In information technology and systems management domain, Application Performance Management (APM) is the monitoring and organization of performance and the ease of use of software applications. APM aims to detect and diagnose application performance problems to maintain an expected level of service. Riverbed is the leader in application performance infrastructure, providing solutions for end-to-end application visibility, optimization, and control in hybrid IT environments. More than 26,000 companies rely on the Riverbed Application Performance Platform for superior application performance that drives superior business performance. Paul Coates, vice president, Riverbed Technology, speaks with BW | Businessworld’s Manish Kumar Pathak about the journey and the expertise of Riverbed Technology. He also talks about India as a different market. What is the expertise of Riverbed Technology?We live in a world where application performance equals business performance. Riverbed Technology is the ‘The Application Performance Company’ – we provide solutions for end-to-end application visibility, optimization and control in hybrid IT environments. We’re known primarily for pioneering WAN optimization with Riverbed SteelHead, which first shipped in 2004 and continues to lead the market with over 50% market share. But as IT evolved over the past decade and moved to the cloud, Riverbed has also evolved. Businesses increasingly rely on applications and data that run both on-premises data centers as well as in the cloud, deliver to users over a mix of public and private networks. This is what is referred to as the hybrid enterprise. Hybrid architectures and SaaS applications bring significant benefits to organizations – agility/time to market, cost savings, flexibility – but also challenges, such as complexity of multiple clouds, networks, service providers, plus end-users everywhere and hundreds of applications that need to be managed and delivered across a mix of networks. Riverbed offers a platform to help companies manage this. The Riverbed Application Performance Platform combines solutions in three key areas, Riverbed SteelHead for application acceleration; Riverbed SteelFusion the first and only hyper-converged infrastructure for Branch IT; and Riverbed SteelCentral for network and application performance management. Together, these solutions help ensure that applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues are diagnosed and cured before end-users even notice. How has Riverbed managed to keep pace with the evolving technology?As IT has continued to evolve as it always does, becoming virtual, cloudy, social and mobile at a rapid pace, we’ve had to evolve as a company too. We’ve been successful in leveraging our core strength – application acceleration over wide area networks (WANs) – to address the new challenges of the hybrid enterprise. What Riverbed did for the WAN, we’re now doing for the cloud and SaaS applications. When we started the company 13 years ago, we gave people the opportunity to move their servers and users apart by fixing the issue of latency. Then people said they wanted the ability to measure performance between their users and their data and we developed the solution. Now organisations are saying they can’t afford the risk of having data at their branch offices – and we solved this challenge by enabling organisations to have zero IT in the branch – no servers, no storage, and no backup required. As a result, branch operations can be instantly provisioned, without needing IT talent on-site and they can also be instantly recovered. Simply put, we created our own market, allowing enterprises to have zero IT at the branch. Can you explain WAN optimization in brief and what is Riverbed’s role in this space?WAN optimization is a collection of techniques to enhance data-transfer efficiencies across wide-area networks. Riverbed pioneered WAN optimization with SteelHead—and we continue to lead the market more than a decade after we shipped the first SteelHead to Environment Canada in April 2004. We’ve continued to build on this innovation. And today, SteelHead accelerates the delivery of all applications – on premise, cloud and SaaS - across the hybrid enterprise. It also provides better visibility into application and network performance and the end user experience plus control through an application-aware approach to hybrid networking and path selection based on centralized, business intent-based policies for what you want to achieve – as a business. We view WAN optimization as an important tool in the application performance management toolkit. But that toolkit must also include end-to-end visibility and greater control across application and network performance. Together, these tools ensure applications perform as expected, data is always available when needed, and performance issues are detected and fixed before end users even notice. Any key verticals you are looking at expanding?In India, we can see strong interest from industries such as banking/FSI, manufacturing and IT services. However, our customers span multiple industries and our technologies are well suited to any business looking to turn application performance into a competitive advantage. New Media usage is growing at an exponential rate in India? What are your plans for India? The rise of digital medium in India is an area of real focus for us at Riverbed globally and is part of the transformation we are undertaking in how we market to our customers. As India is fast becoming one of the biggest and most discerning consumers of new media, we recognize that this is one area where we must engage and interact with our customers in an even deeper way. For Riverbed, it’s about bringing our vision, leadership and experience in application performance management to a vastly broader audience across multiple industries and roles. We’re currently in the final phases of planning and content development around this and will be focusing our initial efforts in online and direct B2B engagements initially. Will the blueprint for business be the same here, or will there be changes accordingly?Riverbed is a global company and our strategy is to be the leader in application performance management – globally. Our goal here in India is to bring the experience, the innovation and the success we have had around the world and use that in an India context. Every market is unique in its own ways and so our role is to understand the market, our customers, the business environment; making Riverbed and our industry-leading portfolio relevant here. There are unique opportunities in India that gives me every confidence for our future potential here: distance and location challenges, limited bandwidth, application complexity, irregular data backup are all factors in how we position our lead solutions. One thing is true however, no matter what country you are in, or what industry or sector, application performance is essential to business performance. What are the new products and platforms