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“Startup” means risk. It prescribes small teams of individuals committed to an idea to make the world a better place…or to make themselves a little richer. Why not both? Regardless, new business ventures work under pressure to research, refine, and deliver an idea to the market. The alternative is shuttering for good.

But despite the high risk/reward framework, these Victory-or-Bust ventures don’t have the market cornered on agility and innovation.

With names like Innovation Kitchen, Lab126, The Design Lab, and the eponymous Skunk Works, big companies like Nike, Amazon, Apple, and Lockheed Martin have successfully combined small teams of people at the top of their technical game with large company resources to bring ground-breaking products to market.

Cisco sets aside space for an innovative team operating with a startup mindset. More than an experimental group, they hold themselves accountable the same way any startup should. When their efforts succeed, the impact of their innovations is transformative for the industry and customers.

Cisco ET&I: Cisco’s Big Bets for the Future

Several years ago, Cisco founded the Emerging Technologies and Incubation Group (ET&I), charging them with creating and advancing new products and technologies that earn Cisco’s Executive Leadership team backing. This unique division focuses on new solutions, new markets, and innovative problem-solving.

Using rapid ideation, agile methodologies, incubation, and validation, the group employs startup thinking with a venture capital (VC) backing model, which brings together committed, diverse teams of experts at the top of their technical fields. Those teams partner with universities, customers, and the Cisco Design Partner Program to deliver best-in-class research, next-generation solutions and software, plus customer co-innovation.

“This is one of the most exciting times to be an innovator.”
–

Vijoy Pandey, SVP of Emerging Technologies & Incubation

Catalyzing the Startup Mindset

In the startup space, ideas thrive or fail. Goals must be met, investors must be satisfied, and product adoption must grow exponentially. Miss a deadline? You might find yourself shuttering the company. The inherent speed and urgency that accompanies working with those stakes can be crushed by slow-moving parts inside large enterprises.

Cisco embraces the startup model by granting ET&I the freedom to work without complex multi-tiered oversight while keeping the stakes high.

Like any startup, delivering on expectations is job one. The group sets milestone-based targets akin to Series A, B, and C funding. The team operates under an Incubation Board of Directors who take the part of investors, providing a funding perspective and leveraging their business expertise to accelerate new ventures. That Board retains the ability to defund projects that aren’t working, aren’t moving fast enough, or aren’t maintaining their original merit.

Inside-Startup Success: Understanding the Venture Capitalist Mindset

Competition for funding is tight, and embracing the traits that make or break a company in the eyes of a venture capitalist can improve the chances of success. Investors in 2023 aren’t convinced by ideas alone—they want to see they’re working with organizations that are built to bring those ideas to market.

Common Red Flags for VCs:

Lack of a clear understanding of the market

Lack of strong enough teams and experts

Lack of a clear path to adoption and usage

Lack of execution against expected milestones

Cisco’s ET&I group takes these lessons to heart when building new market incubations: Get executive buy-in, identify a clear market need, bring in the right teams, and commit to a time-bound plan to achieve product-market fit.

Leveraging Partnerships to Identify Opportunities

Startups are about solving problems. Successful startups set out to thoroughly understand a problem space. They think critically about how innovation and technology can solve challenges and unanswered difficulties globally.

A common barrier to understanding those problems is the innovation team’s lack of insight, lack of understanding of customers’ pain points, and lack of diversity. Without factoring in how other people, cultures, employees, or even countries think about an issue, startups can rush toward uninformed ideas that won’t survive in the market.

ET&I partners with more than 20 universities to explore the full scope of problems ranging from Generative and Responsible AI to quantum security and quantum networks. In 2022, the Cisco Research team within ET&I funded more than 51 research projects, completed 69 publications, issued, and filed 33 patents, and hosted an AI Summit last August. Active research drives active results.

It is well understood that solving some of the world’s most complex problems requires a deep understanding of what customers’ pain points and challenges are. ET&I relies heavily on customer listening, insights from VC communities, and academic research to build empathy with the practitioner, accelerating Proof of Value, Time to Value, and therefore driving rapid product adoption. Leveraging this innovation ecosystem gives ET&I both a competitive edge at the forefront of new technological advancements while shaping its roadmap of its future in cloud-native spaces. It’s a win-win situation.

Investing in Bleeding-Edge Tech

For tech companies seeking to find an edge in an already hypercompetitive market, finding that competitive advantage is what separates the winners from the laggards.

