Tech Intensity - Driven By Intelligent Cloud And Intelligent Edge
In the last week of February, India had two very important visitors from the US - Donald Trump and Satya Nadella. While the former sold $3 billion worth of defense gear to India, the latter preached and sowed the idea of ‘Tech Intensity’ into the minds of Indian business executives, technologists, developers, and entrepreneur hopefuls. If you would like to weigh the impact of the respective actions, the latter would count more in its ability to further the nation’s development agenda.
Satya Nadella, CEO, Microsoft had a three-stop tour where he presented on the theme of Tech Intensity at the Future Decoded: Tech Summit event by Microsoft. He commented that we have an unprecedented opportunity to apply technology to drive economic growth that is inclusive, trusted and sustainable in India. To leverage this opportunity, Microsoft is partnering with leaders in every industry across the country to help them build their own digital capability, transform their organizations and achieve more in this new era, he added.
These statements sort of spell out the concept of Tech Intensity, but not quite so clearly. In his talk Satya Nadella did give out more clarity on what he meant by Tech Intensity.
It is the combination of ‘how quickly’ technologies in the spheres of Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge are adopted and ‘how deeply’ organizations are building tech capabilities within the organization, both exponentiated in an environment of trust. Mathematically, Tech Intensity is the product of the pace of intelligent cloud adoption and the depth of tech capability raised to the exponential power of trust.
Reflecting on the past decade, Satya said that though the achievements in consumer Internet and cloud have been monumental, he felt that the results are narrow. He pointed out that profits were primarily derived out of market places or aggregation-driven models. He called for the need for broader profitability cutting across all sectors; he was optimistic about the possibilities.
His optimism stems from the secular perspective that tech and digital tech is just getting embodied in the mainstream at our places - at home, hospitals, offices, schools, stadiums; across professions; across industries. When these frontiers are tackled, unprecedented value would be realized.
The specter of mainstream digital adoption would be realized by the dual construct of Intelligent Cloud and Intelligent Edge. Intelligent Cloud is the ubiquitous and distributed computing fabric. Intelligent Edge is the sphere of ambient intelligence with consumption experienced through a mix of ever-evolving devices tailored to various senses.
In the rest of his talk, Satya Nadella dwelled on the layers of Microsoft tech stack and its evolution, interspersed with examples of how some Indian organizations have been pushing the frontiers of excellence. At Bangalore, there was a special showcase of start-ups that have been scaling the peaks of cutting-edge innovation. Together, they exemplify Tech Intensity.
Myntra
Myntra, India’s leading destination for fashion and lifestyle, is using Azure to focus on innovation, speed and agility and strengthen their leadership position even further. The elasticity of Azure is helping Myntra scale rapidly for big spikes that occur routinely during festive seasons. Since the deployment of Azure, Myntra, has recorded a 50 per cent rise in orders in the latest edition of its biennial End of Reason Sale.
Udaan
Udaan, the fastest Indian startup to become a unicorn, is a born on Azure company, With a lean technology engineering team, Udaan leverages Azure for all their infrastructure and cloud needs that span business functions, like lending credit, logistics and e-commerce. Azure provides the tech platform that enables Udaan to be agile in building out technologies that help them rapidly increase their coverage and scale.
Royal Enfield
Royal Enfield, the oldest motorcycle brand in continuous production in the world, had multiple IT systems that were unable to provide a single view of customers. This led to higher turnaround times, as well employee and customer dissatisfaction. They integrated reporting capabilities across departments, deploying D365 across its operations – specifically D365 Sales, Service, Field Service, Retail, Finance and Operations. This has improved customer experience/touchpoints across the sales journey – from the sale itself to post-sales service. They are now able to follow up after a test ride and capture customer feedback, and also seek services appointments actively. Moreover, they are also able to generate new insights across operations, for example they can identify the most frequent reasons for repeat repairs. The solution is now live at 120 dealers and distributors.
Eureka Forbes
Eureka Forbes has a 6000 and above strong door to door sales team – one of the largest direct sales forces in India. Their sales model needed to be modernized for an era in which customer expectations are changing and behaviors are changing, such as checking products online. Moreover, there is new friction in the buying process, such as gated communities restricting access. Eureka Forbes has consolidated seven different CRM systems onto Dynamics 365, Salespeople can access customer info directly on their smartphones, including granular insights like water quality and the right product to sell in real time.
HAMS
Road safety is a major public health issue in India and across the world. The HAMS (Harnessing Automobiles for Safety) solution, developed by Microsoft Research, aims to mitigate this. In pilots underway. a smartphone attached to the car’s windshield authenticates the driver is the same as the license applicant. It also monitors the driving test to ensure that the test is fool-proof and objective. At the end of the driving test, HAMS generate the result to show whether the driver has passed the test or not. The implementation has increased the number of driving tests, reduced the time a candidate has to wait to do a test, and also made the tests completely objective both for the evaluator and the candidate.
Narayana Health
Narayana Health has used Power BI to improve efficiency across 6,000 beds in its network of hospitals – from a 60 percent improvement in lab turnaround times to reduction of wastage of blood in the blood banks to better predicting surgery costs. Power BI dashboards are key to Narayana Health’s vision of offering low cost, world-class healthcare. They are used to track both financial and operational metrics offering real-time insights across all hospitals at Narayana – a process that earlier took as many as two to three weeks to complete. The solutions also measure real-time data of more than 3,000 doctors across 30 comparable parameters.
Start-ups
ElasticRun
Aiming to redefine India’s logistics industry with a variable capacity distribution network, it is built on an AI powered platform that offers capacity planning, real-time order matching, and automated order collection as well as a payment system for e-tailers, consumer goods companies and allied service providers.
Spektacom
Founded by cricketer Anil Kumble, it unveils trends and patterns to understand the science behind the art of sports. The Power Bat is equipped with data-capturing equipment and advanced modeling techniques and is powered by machine learning, IoT and Microsoft Azure’s cloud offerings, providing real-time analytics and data management capabilities.
Bizongo
India’s largest multi-category packaging platform in the B2B space delivering more than 290 million packaging units across India, it is developing solutions to automate the packaging supply chain. This ensures availability of packaging material with clients to create an integrated and digital packaging supply chain through auto-replenishment.
Sun Mobility
Working in the field of green energy, it provides Battery as a Service (BAAS) solution with an aim to transform India’s use of clean energy. Leveraging Microsoft Azure IoT, it’s working with state transport undertakings, fleet operators, shared mobility providers, and automotive OEMs across all platforms to create scalable, economical and smarter mobility solutions.
Bionic Yantra
Aiming to restore mobility for severely injured people, it has engineered a wearable robotic exoskeleton that enables rehabilitation and helps patients walk again. Using IoT and ML, their advanced approaches are enabling data trails for patient authenticity and progress achieved and predicting patient recovery.