launched by the company, and how are they performing? One of the core areas we’re focusing on innovating in is visibility. Visibility is increasingly difficult to achieve with today’s complex hybrid IT environments and applications, which often span traditional data centers, third-party hosting facilities, branch offices, mobile devices, and SaaS and IaaS-based clouds. At the same time, delivering applications is also becoming more complex as networks evolve to a hybrid model combining private and public links. Riverbed is bringing a new approach to solving the challenges of complexity with a holistic operational view of the complete IT environment. In fact, just last month, we announced Riverbed SteelCentral Portal, a breakthrough visibility solution for managing application performance in a hybrid IT environment. SteelCentral Portal is a unique combination of end-user experience monitoring, network performance management (NPM), and application performance management (APM) capabilities that blends performance data from our industry-leading SteelCentral visibility and SteelHead optimization and control solutions. This holistic view gives IT teams and business managers a single source of truth – and an unparalleled level of both broad and deep visibility – so that they can more quickly identify root causes of performance issues and drill down to fix them fast. We also recently announced Riverbed SteelFusion 4.0, the first and only branch converge infrastructure solution that enables the consolidation of 100% of data and servers from remote sites into data centers, centralizing data security and IT management, without losing any of the benefits of running branch services locally. We refer to this as “Zero IT at the branch” which means no servers, no storage, no backup at the branch; instant provisioning and recovery; complete security and visibility; and applications simply work. We want enterprises to rethink branch IT. As branch offices, remote locations and store fronts become more and more important to delivering customer engagement and new services, IT contends with supporting islands of infrastructure than have been necessary, yet costly and inefficient to maintain, to meet local performance and reliability needs. Riverbed believes that supporting branch offices shouldn’t be this challenging, which is why we’re delivering the branch of the future by offering SteelFusion - a zero branch IT solution. Finally, the issue of CSR in India is quite a prominent one. Can you provide details of your social responsibility?The environment and human health are very important to Riverbed Technology and we have implemented practices to ensure we are doing our part as a global organization. We look for environmental improvement opportunities across all phases of our products' lifecycles and continuously oversee our compliance with local and international laws. For instance, we work with ISO-certified manufacturers and require our suppliers to provide certificates of compliance that declare the absence of restricted materials in the products they supply to us. We are ultimately committed to reducing the environmental footprint internally and for our customers. Our worldwide community investments support anti-poverty programs, natural disaster relief and disadvantaged youth. Riverbed employees believe in impacting these causes, making the company’s charitable giving program, the Riverbed Employees Assisting Community and Helping Out (REACH OUT) programme, entirely fuelled by their passion to make significant and noticeable change immediately. What about your customers in India and overseas?Riverbed’s 26,000 plus customers include 97 per cent of the Fortune 100 and 98 per cent of the Forbes Global 100. • Cox and Kings India deployed Riverbed’s SteelHead appliances and Steelhead Mobile to improve performance of their legacy business application, improve end user experience, WAN optimization and acceleration, and most importantly protect its investment in an MPLS VPN. • When SABMiller India decided to consolidate its IT Infrastructure, their implementation of SteelHead products helped boost application performance and eliminate the need to increase bandwidth. They now enjoy file transfers over the WAN at 10 to 50 times faster depending on file size, emails are ten times faster, and Web applications are 15 times faster with SteelHead products. • Intuit runs on Riverbed to ensure system availability during tax season and has reduced troubleshooting time 80% with the use of SteelCentral solutions. • Del Monte, with all its apps in the cloud, relies on Riverbed to get high-quality products to market faster. • By running its frictionless enterprise on Riverbed, Tribune Media has consolidated from 54 to just one software-defined data center and nearly tripled its capacity to deliver projects of value to the business. • Michelin has reduced application rollout time by 30% with Riverbed providing visibility into the qualification of apps during development. • Australia-based MTC Work Solutions eliminated SaaS application performance issues that were crippling its business, improving performance of Office 365 by 300 per cent
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The megapixel war just hit a new level as Canon announced two brand new DSLRs for the Indian market. The EOS 5DS and 5DSR are the latest offering and mark the 10th anniversary of the 5D range which was first announced in the year 2005. Both of the cameras come with a high-end full frame sensor (36x24mm or a 35mm film) which is capable of capturing images of up to 50MP in resolution making it the World’s highest resolution full-frame DSLR. This also means that images can be blown up to a large extent without compromising on the quality. The only difference between the two is that Canon has used a low pass filter in the 5DS and two of them (to cancel the effect) in the 5DSR. A low pass filter is generally used in cameras to improve the sharpness and get finer details in your pictures. The 5DS is priced at Rs.2,52,995 and the 5DSR at Rs. 2,65,995 for body only. A 50MP resolution might sound going overboard but Canon responded with the fact that these cameras are aimed at professionals in the field of commercial photography as well as fashion and landscape photography where requirement of such resolution is high. A Canon official also quoted “With the new 5DS and 5DSR range we are going closer to the medium-format range of cameras at a more affordable price.” Along with the DSLRs, Canon also announced a professional 4K video camera called the XC10. This is essentially for videographers who want a simple and compact solution to make high quality videos as well as shoot stills as the XC10 offers the facility to shoot stills at 12MP resolution and 8MP while recording a video without hampering the quality. There is a 10x zoom lens onboard and the camera is as large as a high-end DSLR making it one of the smallest 4K camcorders in the market. The XC10 4K video camera has been priced at Rs. 1,70,000.