In addition to researching emerging technologies, one area Cisco ET&I set themselves to create a bleeding-edge solution is cloud-native application security products. By following a startup model and engaging deeply with early adopters, they created Panoptica—Cisco’s Cloud Application Security product that enables businesses to more securely adopt modern application architectures demanded by the market.

Companies are frequently either reluctant or skeptical to immediately jump into nascent technologies such as application security that have yet to prove their viability in the market. However, times have shown that companies willing to invest in disruptive innovations are more likely to survive during times of digital transformation. Those who rise to the occasion benefit from building highly scalable, resilient, and fast innovative solutions. Finally, companies can both attract and retain top talent while also staying ahead of their competition.

Embracing an Updated Startup Culture

The world grows more interconnected every day, and businesses increasingly understand that a deeper idea pool comes from a greater diversity of employees. But attracting great talent can be challenging if your company is hanging on to monolithic working models. New visionaries have evolved workplace expectations.

To foster a creative mindset, it’s essential to enable team members to take time away from work to engage in activities that inspire and energize. A growing number of credible studies show that work-life balance is solidly linked to productivity and job satisfaction. Keeping the best talent requires creating standards in a company culture that recognizes that every team member has a life outside the workplace.

By embracing outside activities, providing flexible working hours, and focusing on productivity over facetime, companies looking to foster innovation free their teams to move forward and discover world-changing technologies.

By embracing a state-of-the-art hybrid environment that provides flexible hours, remote work, and an inclusive culture, teams can give their best. This environment encourages teams to focus on Horizon 3 ideas and celebrate both successes and failures. This startup culture also fosters the concept of “flash teams” where individuals and skills come together and work on projects like a movie and then disband when the production is completed. Not to mention that Cisco is adamant about powering an inclusive future for all.

There’s much to get right (and wrong) in embracing and developing a startup mentality. The model of a few committed individuals spending weeks of sleepless nights to achieve a goal isn’t gone, but the market understands those examples aren’t sustainable. 

To keep renewing, to keep creating, and to keep pushing boundaries, Cisco ET&I is creating a new sustainable model for delivering innovation.

Consider checking out more information about ET&I today.

Check out the latest Cisco Research findings and gain a competitive edge.

Learn more about Panoptica Simplified Cloud-Native Application Security.

Cloud Native

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Straumann Group’s Sridhar Iyengar has a bold mission: To transform the nearly 70-year-old company’s data and technology organization into a data-as-a-service provider for the global manufacturer and supplier of dental implants, prosthetics, orthodontics, and digital dentistry — and to provide business stakeholders machine learning (ML) as a service as well.

“My vision is that I can give the keys to my businesses to manage their data and run their data on their own, as opposed to the Data & Tech team being at the center and helping them out,” says Iyengar, director of Data & Tech at Straumann Group North America.

Doing so will be no small feat. The Basel, Switzerland-based company, which operates in more than 100 countries, has petabytes of data, including highly structured customer data, data about treatments and lab requests, operational data, and a massive, growing volume of unstructured data, particularly imaging data. The company’s orthodontics business, for instance, makes heavy use of image processing to the point that unstructured data is growing at a pace of roughly 20% to 25% per month.

Advances in imaging technology present Straumann Group with the opportunity to provide its customers with new capabilities to offer their clients. For example, imaging data can be used to show patients how an aligner will change their appearance over time.

“It gives a lot of power to our providers in selling their services and at the same time gets more NPS [net promoter score] for us from the patient,” says Iyengar, who believes AI will play a critical role in Straumann’s image processing and lab treatments businesses. Hence the drive to provide ML as a service to the Data & Tech team’s internal customers.

“All they would have to do is just build their model and run with it,” he says.

But to augment its various businesses with ML and AI, Iyengar’s team first had to break down data silos within the organization and transform the company’s data operations.

“Digitizing was our first stake at the table in our data journey,” he says.

Selling the value of data transformation

Iyengar and his team are 18 months into a three- to five-year journey that started by building out the data layer — corralling data sources such as ERP, CRM, and legacy databases into data warehouses for structured data and data lakes for unstructured data.

That step, primarily undertaken by developers and data architects, established data governance and data integration. Now, the team’s information architects, in conjunction with business analysts, are working on the semantic layer, which feeds data from data warehouses and data lakes into data marts, including a finance mart, sales mart, supply chain mart, and market mart. The next goal, with the aid of partner Findability Sciences, will be to build out ML and AI pipelines into an information delivery layer that can support predictive and prescriptive analytics.

