Author: Neel Achary

Axis Communications Recognizes Partner Contributions and Business Innovations at the South Asia Pacific Partner Summit 2023

India, June 08, 2023: Axis Communications, the market leader in network video, successfully concluded its first integrated Annual Partner Summit for 2023 in India, representing the entire South Asia Pacific region. Held in Goa, the event brought together industry leaders, technology experts, and Axis partners from the region for a two-day immersive experience to ignite innovation and collaboration in the security and surveillance landscape. The event hosted a total of 166 participants including 129 channel and technology partners.

The summit was attended by senior leaders across different boards and regions from Axis Communications including Boudewijn Pesch, Vice President of APAC; Carl Malmqvist, Regional Director of South Asia Pacific; Mats Thulin, Director of Core Technologies, Sudhindra Holla, Director of India & SAARC, Monica Tomar, Regional Marketing Manager, South Asia Pacific, Amanda Lee, HR Business Partner, South Asia Pacific, and more.

Themed Powered by Partnership, the conversations at the event focused on the growth strategy and vision for Asia Pacific and South Asia Pacific. The two days comprised of topics including industry trends, challenges, and technological advancements designed to empower the Axis ecosystem to build strategic partnerships.

Emphasizing the pivotal role played by Axis channel partners in navigating through a dynamic business environment, Carl Malmqvist, Regional Director, South Asia Pacific, commented, “At Axis Communications, we are driven by partnerships and empowered by the people. The Axis Partner Summit 2023 exemplified this power of collaboration and showcased the unwavering commitment of our partners and leaders. Our esteemed channel partners serve as the bedrock of our achievements, labouring in unison with us to scale the gambit of our success. We are committed to fortifying and expanding our business footprint through a robust channel partner network.”

Addressing the success of the Summit, Sudhindra Holla, Director of India and SAARC, said, “The Axis Partner Summit 2023 exceeded our expectations in terms of engagement, knowledge-sharing, and collaboration from our ecosystem players. Our objective was to bring together our partners, distributors, and ecosystem partners in an environment to recognize and appreciate the significant results achieved by them throughout the year. The summit provided a unique platform to foster innovation, strengthen relationships, and collectively shape the future of the security industry.”

In addition to fostering collaboration, the summit acknowledged partners’ exceptional contributions and dedication in 2022 through various accolades. In total, there were 27 awards across nine categories, including categories such as Axis Camera Station Specialist, End-to-end Solutions, Project of the Year, Best Long-Standing Partnership Award and more.

During the summit, Axis Communications unveiled several exciting product launches, demonstrating the company’s commitment to pushing the boundaries of video surveillance technology. These new offerings are poised to revolutionize the security industry, empowering organizations to address evolving industry challenges proactively. This year, the event witnessed a unique showcase of products with the Lights Out demonstration which included LIVE products in action during low and no light scenarios.

The event was jointly sponsored by BriefCam, CyberLink Corp., Digifort, Genetec Inc., Milestone Systems, Ipsotek, Irisity, Videonetics and Wasabi.

TII Trains its State-of-the-art LLM, Falcon 40B, on AWS

The #1 model on the Hugging Face Open LLM Leaderboard is now available to customers via Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart, making it easier to build cutting-edge generative AI applications using the top-performing open source model

India – June 8, 2023 – Amazon Web Services, Inc. (AWS), an Amazon.com, Inc. company, today announced that Technology Innovation Institute (TII), a leading global scientific research center in Abu Dhabi, trained its top-performing, open source Falcon 40B model on AWS. Falcon 40B is a 40-billion-parameter large language model (LLM) available under the Apache 2.0 license that ranked #1 in Hugging Face’s Open LLM Leaderboard, which tracks, ranks, and evaluates LLMs across multiple benchmarks to identify top performing models. Customers can now deploy Falcon 40B from Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, a machine learning (ML) hub that offers pre-trained models, giving customers access to Falcon 40B’s state-of-the-art accuracy and industry-leading performance without having to build their own model from scratch. To get started with Amazon SageMaker JumpStart, visit aws.amazon.com/sagemaker/jumpstart.

LLMs are a subset of machine learning (ML) models focused on language that can power a broad range of generative AI applications, from text processing and summarization to question answering. While these LLMs have the potential to transform industries, the process of building, training, and deploying an LLM can take weeks, if not months, and cost tens of millions of dollars, putting them out of reach of many companies. To drive better performance and cost efficiencies throughout the development process, numerous customers, including Stability AI, AI 21 Labs, Hugging Face, and LG AI rely on Amazon SageMaker, AWS’s end-to-end machine ML service, to build, train, and deploy their LLMs.