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Mobile High-Definition Link (MHL) enables you to hook up a mobile phone to a large display, say an LED TV, via a simple adapter. Sounds fun, but in a world where technology is going wireless and where media streaming can be done without tangling into cables, why would one use MHL? Vipin Sawhney Country Manager, Silicon Image, explains to Kunal Khullar why MHL provides the best user experience.Do you see a rise in the adoption of MHL ever since the technology first arrived?When MHL released its first specification in 2011, it started with a simple idea of connecting a phone to a TV. Since then, MHL’s product ecosystem has grown to more than 750 million products and the use cases continue to expand. Consumers want more out of their smartphones — taking them beyond communication devices and transforming them into gaming consoles, powerful PCs and entertainment systems. The ability to connect a smartphone or tablet to the big screen to display photos and videos, play games or use productivity applications is a compelling value proposition.In India, specifically, many of the leading mobile phones are MHL-enabled, including the Galaxy S5, the entire Xperia line, and the recently announced HTC One M9+. In addition, leading TV brands such as Samsung, Sony, Toshiba and LG have MHL technology inside.What are the ways in which you can use MHL?• Play — Watch HD and 4K videos and photos from your phone on a TV. Stop, rewind, pause and play the content using the TV’s remote control. • Gaming – Pair a game controller to your MHL smartphone or tablet to play mobile games on a TV or monitor with no lag. • Work – Turn your mobile device into a PC by connecting to a very low-cost, laptop-like peripheral and work from anywhere. • Connected Car — Connect your phone to an infotainment unit to access GPS, music and other apps. • USB Type-C — Connect tomorrow’s phones with USB Type-C to today’s ecosystem of MHL TVs, monitors, AVRs and more.Are there any major brands/organisations that rely on MHL for everyday productivity? MHL is ideal for a number of productivity use cases. Dock a smartphone or tablet and then connect a keyboard, mouse and monitor to transform it into a powerful PC. Connect a mobile device to a laptop shell but have all of the processing power come from the device itself. With MHL, you can write emails, browse the Web and create presentations at any time, from any location. The possibilities are endless. MHL’s productivity play is also stronger through its support of USB Type-C, which is ideal for laptops, monitors and docks.To support this productivity vision, MHL is working with companies such as Andromium. While MHL is technology that allows you to connect your smartphone to a TV, monitor or smartbook, Andromium is a custom OS that is specially designed to provide a keyboard/mouse optimised, multi-window/multitasking desktop environment that will help users unlock the true power of their smartphone. Why should anyone use MHL when there are wireless options like screen casting and mirroring?Wireless is convenient, but you’re losing charge the entire time. MHL is focused on being wired because when connected the sink will power the source device. A wired connection also provides the best user experience—there are no compromises in video quality and no lag. MHL does co-exist with other wireless technologies such as WirelessHD as we believe there are certain applications that are more suitable for a wired connection, while other applications may call for a wireless connection. A good example of this is wired Ethernet vs. wireless on PCs.What do you think will be the future of MHL and what kind of innovative applications can we look forward to?Nokia, Samsung, Silicon Image (a Lattice Semiconductor Company), Sony, and Toshiba are promoters of the MHL Consortium and leaders in the mobile and CE space. The goal of each released specification is to deliver a set of innovative features that enable companies to stay ahead of the industry curve and forecast the needs of consumers. The MHL Consortium has adopters that create a large and diverse product ecosystem that includes smartphones, tablets, TVs, monitors, automobile infotainment systems, AVRs, Blu-ray disc players, set-top boxes (STBs) and more. At CES 2015, the MHL Consortium announced superMHL, its latest technology specification. For mobile, it delivers higher resolution, faster frame rates, support for the USB Type-C connector and 40W of power charging, while expanding capabilities for tomorrow’s living room through 8K video at 120 frames per second, a consumer friendly superMHL connector and picture enhancement features. Consumers will be able to connect their mobile devices, set-top boxes, Blu-ray disc players, AVRs, streaming media sticks and other source devices to TVs and monitors. It will be exciting to see the different type of superMHL products that will be released down the road. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 29-06-2015)