“As the information layer gets mature, that’s where the ML and the AI will start seeing some green shoots,” he says, adding that although data transformation was a pressing need when he signed on in 2021, he wanted a more compelling vision to sell the board and business leaders on tackling it.

For that, he relied on a defensive and offensive metaphor for his data strategy. The defensive side includes traditional elements of data management, such as data governance and data quality. The offensive side? That is the domain of AI and advanced analytics that serve a role beyond just insight and business optimization.

“The offensive side is how to generate revenue, all of the insights from the historical data that we have collected and, in fact, forecast the trends that are coming,” Iyengar says. “Most of the data that we get on the offensive side are unstructured, and we want to make sure that it makes sense to the business leaders and help them harmonize and enrich it in such a manner that they can serve their customers more efficiently and that the customers get served and leverage Straumann’s services in a much more robust, frictionless manner.”

Not surprisingly, it was this offensive side that got Straumann’s board invested in Iyengar’s plan for transformation.

“When the customer-centricity and the digital transformation piece was proposed — along with data transformation — I think that resonated with them,” Iyengar says.

Skilling up for the future

Iyengar’s team found success by adopting a use-case approach, not unlike that of one of Strauman’s core businesses. “We pretty much took the same principle of the pre-treatment and the post-treatment images that we show to our patients,” Iyengar says.

The team asked company leaders to pick a number of customer-centric vectors to illustrate how data innovations could be used to drive business outcomes. One of the targets was driving down customer churn. The team started by splitting churn propensity into two values: one for retention of existing customers and one for new customer acquisition. It used typical customer lifetime values and analyzed buying patterns to provide the marketing team and sales team with insights they could use to drive their strategies.

Iyengar says adopting this approach to selling digital transformation internally has made the job much easier. “We are seeing a lot of investments being approved from all the businesses in order to support that initiative,” he says.

In the meantime, as the team begins to build out ML and AI capabilities, it is also imperative to transform the Data & Tech team itself.

“The skill set that we have inherently from our traditional school point of view doesn’t suit the ML and AI part of it,” Iyengar says. “What you need there is statisticians and mathematicians, not programmers and coders, right? So, we have been transforming ourselves as well, culturally and from a skill point of view. That takes its own time. We have a learning curve at our end to build the right skill set within us.”

Iyengar is supplementing his team’s skill set with help from enterprise AI specialist Findability Sciences. The company’s Findability.ai platform combines machine learning, computer vision, and natural language processing (NLP) to aid customers in their AI journey.

“I have a lot of traditional ETL skills in my team,” he says. “What I don’t have is the ML/AI skill set right now. Partners are helping us in that space.”

Ultimately, Iyengar says, these changes will transform how the Data & Tech team interfaces with the business. For now, it operates under a centralized “hub and spokes” model. But he says hiring statisticians and mathematicians in his team won’t be scalable. Instead, what he really wants within three to five years is to embed them in teams closer to the lines of business, so the businesses can run models by themselves.

“Right now, we’re driving the bus at 100 miles and hour and changing the tires at the same time, which is not going to be scalable by any means, though I’m proud of my team that we are doing it,” he says.

Artificial Intelligence, Data Management, Predictive Analytics

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Why a CISO can become a CIO: Before working for Petrofac, George Eapen spent 12 years with General Electric where he had multiple IT leadership roles. At Petrofac, Eapen was appointed CISO in 2018 and was promoted to CIO in 2020.

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CIO Leadership Live

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Mario Foster is an experienced CIO who has been in the industry and the region for over 15 years. Before joining Al Ghurair Group, he worked for Saeed & Mohammed Al Naboodah Group based in Dubai for almost eight years leading the digital charter of the organization by exploring the business potential of new technologies such as RPA, AI, IoT, 3D printing and others.

What was your first job in the IT industry?

I was a technical support engineer in Canada. I always liked electronics in general, and I still remember my teenage days when I used to watch my older brother (who is an electrical engineer by profession) repairing our stereo cassette tape recorder and other old home electronics, and trying to learn from him. I even managed to repair some, but I never knew that I would be in IT specifically. I was more interested in electronics engineering. 

What was your education?

