It’s a wrap: News this week (Aug 19 — Aug 25)

There have been multiple developments on the tech front this week. From India’s lunar mission to modernisation of mainframes, this is the list of the most important developments this week for a quick catch-up:

Chandrayaan-3 lands on Moon

This week, India became the fourth nation in the world to land a spacecraft on the Moon and the first ever to do so on the lunar south pole, at a relatively modest budget of ₹615 crore. With this feat, India has cemented its position in the elite space club. The soft landing at the lunar south pole is significant due the recent discoveries of ice formations within the Moon’s craters. Russia’s Luna 25 spacecraft was attempting a similar soft landing on the south pole but crashed into the surface just a few days shy of the scheduled landing.

Nasscom’s new upskilling portal

To bridge the gap between recruiters and digitally skilled and certified IT professionals, National Association of Software Services Companies (Nasscom) on Wednesday, officially launched the Talent Connect portal. 

The platform will serve as an exclusive portal for enterprises looking to hire digitally skilled and certified industry-ready talent for both IT and non-IT sectors. The platform also enables IT professionals with career breaks to enter the workforce, Nasscom said in a statement. 

The portal currently features a talent pool of over 1.5 lakh skilled and certified individuals available for immediate recruitment. Nasscom expects this number to reach 5 lakh within the next six months.

Deloitte’s Gen AI incubator

Deloitte on Tuesday launched its global generative artificial intelligence (AI) market incubator that will promote innovation in generative AI and serve enterprises in India and across the globe. 

The AI incubator will leverage AI, machine learning (ML) and other emerging technology expertise of the company’s professionals, including data scientists, AI specialists and engineers. 

Merative’s new centres in India

Merative, formerly IBM Watson Health, that became a standalone data analytics company under US-based private equity Francisco Partners in July last year, on Thursday, announced its India global capability and innovation centres (GCICs) across three Indian cities — Bangalore, Hyderabad and Chennai.

These India centres will enable the company to achieve its purpose of combining trusted technology and deep industry expertise to serve more than 4,500 clients in healthcare and government social services around the world, Gerry McCarthy, CEO of Merative told TechCircle.

IBM taps Watsonx Gen AI to help modernise COBOL on mainframes

Tech company IBM on Tuesday announced a new generative AI-assisted product — Watsonx Code Assistant for Z. The product will help enable faster translation of COBOL to Java on ‘IBM Z’ and enhances developer productivity on the platform. IBM Z is a family name used by IBM for all of its z architecture mainframe computers.

The product, which will be enabled by a 20 billion parameter large language model (LLM) for code, is also designed to assist businesses in leveraging generative AI and automated tooling to accelerate their mainframe application modernisation — all to preserve the performance, security and resiliency capabilities of IBM Z.