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I have about 350 apps on my primary phone. The first question anyone asks me if they hear this is: do you really use all of them? The answer is yes, I do. Not all of them all the time, but I like the lot to be around for when I do decide to use them. Today, whether you’re booking a flight, calling a cab, ordering some food, buying a dress or listening to music, or even getting your house cleaned — it’s all done from within an app. I find I get my news these days by using news aggregator apps like Nuzzel or Flipboard or Pulse.Pick my interest areas, keep giving feedback by voting up stories I wanted to read and then let the app “learn” what I want to know about in future. Gone are the days when I would start out at news.google.com. Google is not about to take that sort of thing lying down and this was more evident than ever when it showed the world a glimpse of the biggest change coming up in the next version of Android. “Google Now on Tap” is an ever-helpful but also over-powerful feature that shows you just how much Google knows. When we’ve all been duly Lollipopped and moved on to Android M, sometime later this year, Google Now, which already picks up information from your Gmail, searches, calendar and task list, will be able to delve right into the apps you use and second-guess what information you want. All you have to do is tap the Home button on your phone or tablet to get it. You won’t need to leave the screen or app you’re in at the time. You could also go the lazy voice route and just ‘OK Google’ to ask. App developers will have to do nothing much to enable this: it’s a Google thing, because Google now understands what’s on your screen even if it’s a picture. Put that together with the fact that it also knows who you are, where you are, and what’s around you, and you have a powerful contextual combo. Put that together with the fact that Google can “suggest” what you should do, and you have something frightening, even though most of the time it could be helpful. Say you’re looking at a picture of the Pyramids of Giza on Instragram. Or reading a message with a plan to meet up for dinner. Press the Home button to immediately know the height of the Pyramids or get instant recommendations on which restaurants to check out for dinner. You can go ahead and use highly contextual natural language like saying “How high are they?” for the Pyramids. Or perhaps “Where should we eat?” for the dinner invite. The constant machine learning of all your activities and preferences will make every such answer increasingly relevant.The same learning will obviously power regular Google Now suggestions, including on wearables and on the web. You won’t even have to ask. So pretty soon, Google could bypass apps and be the one universe to guide you through decisions through the day every day. Of course, many a time, it will all go wrong as something or the other happens not to be working. Perhaps your location is off or wrongly picked up, your voice isn’t heard properly or an image hasn’t been correctly identified and you’re getting incorrect information. But that’s the price we’re going to have to pay for using a technology early in its lifetime, even as it’s learning, and wanting more and more convenience as Google’s Knowledge Graph gets more and more detailed. (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 29-06-2015)
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Would a smartphone’s slimness weigh a lot in your decision to buy? I believed too much was being made of thinness until I had a look at the Gionee Elife S7 Android phone. This wafer of a phone is truly sleek and elegant, helped in looking so in no small measure by its double-steel rimmed sides. Two metal lines sandwich glass on both sides making the device look tall and pretty. I got the black version and decided it probably looked a whole lot nicer than white or any other colour.The S7 may be slim (only 5.5mm thin) but it still doesn't feel flimsy. Fragile perhaps, but not flimsy. It has a premium build and looks all glossy the way so many Sony phones do, except for the fact that it immediately shows up fingerprints. Safer to use the case thoughtfully provided in the box and also reduce the chances of the phone sliding smoothly out of your hand. It’s otherwise supposed to be made of pretty tough metal on the sides and feels good when you hold it because it’s ever so slightly rounded. At the same time, the buttons all on the right edge, stick out just enough to be easy to find — important on a slim phone. Two SIM slots, and the charging slot are all exceptionally neatly lined at the bottom of the phone. Amazingly, the 3.5mm jack also fits there as do the mic and speaker. This device can’t be opened up and is really neat and well crafted.The screen on this device is quite a pleasure. It’s bright and reproduces colours very well. But then that may be my weakness for SUPER AMOLED screens. It’s vivid and crisp and has a nice trick up its sleeve. It uses Chameleon, an app that lets you point the phone at something and pick up a mix of three colours as the theme for the device.In its brand new state, the S7 runs really fluidly. Navigating across screens and between different sections on the phone is especially smooth. Gionee has its own interface and like many Chinese takes on Android, does away with the separate app drawer. Apps are all in rows on the home screens. Then they add a few features here and there for differentiation. These interfaces are losing their distinctiveness today, especially as you can use launchers and apps to get those features. But the Amigo 3.0 interface on this device is at least light and does nothing to interfere with