It was initially in electronics engineering and then moved into computer science. I’ve also completed my MBA in technology management. As for the many technology certifications I hold, my first was MCSE [Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer] more than 20 years ago. I also have multiple Cisco and RSA Security certificates, and two ISACAc Certificates [CISM and CRISC] in addition to my PMP from the old days. Those are only some that I can remember.

Explain your career path. Have you always been in the industry?

I started as an IT hardware support engineer in a small company assembling PCs. I then moved into networking and decided to focus on Microsoft technologies. MCSE was a hot certificate at that time, which even on its own could immediately secure a job for people at that time, so I decided to complete it while working. It was challenging because then I couldn’t afford to study the six required courses at a training centre to complete my six exams. I ended up learning on my own and building my first small network and my exchange mail server at home, and that was when my real IT career started. I then worked for a few years with Microsoft in Canada before accepting a job in the US with RSA Security, which was an excellent learning experience for me. After a couple of other senior IT jobs in Canada, I moved to Saudi Arabia and landed a job with Riyad Bank to manage their SOC. Right after that role, my focus switched to the business applications domain, as I wanted to have an experience span over all main technology domains—infrastructure, security and business applications. And here I am now securing my fourth CIO role, but this time it’s with Al Ghurair Group, where all my previous CIO roles have been with family-owned large conglomerates, two in Saudi Arabia and two in the UAE. 

How do you think your expertise and job at Saeed & Mohammed Al Naboodah Group will support your new role at Al Ghurair Group?

Working as a group CIO for a large, family-owned conglomerate is a totally different experience than any other CIO role with a single company having one business vertical, even if it’s an MNC, and it requires a very special skill set and work culture experience that’s very niche to this type of family-owned group companies.

For example, in such large groups, the group CIO has to deal with multiple business unit heads and GMs, and each one of them is running a different business vertical. So their technology requirements from the CIO might be totally different, and their expectations from technology are different. Some are believers in technology, while others aren’t. On top of that, you have the corporate head office or holding group to support and empower too. This part of my experience at Al Naboodah and at previous family-owned conglomerates is empowering and will help me at Al Ghurair Group. I’ve also previously worked for a Saudi conglomerate, which included multiple industrial manufacturing companies within the group, which I expect will also help me since industrial manufacturing is one of the key businesses within Al Ghurair Group. I should also highlight the importance for the CIO to have solid business knowledge, since depending on technical knowledge might be good enough for an IT manager, but not for a CIO. 

What are your priorities in this new role? What would you like to achieve?

First is to complete my full assessment of the current IT operating model across the group and to present my findings and my recommendations to the group CEO and the board in order to receive their approval on a new recommended IT operating model that’s adding value to the business, while also being in full alignment with business strategy. Next comes IT governance and security, which is also a priority before I even start looking at business digital transformation initiatives. Things can then follow naturally when the right structure is in place, and this includes having additional technology skillsets that might be missing and needed for any digital transformation initiative down the road. 

How do you define long-term IT department success, and what methods do you use to measure overall performance?

I define it by the amount of value added to business over the years when IT becomes a business enabler and a partner to business rather than just a support function.I measure the overall performance at minimum in two areas: one by conducting regular business feedback surveys and comparing our performance with previous years, and the second is comparing the IT department performance and my CIO’s performance against industry standard benchmarks from worldwide technology research firm leaders such as Gartner and others. There are also other ways to measure overall IT performance.

What are the top questions CIOs should ask before accepting a new job?

Ask about the high-level business strategy to find out if business leaders value technology and look at the IT department as a business partner or as a support or cost centre. Also, a CIO understands the IT structure in place before accepting an offer and evaluates if this is a structure he or she is comfortable working within. CIOs shouldn’t be shy asking what’s expected from them and what will be considered their key success factors. Then these expectations can be evaluated against their own expertise and whether they can achieve and deliver those goals or not.

What would you advise to a CIO who wants to take a new job?

Do not be afraid to take on a new challenge, and always raise your own bar and challenge yourself.

Careers, CIO, IT Leadership

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Veneeth Purushotaman, Group CIO at Aster DM Healthcare explains how the hospital digital strategy helped them to become the first private hospital in Dubai to secure HIMSS Stage 6 certification.

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CIO Leadership Live

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Efficient supply chain operations are increasingly vital to business success, and for many enterprise, IT is the answer.

