine’s parties, guests can pair up anonymously for bulk calculations, unveiling scores with dramatic flair, prizes for “best matches,” and pranks for the lowest ones. Gen Z creators often amplify the fun through TikTok Lives, turning unexpected results into memes.​

To boost digital content, users screenshot high scores featuring romantic animations, then remix them into Reels or Stories with captions like “Our 92% fate—tag your soulmate!” Whether solo, paired, or in squads, love calculators weave whimsy into romance, proving that in 2026, the sweetest connections start with a swipe, a score, and a shared laugh—making every heart a little bolder for love's grand reveal.