smooth functioning though it has a few oddities such as having to swipe from down to up to see settings and other buttons. Gionee has gone and put way too many little apps on this device. The company is actually very focused on smaller cities and towns and probably likes to give pre-loaded apps to a segment less aware about what’s out on the Play Store.The cameras on the S7 are not low-light specialists, but perform fast and well in proper daylight. The camera app is full of controls and features such as focusing on an object to blur the rest out, HDR, Panorama and a Professional mode so you can adjust basic parameters.The Gionee S7 is priced at Rs 24,999. There’s no image stabilisation, as is to be expected for a device of this price. There are tonnes of options today, especially from Xiaomi that throws in a game changer every couple of months with devices that offer both design and specs for a low price. But look at the S7 for its elegance and smoothness. Creative Ultra Light Soundblaster JamIt’s nice to know there are affordable Bluetooth headphones coming out with some good sound to them. The new Creative Ultra Light SoundBlaster Jam didn’t look particularly impressive when I first ripped it out of its box. Neat enough, tough enough, but nothing in the looks department otherwise. A standard grey-black hard synthetic material with nothing fancy going on. The only accent and splash of colour happens to be its charging cable — a nice thick sturdy red wire with micro USB on one end and regular USB on the other. You plug it into a phone charger you may have handy, and then untether. It can also connect to a PC or Mac with that cable. But there’s nothing else in the box by way of a direct cable or adaptor. This is barebones. I expected the sound to be equally barebones but was surprised. It’s good rich sound and balanced with nothing sticking out like a sore thumb. The base (and that has a separate little button for boosting) was clean and not thumping or like a slap on the ear as is common with lower-end headphones. The treble doesn’t pierce through but sounds reined-in. It doesn’t sound like it could damage your eardrums and there are no distortions. You get warning beeps if you try to increase the volume beyond a point.The controls for volume, pairing via Bluetooth (though it does have NFC as well), and the base booster are all on the right earcup of these over-the-ear phones. They’re comfortable and yet strongly fitted. I’ve had several high-end headphones fall right off when I look down.Some of the strong points, beyond pretty good sound, are 12-hour battery life, good comfort, and a great price of Rs 3,499 on Amazon, FlipKart and Snapdeal.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 29-06-2015)
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You Can Forget It Are you one of those people who often draws a blank when you meet someone and find you can’t remember a whole lot of things about that person? Well, here’s an app to help pull out what you should have remembered but didn’t. But you’ll have to be prepared to be disciplined with recording information.InstantRecall on Android (not to be confused with iInstant Recall on the App Store) picks up all the contacts on your phone and has a place for you to organise all sorts of information about a person. It doesn’t replace or interfere with your native contacts application.So, when you get a phone call, a pop-up will ask if you want to record a note. You also have a widget which you can keep handy on a home screen, if you’re a strong networker and meet lots of people, and you can just tap to add information either by voice or keying in text.Everything from what the person’s achievements are, to where he went for a holiday, who’s in the family, to what he wants to discuss can be put in. Then there’s connections to the main social networks. You can call up the information before you meet the person again and be quite impressively up-to-date.InstantRecall is particularly meant to be helpful to those in marketing, PR, and sales or communications departments allowing them to cement business relationships by keeping relevant information right at hand. While it may be too much work for personal contacts, one can immediately see that it would be really helpful for business contacts. InstantRecall is free and has a bunch of tutorials and power tips on the developer’s website for users to make the most of what they can do with the app.Lookup What You Needit's a great idea, but how well it works depends on businesses, appropriate use by customers, and what’s available in a location. Lookup, free on Android, is an app that tries to put messaging and local shopping together. You need something — you search for it, and when results come up, you click on a seller and message him your queries. Lookup is only available for Bangalore and Mumbai right now but may move into other locations. I did find some Delhi entries. The app aims to get users prices, deliveries, restaurant bookings and even access to hospital and appointments with doctors. It probably won’t be long though before Google and Facebook extend their services, making any other attempt redundant. Facebook is about to use WhatsApp to link customers and businesses, and Google is throwing up recommendations on searches.(This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 29-06-2015)