With over 2,000 suppliers and 35,000 components, Kanpur-based Lohia Group was facing challenges in managing its vendors and streamlining its supply chain. The capital goods company, which has been in textiles and flexible packaging for more than three decades, is a major supplier of end-to-end machinery for flexible woven (polypropylene and high-density polyethylene) packaging industry.

“In the absence of an integrated system, there was no control on vendor supply, which led to an increased and unbalanced inventory,” says Jagdip Kumar, CIO of Lohia. “There was also a mismatch between availability of stock and customer deliveries. At the warehouse level, we had no visibility with respect to what inventory we had and where it was located.”

Those issues were compounded by the fact that the lead time for certain components required to fulfill customer orders ranges from four to eight months. With such long component delivery cycles, client requirements often change. “The customer would want a different model of the machine, which required different components. As we used Excel and email, we were unable to quickly make course correction,” Kumar says. 

Jagdip Kumar, CIO, Lohia Corp

istock

Moreover, roughly 35% of the components involved in each customer order are customized based on the customer’s specific requirements. Long lead times and a lack of visibility at the supplier’s end meant procurement planning for these components was challenging, he says, adding that, in the absence of any ability to forecast demand, Lohia was often saddled with disbalanced (either extra or less) inventory.

The solution? Better IT.

Managing suppliers to enhance efficiency and customer experience

To manage its inventory and create a win-win situation for the company and its suppliers, Kumar opted to implement a vendor management solution.

“The solution was conceptualized with the goal of removing the manual effort required during the procurement process by automating most of the tasks of the company and the supplier while providing the updates that the former needed,” says Kumar.

“We roped in KPMG to develop the vendor portal for us on this SAP platform, which is developed on SAP BTP (Business Technology Platform), a business-centric, open, and unified platform for the entire SAP ecosystem,” he says.

The application was developed using SAP FIORI/UI5, while the backend was developed using SAP O-Data/ABAP services. The cloud-based front end is integrated with Lohia’s ERP system, thereby providing all relevant information in real-time. It took four months to implement the solution, which went live in September 2021.

With the new deployment, the company now knows the changes happening in real-time, be it the non-availability of material or a customer not making the payment or wanting to delay delivery of their ordered machine. “All these changes now get communicated to the vendors who prepone or postpone accordingly. Armed with complete visibility, we were able to reduce our inventory by 10%, which resulted in cost savings of around ₹ 200 million,” says Kumar.

The vendor portal has also automated several tasks such as schedule generation and gate entry, which have led to increases in productivity and efficiency.

“The schedules are now automatically generated through MRP [material requirement planning] giving visibility to our suppliers for the next three to four months, which helps them to plan their raw material requirements in advance and provide us timely material,” Kumar says. The result is a material shortage reduction of 15% and a 1.5X increase in productivity. “It has also helped us to give more firm commitments to our customers and our customers delivery has improved significantly, increasing customer trust,” he says.

“Earlier there was always a crowd at the gate as the entry of each truck took 10-15 minutes. The new solution automatically picks up the consignment details when the vendor ships it. At the gate, only the barcode is scanned, and truck entry is allowed entry. With 100 trucks coming in every day, we now save 200-300 minutes of precious time daily,” he says.

Kumar’s in-house development team worked in tandem with KPMG to build custom capabilities on the platform, such as automatic scheduling and FIFO (first in, first out) inventory valuation.

To ensure suppliers would adopt the solution, Lohia deployed its own team at each vendors’ premises for two to three days to teach them how to use the portal.

“We showcased the benefits that they could gain over the next two to three months by using the solution,” Kumar says. “We have been able to onboard 200 suppliers, who provide 80% of the components, on this portal. We may touch 90-95% by the end of this year.”

Streamlining warehouse operations to enhance productivity

At the company’s central warehouse in Kanpur, Kumar faced traceability issues related to its spare parts business. Also, stock was spread across multiple locations and most processes were manual, leading to inefficient and inaccurate spare parts dispatches.

“There were instances when a customer asked for 100 parts, and we supplied only 90 parts. There were also cases wherein a customer had asked for two different parts in different quantities, and we dispatched the entire quantity comprising only one part,” says Kumar. “Then there was the issue of preference. As we take all the payment upfront from our customers, our preference is to supply the spare part on a ‘first come first serve’ basis. However, there could be another customer whose factory was down because he was awaiting a part. We could not prioritize that customer’s delivery over others.”

That the contract workers were not literate, and the company had too much dependency on their experience was another bottleneck.