That is why TII turned to Amazon SageMaker to build its Falcon 40B model. Because SageMaker is a fully managed service, TII could focus on developing custom training mechanisms and optimizations instead of managing its ML infrastructure. To minimize training costs and reduce time to market, TII pursued several optimizations, including writing a custom matrix multiplication, to accelerate training speed. Throughout the training process, AWS also worked closely with TII to enhance resiliency using SageMaker, ensuring that training ran smoothly and reducing interruptions that required developer attention.

TII released its Falcon 40B model in May 2023 under the Apache 2.0 license. Since its release, Falcon 40B has outperformed similar contemporary models across various benchmarks, demonstrating exceptional performance without specialized fine-tuning. To make it easier for customers to access this state-of-the-art model, AWS has also made Falcon 40B available to customers via Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart. Now customers of every size and across every industry can quickly and easily deploy their own Falcon 40B model and customize it to fit their specific needs for applications such as translation, question answering, summarizing information, or identifying images.

“Falcon-40B’s open source release empowers organizations to harness its exceptional capabilities and drive advancements in AI-driven solutions. It represents a significant milestone in our commitment to fostering AI innovation and exemplifies the profound scientific contributions of the UAE,” said executive director of AI-Cross Center Unit and Project Lead for LLM Projects at TII. “By making Falcon LLM open-source, we aim to enable widespread access to its advanced tech capabilities and empower researchers and organizations worldwide. Next steps include contributing to further advancements in the field of AI and advanced technologies, with new models on the horizon, and promoting the utilization of advanced AI tech within UAE organizations and businesses.”

To help customers get started quickly with ML, customers can deploy and use the Falcon models easily in SageMaker Studio or programmatically through the SageMaker Python SDK. Falcon 40B are generally available today through Amazon SageMaker JumpStart in US East (Ohio), US East (N. Virginia), US West (Oregon), Asia Pacific (Sydney), Asia Pacific (Seoul), Europe (London), and Canada (Central), with availability in additional AWS Regions coming soon.

Experience Center Opening: Synology and Data Skill Systems Unveil Game-Changing Storage Solutions for Media & Entertainment

Mumbai, India – June 08th,2023- Synology, a global leader in network-attached storage (NAS), IP surveillance, and network solutions, is proud to announce a strategic partnership with its India local partner, Data Skill Systems, to present Synology’s innovative storage solutions for the media and entertainment industry. As part of this collaboration, Data Skill Systems will also be unveiling its new Experience Center, dedicated to showcasing Synology’s comprehensive range of storage solutions.

The Experience Center, located in Andheri (West), is set to open its doors on June 7th, 2023. This state-of-the-art facility will provide a hands-on environment for visitors to explore and experience the advanced features and functionalities of Synology’s acclaimed products. The Experience Center aims to demonstrate how Synology’s solutions can optimize workflows, enhance data management, and streamline operations within the media and entertainment sector.

“We are excited to partner with Data Skill Systems to showcase our cutting-edge storage solutions tailored specifically for the media and entertainment industry,” said Russell Chen, Regional Sales Manager at Synology. “With the exponential growth of digital content and the increasing demand for reliable and scalable storage solutions, our collaboration with Data Skill Systems will provide an ideal platform for customers to witness firsthand how Synology’s products can transform their workflows and empower their businesses.”

The Experience Center will highlight key Synology solutions that are particularly relevant to the media and entertainment sector, including Active Backup for Business, Drive, and Surveillance Station. Visitors will have the opportunity to witness how Synology’s comprehensive ecosystem seamlessly integrates with various applications, enabling efficient data management and secure backup solutions for businesses of all sizes.

To visit the Experience Center or for further information, please contact Data Skill Systems at +91 9820220822 or email synology@dataskillsystems.com. Representatives from Data Skill Systems will be available to provide demonstrations, answer questions, and offer personalized guidance tailored to the specific requirements of media and entertainment professionals.

Views on RBI Policy: Soumitra Majumdar, Partner, J. Sagar Associates

Mr. Soumitra Majumdar, Partner, JSA

“RBI’s monetary policy statement do significantly allay fears of economic slowdowns in India. The Indian economy should be able to weather several risks and geo-political tensions plaguing several developed economies and prove to be a stable and consistent investment destination. Though showing positive trends, however, inflation continues to remain the centre of RBI’ attention. Cleaner balance sheets of banks and corporates coupled with the liquidity holds promise of larger capital expenditure by both the public and private sectors. Bank’s ability to fix their inter- institutional borrowing limits testifies the sectoral strength. The proposed amendments to the stressed assets resolution circular of June 7, 2019 for including specific guidelines for compromises and settlements with borrowers, is definitely a welcome move. This will help expediting closure of settlement proposals under a certain regulatory framework – promising further cleansing of bank and corporate books, with renewed focus on further credit and business growth. Regulations for restructuring borrower accounts hit by natural calamities is again a positive move for the economy. Thrust on developing and securing the digital lending ecosystem also holds promise for credit penetration and demand- driven growth.”