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Any event from Apple has fans and the media practically frothing at the mouth with excitement, and this year's Worldwide Developer Conference, WWDC, in California was no exception. It's where Apple reveals future plans, updates to products, new opportunities and tools for app makers, and more. Notably, this year there was even a woman executive on stage, which is a bit of a first. Here's a roundup of what was announced: El Capitan Is HereAfter a quick hello from CEO Tim Cook, Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, took over to run through changes to OS X, the operating system for the Mac. Changing its name from Yosemite to El Capitan, Apple is improving experience and performance of the operating system with some new features and tweaks. Safari users will be able to pin websites in the browser; spotlight search will understand natural language to find files; multitasking Windows-style will be supported, and the 3D graphics kit will add more power for heavyweight gaming. Users will get a free upgrade. A Day In The Life Of iOS 9Apple claims to have extended battery life and enhanced security. There are also more intelligent features introduced in this new version of the OS for the iPhone and iPad. Siri is said to be smarter, being able to understand natural language better. "Show me photos from Utah," should bring up the relevant results from the device's camera roll. There are also enhanced and detailed search features and reminders that are reactive to location. Starting from the morning and playing your favourite meditation tunes to reminding you when to leave for a meeting, to what to pick up for a party tonight, Siri is becoming rather Google Now, though here, the capability is called Proactive. Pay It With AppleApple Pay, the company's bid to replace the physical wallet was reintroduced by Jennifer Bailey, who heads this initiative. Apple claims paying through the iPhone or Apple Watch is now available in a million locations, with 2,500 banks supporting 50 million card members. Apple Pay isn't in India yet, though and is in fact headed to the UK next, in July. Google has had its own news app from the beginning, and of course there are hundreds of rich news apps on the App Store, all lead by the pioneering Flipboard, the app you can use to create your own magazine of news and content. But now Apple is to have one of its own. It will let you choose sources and topics but also suggest content. This app will include video, animations and photographs in a neat and easy format. This is launching elsewhere at first and not yet in India.The iPad Gets Some GoodiesThe iPad market has been going down of late. It will be interesting to see whether elevating the experience on this category-starting tablet will change that. Apple has tried to make it an easier device to work with. A pain point has always been inputting text, and to address this, a QuickType keyboard has been introduced which includes predictive text with shortcuts for cut and paste and even a virtual touchpad. Multitasking, a much wanted capability has finally come to the iPad, though perhaps not all versions. Android has had multitasking for many years, but Apple is catching up with a slick rendition of split windows, slideovers and picture-in-picture modes with which a user will be able to smoothly interact with apps simultaneously. The Watch That Will Change The World"We believe in technology on the wrist," say the Apple execs announcing a new version of the operating system for the Apple Watch, WatchOS 2. This brings native apps and many other additions to the watch Apple and fans believe will change the world. Starting with fancy customisation to the watch faces, there is enhanced communication with which you can do FaceTime audio calls, read and reply email, and send messages and drawings to contacts. There are also plenty of Google Now style features with flight times, travel and navigation enhancements included. The calendar will be an interactive feature called Time Travel, and with it you'll be able to go backward and forward in time to see what you need to do. The Apple Watch will have enhanced health and fitness features, being able to pull in data from third party apps and integrating that into a comprehensive dashboard of activity. Siri will be able to start exercise sessions, time them, and make suggestions customised for the user. Siri will also give virtual and shareable badges for exercise, encouraging fitness habits. The Apple Watch will also, again through Siri, be able to interact with Apple's Home Kit devices, the company's Internet of Things project. A user will command Siri to talk to the Home Kit and control devices in the home even when the user is not around. The Home Kit is another part of the Apple ecosystem not yet available in India, as are the individual devices. One More ThingUsing Steve Jobs' favourite line, Apple announced a "new chapter in music." This is the expected launch of its steaming music service via iTunes. This service will include the user's own uploaded music plus song and playlist suggestions. This service will most likely not be available in India. Another music service is Beats 1, a global radio broadcasting 24/7 from New York, London and Los Angeles. Connect, also a part of this music service, will connect listeners with artists.
