INVC NEWS
New Delhi,
Mr. Rakesh Kharwal, Managing Director – India/South Asia & ASEAN, Cyberbit: “A year after the Cambridge Analytica scandal, yet another data leak took place at Facebook this year. About 540 million records of Facebook users were publicly exposed to Amazon’s cloud hosting service. To give you a picture, this is about 7% of the global population when a large chunk of it is yet to digitize. The losses due to such cyber crimes are expected to reach $6 trillion by 2021 according to a report by Cybersecurity Ventures. This is when almost 60% of organizations have unfilled cybersecurity positions owing to the skill gap and 77% of leaders believe that an infrastructure breach can take place with far-reaching consequences. The need of the hour is to quickly fill this void by adopting next-generation technologies such as cybersecurity simulation & training platform to equip our nation with the required skillsets and thereby generating over 1 million jobs for the country’s youth. In a nutshell, 2020 could turn out to be a year of unbridled opportunities for India if it is able to successfully align itself in this landscape.”
Mr. Piyush Kumar Founder and CEO, Rooter: “2019 was a great year for the Sports industry in India with a busy cricket calendar including the ICC Cricket World Cup in England for ODIs. A massive number of sports fans chose to consume their favorite sports events online, especially on their smartphones. As a result, the Indian smartphone market added nearly 100mn new users taking overall internet user base to 600mn in 2019. This presented a huge opportunity for all content platforms to engage and onboard new users. As consumption for sporting events online grew around 50% in 2019, OTT platform Hotstar engaged more than 300mn users, whereas Cricbuzz had more than 100mn users consuming its content. Sports Community Platform, Rooter also pivoted from being a gaming and content provider to a content-based community platform in 8 languages in 2019.
We identified our core audience and their needs thereby focusing on content as a core product feature to create the community. We also launched the first-ever Audio/Video user-generated tool in Sports, giving wings to millions of fans to express themselves. The user base of Rooter grew by 350% this year with more engagement and revenue base. 2020 is again lined up with a busy sports calendar starting with IPL, Euro 2020, Olympics and T20 World Cup. We want to grow bigger creating a strong value proposition for sports fans and create our own leadership space in sports content category in India.”
Mr. Ashwin Rao, Director, Limelight Networks, India: The global wireless communications industry has begun preparing for the rollout 5G with the promise of offering consumers faster speeds that can potentially change how people and Internet of Things (IoT) enabled devices communicate. According to the State of Digital Lifestyle research report 2019 commissioned by Limelight Networks, expectations that 5G networking will bring faster download speeds are highest are highest in India, with 88.2 percent expecting to see improved performance.
Mr. Eric Zhou, EVP – UNISOC: “Given the recent developments, it is likely that the year ahead will see India making several quantum leaps. To begin with, a large-scale 5G rollout is likely to come to pass in 2020, with chipset manufacturers, smartphone brands, and telecom operators taking a page out of the playbooks of 5G nations such as the China and US. This 5G adoption will also increase the network bandwidth in new-age chipsets, powering a rapid increase in the number of everyday use-cases for these cutting-edge technologies such as AI, machine learning, and edge computing.”
Mr. Aakrit Vaish, CEO, Haptik: “Conversational AI world is now driven by an entirely new concept of Intelligent Virtual Assistant solutions (IVAs), and 2020 is the year when they finally burst onto the scene. Intelligent Virtual Assistants (IVAs) are getting smarter and their increasing capability of voice assistants is accelerating their adoption in the global business landscape further. While Alexa is reported to have 50,000 skills and is used by 3500+ brands, Google’s voice support today supports more than 30 languages. Globally, IVAs have contributed to increased sales by about 67%, and have initiated 26% of all sales transactions. As per a recent report by Accenture 75%, executives believe they risk going out of business if they don’t scale.
We enter 2020, with an ever-quickening pace of life needs solutions that support diverse needs for people with short attention spans. IVA solutions have evolved to fill this need gap, and have finally reached a critical point in their acceptance and implementation.
From the pace of adoption of IVAs by organizations, It becomes obvious that enterprises are not ‘trying them out’ anymore, rather they are actively looking at them as necessary drivers of better ROI, improved customer engagement, operational efficiency, productivity boosters and an active facilitator towards achieving other organizational objectives. 2020 is the year when IVAs will become a common feature across the global entrepreneurial ecosphere, implemented as a norm rather than a novelty.”