Monetary Policy Quote from Siddhartha Sanyal, Chief Economist & Head Research, Bandhan Bank

Siddhartha Sanyal, Chief Economist & Head Research, Bandhan Bank.

Quote:

“The status quo on the repo rate in today’s MPC meeting was almost a foregone conclusion and the committee did not spring any surprise. Interestingly, despite lowering the Q1 FY24 CPI inflation forecast by 50 basis points, the CPI projection for the full year was kept almost unchanged. As expected, the RBI underscored that the vigil on inflation will remain strong as they emphasised on the importance of reaching the CPI target of 4% rather than merely staying within the tolerance band. The emphasis on achieving the 4% target and keeping the stance of policy unchanged at “withdrawal of accommodation” likely have pushed out expectations of rate cuts at the margin. Overall, the central bank is expected to keep the repo rate unchanged for several quarters, likely beyond the current calendar year. Monetary policy in India of late had been prudent, decisive and often front-loaded, a trend that is likely to continue in the foreseeable future”.

Quote from Ms. Achala Jethmalani, Economist, RBL Bank on Monetary policy announcement

Quote – Ms. Achala Jethmalani, Economist, RBL Bank

“In a no surprise move, monetary policy maintained a status-quo on policy rates and stance. It remains in a ‘wait & watch’ mode and vigilant on inflation trajectory. We expect a pause on policy rates through CY2023 while modulating system liquidity. The window for policy pivot to rate cuts could open-up in 1H CY2024, if inflation trajectory warrants given that growth remains robust.”

Supercharge Your Cloud Security with PingSafe’s Cutting-Edge Solutions Now Available on Google Cloud Marketplace

Bengaluru, 8th June 2023: PingSafe, the only CNAPP platform powered by attacker’s intelligence, announced its launch on Google Cloud Marketplace today. Google Cloud users can now quickly find and deploy PingSafe’s CNAPP platform on the Google Cloud Marketplace, streamlining the onboarding process and allowing users to proactively secure their Google Cloud real estate.

“PingSafe was built with the vision of securing the cloud and making the internet a safer place,”, said Anand Prakash, the CEO of PingSafe. “PingSafe’s inclusion on Google Cloud Marketplace helps advance our vision by opening up a new avenue for serving our customers more efficiently while allowing the users to drive innovation via the Google cloud offerings fearlessly.”

With PingSafe’s CNAPP platform available on Google Cloud Marketplace, customers will realize key benefits, including:

• Onboarding without additional pre-approval steps, such as licensing and pre-configuration.
• Consolidated spending, billing, and payments.
• Committed coverage for the latest Google Cloud offerings

“While the cloud is becoming a necessity for most businesses, the Google Cloud and PingSafe partnership will allow cloud adoption at scale without worrying about their security,” adds Dhiraj Khare, VP – Sales at PingSafe.

“Demand for cloud security continues to grow, making it essential for organizations to have powerful solutions to protect their cloud infrastructure and sensitive data,” said Dai Vu, Managing Director, Marketplace & ISV GTM Programs, Google Cloud. “With PingSafe available on Google Cloud Marketplace, organizations can access and deploy PingSafe’s CNAPP Platform directly, helping secure their infrastructure.”

Quote on RBI Monetary Policy – Mr. Rajiv Agarwal, MD & CEO, Essar Ports

Mr. Rajiv Agarwal, MD & CEO, Essar Ports

“Today’s announcement of the RBI Monetary Policy is a result of the overall positive outlook of the Indian economy and that the inflation is under control. This reflects that India has decoupled from the rest of the world in terms of inflation and growth rates. We should expect a downward reduction in the rates in coming times.”

Views on RBI Policy: Mr. Dhiraj Relli, MD & CEO, HDFC Securities

Mr. Dhiraj Relli, MD & CEO, HDFC Securities

“The RBI MPC left the repo rates unchanged at its meet on June 08 in line with street expectations. MPC members were in a sweet spot in the backdrop of higher than expected GDP numbers and moderating headline and core inflation print. 

The MPC continued with the ‘withdrawal of accommodation’ stance (with 5:1 majority), as liquidity has turned into significant surplus mode further increased by the impact of withdrawal of Rs 2000 notes. A sustained moderation in inflation going forward may prompt the shift from “withdrawal of accommodation” to “neutral” stance. 

India’s economic activity has continued to demonstrate resilience. RBI retained its GDP forecast at 6.5% in FY24. 

Given the uncertainties around the impact of El-Nino conditions leading to sub-par monsoon in 2023, RBI remained cautious and revised the inflation projection by only 10bps to 5.1% for FY24. RBI Governor stressed on moving towards the primary target of 4% inflation. In this backdrop, expectation of rate cut in this calendar year seems to be faded. We expect the first rate cut perhaps in Feb 2024.”