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Next time you are out shopping, you might find the girl at the counter flashing a sleek gizmo at you to swipe your plastic on. It’s a mobile point-of-sale (mPoS) unit — your old-world, brick-sized PoS trimmed to fit into a smartphone or a tablet. At about Rs 10,000 — or half the cost of what merchants currently shell out — it will ‘swipe’ you off your feet; it can help reimagine the payment landscape and retailing businesses as we know them. The main difference between PoS and mPoS is in the form. Any smartphone or tablet can become an mPoS with a downloadable mobile app. The business owner registers the app; the vendor sends a card reader that can be plugged into the mobile device’s audio jack. Some mPoS software vendors also provide optional hand-held docking stations (called sleds) that allow the mobile device to read barcodes and print receipts. The latest Mint Road monthly bulletin shows we have 575 million pieces of plastic (553 million debit and 22 million credit cards), but just over a million PoS terminals. We have, as Ernst & Young (EY) says, one of the lowest set-up of PoS terminals (per million) in the world at 693. Brazil has 32,995; both China and Russia have around 4,000. Not only has PoS rollout not kept pace with plastic issuances, you also have a skew. Points out Mahesh Makhija, partner, Advisory-Financial Services, EY: “More than 70 per cent of the terminals are in the top 15 cities and contribute to over 75 per cent of volumes. And only 1.1 million of the more than 10 million retail touch-points have PoS units.” But you can sense a new firmness underfoot. Says Srinivas Nidugondi, senior vice-president and head of Mobile Financial Solutions at Mahindra Comviva: “The idea of cashless transactions is gaining momentum. It’s gradually changing as the usage of credit and debit cards at PoS has seen a growth of 86 per cent in the last two years.” Parag Rao, senior executive vice-president and business head, Card Payment Products & Merchant Acquiring Services, HDFC Bank, sees “CoD (cash-on-delivery) as a big driver for mPoS with the boom in e-commerce.” As well as for payments for insurance policies, all kinds of home-delivery businesses, restaurants, taxi service providers, pathology labs and what have you. “If we can hook into all this (with mPoS), we can get non-cash (transactions) to double in the years ahead,” says Rao. But for that, both PoS and mPoS have to become ubiquitous. As on date, cash is not just on the throne, a lot of it snuggles “under the pillow” as well. Only 4 per cent of transactions are non-cash. Now while banks can do little about the fact that many want it that way, it’s got larger implications. “Ninety six per cent of consumer payments is in cash with millions of retailers across the country preferring cash payments to avoid traceability and paying taxes, which is not surprising given only 35 million of the over 1 billion Indians pay taxes,” says T.R. Ramachandran, group country manager, India and south-Asia, Visa. This adds to cash-handling charges: Mint Road’s Annual Report (2013-14; it’s the latest) puts it at Rs 3,200 crore (Rs 2,800 crore in FY12-13). What you can’t get away from is that it’s no good to issue plastic to all comers if at the end of the day, they can’t use them. From PoS to mPoSThe cost to set up a PoS unit is high due to cut-throat competition between acquiring banks and low discount rates. That is the reason behind the low number of PoS units and their residency largely in the metros and bigger cities. Says Himanshu Pujara, managing director, Euronet (India): “The cost (of PoS terminals) can’t be recovered below a certain threshold of monthly card volumes acquired at merchant locations.” The silver lining, as Nitish Asthana, general manager, First Data Acquiring Services, says is that we will primarily be a debit card market. “The debit card merchant fee is significantly lower at 0.75 per cent for small-value transactions. It should enable merchants to accept cards, especially in the light of the significant cost of carrying cash. Card activation on automated teller machines and then PoS will drive the demand side of card usage. There should be incentives linked to card payments to facilitate this transition faster.” Now what works in favour of mPoS is the low-cost of hardware compared to traditional card-processing equipment. It helps that banks have knocked off the upfront set-up fee (typically between Rs 10,000 and Rs 20,000 depending on the device) and moved over to a monthly rental-based equipment leasing. But here again, what’s not clear is whether outlets are ready to pay for the phone (Rs 5,000) and the dongle (Rs 3,500). Initial field reports suggest resistance even though the shopkeeper conveys this by speaking over a Rs 20,000 smartphone! It’s also not that all deployers bundle the phone and the dongle as an offering. Net result: it would be wrong to expect that all merchants will at once be gung-ho for mPoS. That’s because merchant fees for debit transactions are at 0.75-1 per cent and for credit cards between 1 and 2 per cent. These fees depend upon the size of the transaction, type of merchant and card and whether the transaction is domestic or international. “Fees on debit cards are capped by regulations, and are amongst the lowest in the world, so that merchants have incentive to expand debit acceptance, but a lion’s share of the merchant fees — 90 per cent or more, whether on debit or credit transactions, goes as pass through to the issuing bank