To overcome these problems, and to integrate its supply chain logistics with its warehouse and distribution processes, Lohia partnered with KPMG to deploy SAP EWM application on the cloud.

“We decided to optimize the warehouse processes with the usage of barcode, QR code, and wifi-enabled RF-based devices. There was also a need to synchronize warehouse activities through the integration of warehouse processes with tracking and traceability functions,” says Kumar. The implementation commenced on 01st April 2022, and it went live on 01st August 2022.

To achieve traceability, Kumar barcoded Lohia’s entire stock. “We now get a list from the system on the dispatchable order and its sequence. Earlier there was a lot of time wastage, as we didn’t know which part was kept in which portion of the warehouse. Employees no longer take the zig-zag path as the new solution provides the complete path and the sequence in which they must go and pick up the material,” Kumar says.

Kumar also implemented aATP (Advanced Available-to-Promise), which provides a response to order fulfilment inquiries in Sales and Production Planning. This feature within the EWM solution provides a check based on the present stock situation and any planned or anticipated stock receipts.

“The outcome was as per the expectations. There was improved inventory visibility across the warehouse as well as in-transit stock. The EWM dashboard helped warehouse supervisor to have controls on inbound, outbound, stocks overview, resource management, and physical inventory,” says Kumar.

“Earlier one person used to complete only 30 to 32 parts in a day but after this implementation, the same person dispatches 47 to 48 parts in a day, which is a significant jump of 50% in productivity. The entire process has become 100% accurate with no wrong supply. If there is short supply, it is known to us in advance. There is also a 25% reduction in overall turnaround time in inbound and outbound processes,” he adds.

Supply Chain Management Software

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Microsoft has signed a 10-year deal with the London Stock Exchange Group (LSEG) that calls for the software giant to buy a 4% stake in the exchange in order to jointly develop new products and services for data and analytics.

Microsoft will buy the stake from a Blackstone and Thomson Reuters consortium, which previously sold the financial data company Refinitiv to LSEG for £22bn (US$26.9 billion) in 2021. As a result of the new agreement, LSEG now has a contractual agreement over the 10-year period to spend a minimum of $2.8 billion on cloud-related products with Microsoft.

While the financial terms of the deal have not been fully disclosed, under the arrangement, LSEG’s Workspace data and analytics application—acquired as part of the Refinitiv deal—will become integrated into Microsoft Teams, to provide users with a wider variety of in-app experiences than are currently available, including more detailed trend analysis and risk-building scenarios.

Microsoft said its initial focus would be on delivering interoperability between Workspace and Microsoft Teams, Excel and PowerPoint, with other Microsoft applications and a new version of LSEG’s Workspace, accessed entirely within the Microsoft 365 suite, to be added in the future.

“This strategic partnership is a significant milestone on LSEG’s journey towards becoming the leading global financial markets infrastructure and data business, and will transform the experience for our customers,” said David Schwimmer, CEO of London Stock Exchange Group, in comments published alongside a Microsoft blog post announcing the news.

“Bringing together our leading data sets, analytics, and global customer base with Microsoft’s comprehensive and trusted cloud services and global reach creates attractive revenue growth opportunities for both companies,” he said.

Since the news was announced, in early trading on Monday, LSEG’s share price rose by 4%.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella also welcomed the announcement, saying in a press release that “advances in the cloud and AI will fundamentally transform how financial institutions research, interact, and transact across asset classes, and adapt to changing market conditions.

“Our partnership will bring together the industry leadership of the London Stock Exchange Group with the trust and breadth of the Microsoft Cloud — spanning Azure, AI, and Teams — to build next-generation services that will empower our customers to generate business insights, automate complex and time-consuming processes, and ultimately, do more with less,” he said.

The deal with the London Stock Exchange was not the only acquisition news announced by Microsoft in recent days. Last week, the company also bought Southampton, UK-based fiber-optic company Lumenisity for an undisclosed amount.

Lumenisity was spun out from the University of Southampton in 2017, as part of a hollow core fiber-optic research project. Hollow core fiber allows light to travel at a lower latency and speeds up to 47% quicker compared to traditional fiber, with Microsoft saying it plans to use the company’s technology for cloud platform users that require strict latency and security requirements.

“The technology can provide benefits across a broad range of industries including healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, retail and government,” said Girish Bablani, corporate vice president for Azure Core, in a blog post.

