Enterprise Tech Dispatch: Siemens Healthcare to use India as export hub, Huawei's AI and cloud play

As the debate around the impact on jobs of emerging technologies in India rages on alongside developments such as Zomato cutting its backend sales support workforce due to automation, all developments don't seem too gloomy. 

Siemens Healthcare, the healthcare division of engineering conglomerate Siemens, is looking to make India an export hub for its advanced medical imaging devices which will be shipped to countries such as China, Latin America and Africa, The Economic Times reported.  

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The report quotes Siemens Healthcare managing director Gerd Hoefner saying the company had taken the decision to start manufacturing in India seeing its prowess in the software services industry. Hoefner also said more than half of the company's software R&D team is based out of its Bengaluru office and the country has become a digital hub for the company.

Siemens has set up the manufacturing unit at a cost of Rs 20 crore. Over the last 20 years, the company has invested Rs 2,500 crore in its R&D facility where it is currently working on improving CT scan systems. The manufacturing unit has started producing a mobile arm component used in digital imaging by the healthcare industry. 

Huawei goes all out on AI, cloud computing

As Huawei battles governments in the US, Australia, Japan and India to continue its 5G operations, it seems to be in no mood to give in to the pressure.

The company, which recently launched what it claims as to the world's fastest artificial intelligence (AI) processor - Ascend 910 and 310 - that runs on its proprietary AI framework called MindSpore, has added new AI systems based on the Ascend processors under the brand name of Atlas which will also be available on the cloud. 

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While the Atlas 900 is an AI training cluster, the Atlas 800 is an AI training server. Huawei also launched the Atlas 500 and Atlas 300 targetted at AI edge stations and AI inferencing and training, respectively. It has also introduced an AI accelerator module under the name of Atlas 200.

"The future of computing is a massive market worth more than $2 trillion," Ken Hu, Huawei's deputy chairman, said in a statement earlier this week. "We'll keep investing with a strategy that focuses on four key areas. We will push the boundaries of architecture, invest in processors for all scenarios, keep clear business boundaries, and build an open ecosystem."

Also read: Amid global scrutiny, Chinese firm Huawei forays into automated database management

In a bid to hire more developers, Hu said the company will invest $1.5 billion in its developer programme. The aim is to expand the programme to support five million developers and enable Huawei's worldwide partners to develop the next generation of intelligent applications and solutions, Hu said.  

IMPS still best-rated;  tech firms eye higher UPI market share

IMPS or immediate payment service still remains the best-rated payment transfer method in the world even as tech firms and startups such as Google, WhatsApp and Paytm continue to focus on India's mobile-based bank to bank payment transfer service united payments interface (UPI). 

IMPS was voted the best payment service surpassing payment services in the US, Japan, Germany and 51 other countries, according to a report in Hindu BusinessLine that cited a survey by the US-based financial services company FIS. 

The report also said that India has seen a 10x rise in transactions via IMPS in the last year. 

Companies such as Google and WhatsApp are focused on utilising UPI as a payment mode to launch their own payment apps. Google had launched Tez, its payments app now rebranded as Google Pay, in September 2017. It currently has around 67 million users. 

Later, the company partnered with retailers and other merchants to start providing services such as utility payments. On Thursday, Google launched another new set of  features for its payments app including a Google Pay for Business app. The app will enable small and medium-sized merchants to facilitate digital payments without onboarding and verification processes, said a statement from Google.   

On the other hand, Facebook-owned WhatsApp has been trying to launch its payments feature in India, which is still in beta mode.

WhatsApp had run into regulatory hurdles post Facebook's Cambridge Analytica imbroglio.

Meanwhile, Paytm has been trying to cut down on competition in the market. It had written to NPCI (National Payments Corporation of India) which had developed UPI against WhatsApp Pay's beta launch. 

Later, it had also alleged that Google might be using customer data from its payments app. 

Google Pay's next move to acquire new users might not be easy. The next 800-900 million users would be very difficult to get, Google's vice president of Next Billion Users told The Economic Times in an interview. 

Microsoft and Eros partnership 

OTT player Eros Now, a part of Eros International, has partnered with Microsoft to build a video platform based on the Windows-maker's cloud platform Azure. 

According to the terms of the partnership, Eros' new platform will provide seamless delivery of content for its consumers across geographies and languages, supported by Azure Content Delivery Network (CDN) and other services. 

The companies in a joint statement said Microsoft will help Eros create new interactive voice offerings for consumers, powered by Azure AI tools, including OTT app video search experiences and voice search for video content across 10 Indian languages.

To increase consumer satisfaction and loyalty, Eros will create an engine to deliver personalised content recommendations for consumers by leveraging its own user data combined with Azure AI, analytics, cloud data warehousing solutions and Azure media services.