and card associations,” says Asthana. What’s unsaid is that merchants are asking for the moon! What will soon change this attitude is the pressure that will come from plastic holders and firms. E-commerce players will soon see that it makes more sense to hand over an mPoS to delivery boys as 80 per cent of sales are settled through CoD. Milan Sheth, partner and technology industry leader, EY, points to the extra charges levied by logistics providers to collect cash from customers — a combination of fixed charges for CoD collection, along with a percentage of the shipment value (1-2 per cent), which hike the cost of delivery. “Some logistics providers are known to remit collected cash after up to six weeks, which leads to working capital issues. In addition, the reconciliation of accounts with logistics providers adds another layer of administrative expense, which is expected to grow in complexity as operations grow,” adds Sheth. What this in effect means is while you may say your store is in the virtual world, you collect payment for what you sell in very much a physical way. Its time has come You have scores of players in the mPoS space with new business cards: Mswipe (backed by investment from Matrix Partners), Ezetap (Silicon Valley investors), Mosambee (SIDBI Ventures), Mobiswipe (One97 Mobility Fund) and Paymate India (from Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield and Byers; Sherpalo and Mayfield). It tells you what’s in store! Now mPoS is not altogether a new animal on our turf. Back in 2003, HDFC Bank launched India’s first mPoS terminals by CDMA (code division multiple access) technology in partnership with Reliance Infocomm and PoS terminal manufacturer Schlumberger. It tied up with ‘SangamDirectSM’, a supermarket-on-phone from what was then Hindustan Lever and with a Pizza Hut franchisee. The mPoS terminal was connected to a Reliance mobile phone. When you swiped, the transaction was carried through the CDMA network to HDFC Bank’s payment switch, which, in turn, “talked to” Visa and MasterCard gateways for authorisation of the transactions. It works very much the same way even now, but HDFC Bank’s launch was ahead of its times and we didn’t hear much about it. But it’s an idea whose time has come. While current mPoS numbers are low (it’s at about 50,000 with HDFC Bank’s share at 25,000), ICICI Prudential has shown what can be done with it. It has joined hands with Mahindra Comviva to equip its agents with mPoS devices so they can issue new policies at the customer’s doorstep; the devices will scan and upload documents for “know-your-customer” and policy payments. It’s part of a global trend.Himanshu Pujara, MD, Euronet A growing number of medium-sized and large merchants have taken note of mPoS. Starbucks, Nordstrom, JCPenney, Gap, Home Depot, and Sephora use or experiment with mPoS alongside traditional PoS; and have integrated mPoS platforms into payment systems. Urban Outfitters has gone a step further: it has replaced cash registers with iPad-based mPoS solutions in select US stores, and plans a wider rollout. Some large fast-moving-consumer-goods firms look to using mPoS to complement direct-to-consumer initiatives. A caveat is in order. “While large urban retailers may seek technologies like mPoS which help them in ‘line-busting’, smaller merchants may opt for a cheap and easy-to-use solution like a card-reader attached to a mobile phone. Rural merchants on the other hand, are likely to adopt bio-metric PoS terminals, which will enable them to accept Aadhaar debit cards that are likely be issued in large numbers for financial inclusion,” explains Makhija to underscore it’s not a one-PoS-fits-all world. All together, there could be close to 3.5 million PoS (inclusing mPoS) in the next five years; for now, mPoS is set to take centre-stage. And mPoS is not just a payment tool; there are other benefits too. The traditional PoS terminal is just a payment enabler. Merchants have to invest quite a bit on PoS software to keep track of sales, inventory, customers. “Now small- and medium-businesses can receive these VAS (value-added services) as part of the mPoS offering, which doesn’t just help them accept card payments, but bring in a whole lot more to help them do more with low-investment,” explains Nidugondi. It can also lead to a convergence of consumer-facing mobile commerce and merchant-acceptance; the jury is still out on this one. Srinivas Nidugondi, senior vice-president and head of Mobile Financial Solutions at Mahindra ComvivaAnd with 4G, expect telcos to jump in. “Japan is a market where a major telco is also a major electronic acquirer. However, with banks in India so well entrenched and the economics of acquiring a merchant quite a challenge, not too many telcos are jumping with joy at the thought of becoming an acquirer in case they get a payment bank licence,” says Pujara. Although we hear a leading telco is going to join the bandwagon here: the rumour is that it is Reliance Jio. What we now see is a convergence of smartphone penetration, a large base of small and medium enterprises and micro-merchants, low penetration of traditional PoS terminals, a core base of card users that’s expanding and bank and government schemes to encourage card adoption. As telcos, banks and retail sector seek improved return on investment and increased demand for customer analytics features, mPoS will boom. The time to pause is over! (This story was published in BW | Businessworld Issue Dated 29-06-2015)
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