Cloud Computing, Financial Services Industry, Technology Industry

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Banking as a Service (BaaS) is revolutionising the finance sector. BaaS enables non-financial companies to provide customers with financial products and services such as personal loans, credit cards and digital savings accounts. It leverages the expertise and experience of trusted banks, such as Standard Chartered, so they can offer a wider range of services to existing and new customers.

When Indonesian e-commerce company Bukalapak wanted to provide their customers with access to financial services, they partnered with Standard Chartered to launch BukaTabungan, which is powered by Standard Chartered nexus (SC nexus) BaaS platform. While SC nexus already had a footprint on AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region, it had not yet migrated to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.

Sourced Group an Amdocs Company (Sourced), migrated SC nexus’ digital banking platform from AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) within a tight timeframe. SC nexus was planning to make that migration by 2025. But to meet the needs and regulatory compliance of Bukalapak, that migration was brought forward. And while this migration typically takes about a year, Sourced completed the migration of the workload which was spread across four AWS EKS clusters coordinating 103 EC2 instances across three availability zones in just nine months. The accompanying data migration included eight PostgreSQL clusters and data sync for a Cassandra cluster and two Amazon S3 buckets.

As well as enabling Bukalapak to achieve its objectives, being able to offer BaaS from Indonesia broadens SC nexus’ market reach.

The migration was complex as not all the required AWS services were available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. At the time of migration, Sourced needed to develop robust and compliant solutions as Kinesis Analytics, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS EKS and GPU instances were not available in the AWS Jakarta region.

Sourced’s expertise and deep knowledge of cloud services was a valuable asset in this complex migration. For example, the company was able to architect an automated solution for the data migration. This was a crucial factor that enabled the migration, that took nine months of preparation and planning, to be successfully completed in just eight hours.

The partnership between Sourced and SC nexus has supported and enabled Standard Chartered’s strategic priority of scaling up its mass retail presence through innovative partnerships and generating new revenue streams through digital initiatives. Being able to meet customers’ needs, such as those of Bukalapak proves that it is possible to offer reliable, robust and secure BaaS offerings that take into account the needs for data sovereignty and differing regulatory requirements.

Sourced has expertise in most major cloud platforms offered across the world. The partnership with SC nexus, which has grown over several years, has given SC nexus first-mover advantage in several countries. For example, Indonesia is one of the world’s largest emerging markets with almost 200 million internet users. The partnership with Sourced means SC nexus can offer BaaS in country with onshore services through AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) that are compliant with local laws and regulations.

Similarly, it can also do the same in Singapore as well as many of the over 30 markets Standard Chartered already operates in. With a proven track record in making SC nexus available in multiple regions through the partnership with Sourced, Standard Chartered has a platform that can grow beyond the Asia Pacific region and offer compliant BaaS across the world.

BaaS gives businesses that are looking for new services they can offer to customers a high-value service. And while banking has been extremely difficult to break into because of the high cost of establishing systems and licensing and maintaining regulatory compliance SC nexus enables businesses to offer banking services through a trusted banking partner. Sourced has enabled SC nexus to expand its reach across the Asia Pacific region and beyond.

Read the full case study here

About Sourced Group

Sourced Group an Amdocs company is an award-winning global cloud consultancy that enables enterprises to make the most of cloud services with a focus on security, governance and compliance. With offices globally we provide professional services for securing, migrating and managing the cloud infrastructure of large enterprise customers. We specialize in configuration management, automation, cloud computing and data management for a wide range of industries, including financial services, media, transport and telecommunications companies. By utilising our proven deployment frameworks, and trusted design patterns, we work with the largest and most security conscious organisations to unlock innovation through cloud computing.

About Amdocs

Amdocs’ purpose is to enrich lives and progress society, using creativity and technology to build a better connected world. Amdocs and its 27,000 employees partner with the leading players in the communications and media industry, enabling next-generation experiences in 85 countries. Our cloud-native, open and dynamic portfolio of digital solutions, platforms and services brings greater choice, faster time to market and flexibility, to better meet the evolving needs of our customers as they drive growth, transform and take their business to the cloud. Listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, Amdocs had revenue of $4.2 billion in fiscal 2020. For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com.

Managed Cloud Services

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Banking as a Service (BaaS) is revolutionising the finance sector. BaaS enables non-financial companies to provide customers with financial products and services such as personal loans, credit cards and digital savings accounts. It leverages the expertise and experience of trusted banks, such as Standard Chartered, so they can offer a wider range of services to existing and new customers.

When Indonesian e-commerce company Bukalapak wanted to provide their customers with access to financial services, they partnered with Standard Chartered to launch BukaTabungan, which is powered by Standard Chartered nexus (SC nexus) BaaS platform. While SC nexus already had a footprint on AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) region, it had not yet migrated to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region.

Sourced Group an Amdocs Company (Sourced), migrated SC nexus’ digital banking platform from AWS Asia Pacific (Hong Kong) to AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) within a tight timeframe. SC nexus was planning to make that migration by 2025. But to meet the needs and regulatory compliance of Bukalapak, that migration was brought forward. And while this migration typically takes about a year, Sourced completed the migration of the workload which was spread across four AWS EKS clusters coordinating 103 EC2 instances across three availability zones in just nine months. The accompanying data migration included eight PostgreSQL clusters and data sync for a Cassandra cluster and two Amazon S3 buckets.

As well as enabling Bukalapak to achieve its objectives, being able to offer BaaS from Indonesia broadens SC nexus’ market reach.

The migration was complex as not all the required AWS services were available in the AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) region. At the time of migration, Sourced needed to develop robust and compliant solutions as Kinesis Analytics, AWS Transit Gateway, AWS EKS and GPU instances were not available in the AWS Jakarta region.

Sourced’s expertise and deep knowledge of cloud services was a valuable asset in this complex migration. For example, the company was able to architect an automated solution for the data migration. This was a crucial factor that enabled the migration, that took nine months of preparation and planning, to be successfully completed in just eight hours.

The partnership between Sourced and SC nexus has supported and enabled Standard Chartered’s strategic priority of scaling up its mass retail presence through innovative partnerships and generating new revenue streams through digital initiatives. Being able to meet customers’ needs, such as those of Bukalapak proves that it is possible to offer reliable, robust and secure BaaS offerings that take into account the needs for data sovereignty and differing regulatory requirements.

Sourced has expertise in most major cloud platforms offered across the world. The partnership with SC nexus, which has grown over several years, has given SC nexus first-mover advantage in several countries. For example, Indonesia is one of the world’s largest emerging markets with almost 200 million internet users. The partnership with Sourced means SC nexus can offer BaaS in country with onshore services through AWS Asia Pacific (Jakarta) that are compliant with local laws and regulations.

Similarly, it can also do the same in Singapore as well as many of the over 30 markets Standard Chartered already operates in. With a proven track record in making SC nexus available in multiple regions through the partnership with Sourced, Standard Chartered has a platform that can grow beyond the Asia Pacific region and offer compliant BaaS across the world.

BaaS gives businesses that are looking for new services they can offer to customers a high-value service. And while banking has been extremely difficult to break into because of the high cost of establishing systems and licensing and maintaining regulatory compliance SC nexus enables businesses to offer banking services through a trusted banking partner. Sourced has enabled SC nexus to expand its reach across the Asia Pacific region and beyond.

Read the full case study here

About Sourced Group

Sourced Group an Amdocs company is an award-winning global cloud consultancy that enables enterprises to make the most of cloud services with a focus on security, governance and compliance. With offices globally we provide professional services for securing, migrating and managing the cloud infrastructure of large enterprise customers. We specialize in configuration management, automation, cloud computing and data management for a wide range of industries, including financial services, media, transport and telecommunications companies. By utilising our proven deployment frameworks, and trusted design patterns, we work with the largest and most security conscious organisations to unlock innovation through cloud computing.

About Amdocs

Amdocs’ purpose is to enrich lives and progress society, using creativity and technology to build a better connected world. Amdocs and its 27,000 employees partner with the leading players in the communications and media industry, enabling next-generation experiences in 85 countries. Our cloud-native, open and dynamic portfolio of digital solutions, platforms and services brings greater choice, faster time to market and flexibility, to better meet the evolving needs of our customers as they drive growth, transform and take their business to the cloud. Listed on the NASDAQ Global Select Market, Amdocs had revenue of $4.2 billion in fiscal 2020. For more information, visit Amdocs at www.amdocs.com.

Managed Cloud Services

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SkyCity Entertainment Group Chief Information Officer Glen McLatchie on his career-defining moments, the importance of mentoring and professional development, and the transformation plans ahead for the casino and hotel group after a challenging few years.

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