TIME SPENT ON OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS INCREASES

TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE

G itHub’s 2020 State of
the Octoverse report
finds that while
developers have been
putting in longer
working hours during
the Covid-19 pandemic,
they’ve also spent more
time on open source
projects. There was a
major spike in activity in
March and April when
the pandemic began to
take shape
% increase in open source project creation per active user
compared to previous year (Seven day rolling average)
Virtual meeting rooms & avatars
60
COVID-19 LOCKDOWN
40
Our discussion this week is about
careers in Python, and women
I n a world of remote teams
and WFH, I would love to
access a truly immersive
conversations can happen
in a virtual space (meeting
room, for example) and each
in Python. We’ll be talking with virtual experience which participant is represented
20 Manaswini Das of Red Hat, Niharika would make collaborating with an avatar. Participants
Krishnan of TCS, and Sukanya Mandal with peers and clients a lot can talk, engage and even
0 Live on Facebook today, of Capgemini, all of who are active in
more real-time and high draw on virtual whiteboards.
December 9, from 6pm to 7pm. Pyladies, the international mentorship
touch. While augmented re- There can be break-aways or
Event page link: group that helps women become active
Source: GitHub 2020
ality (AR) and virtual reality direct 1-on-1’s. This could
-20 State of the Octoverse
http://bit.ly/techieswebinar29 participants and leaders in the Python
open-source community (VR) have been around, both also be used to on-board
NOV ‘19 JAN ‘20 MAR ‘20 MAY ‘20 JUL ‘20 SEP ‘20
media have been missing new employees or while run-

Why many want to move to

that one killer use-case to ning cross-functional
make it truly main- brainstorms. Finally,
stream. Here is where while it’s no sub-
Covid, and its many stitute for meeting
predicaments present a in-person, at least it

cloud in the post-Covid world

perfect use-case. brings us one-step
With VR, I’d like to see closer to recreating
easy-to-setup envi- the office while
ronments where sitting at
meetings and home.

Vikram Ahuja | CO-FOUNDER, TALENT500

doses, their effectiveness and effi-
It’s expensive & CLOUD IS CRUCIAL TO ADDRESSING UNCERTAINTY, RISK ciency, to help regulators, doctors,
and scientists,” he said.
difficult to Interest in cloud has zoomed since Covid. The
majority of business leaders now acknowledge
Just the other day I was talking to one of the
CIOs of a leading bank and he was
Polycab is one of India’s largest
manufacturers of cables and wires
manage sudden that cloud is crucial to addressing uncertainty
and lowering risk. Our research also shows
talking about how cloud is going to play
a big role. Now, banking being a
with revenue of over Rs 8,000 crore.
It is working with Oracle to move
changes with that those who have driven digital
transformation across the value chain, their
regulated industry was always a tad
slower on the cloud offtake than others.
workloads to the cloud. The com-
pany’s CIO Vivek Khanna says he’s

in-house data growth rates doubled. All that has to be

powered by cloud
So, coming from him, it was like music
to the ears
moved disaster recovery and the
treasury application to Oracle

centres Mahesh Zurale | SENIOR MD, ACCENTURE INDIA
Some applications will have spikes and those
Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN
may require a public cloud. But the
Puneet Gupta | MD, NETAPP INDIA
Covid has changed the surface area and pace of
digitisation in the country. Banking customers,
cloud. Every new application is be-
ing built for the cloud. Polycab is
using Oracle’s cloud-based Mobile
Supply Chain Application to cap-
ture shop-floor data in real-time,

M
ahesh Zurale, Accen-
ture’s senior managing
director and lead for Ad-
vanced Technology Cen-
tres in India, says a global fashion
characteristics of core banking workloads, or those of for instance, are accelerating legacy
and is now extending that to the
ERP in a manufacturing or retail sector, or modernisation and regulated industries are
warehouses. “Why buy an aero-
core insurance are very different. This is embracing the cloud. It’s a great plane when I can just buy an air
why everyone’s talking of a hybrid cloud, opportunity for India to reinvent itself as a ticket to go where I want. Cloud has
a mix of public cloud and on-premise SaaS-based economy meant zero capex, no one needed

retailer saw all of its thousands of
physical stores shut down as the
pandemic spread. Their online
sales constituted less than 20% of
Why containers
Viswanath Ramaswamy | VP, CLOUD AND COGNITIVE Karan Bajwa | MD, GOOGLE CLOUD INDIA to maintain systems, and I can use
a variety of technologies, and the
SOFTWARE & SERVICES, IBM INDIA
We moved our DR (disaster recovery) to Oracle latest versions of them,” he says.
Companies want to increase cloud. We use Oracle’s Mobile Supply Chain Technology is also increasingly

the total. And all of a sudden, the
entire burden fell on this channel.
The retailer’s systems were not
designed for that scalability.
revenue, reduce cost, reduce risk. Cloud is
being looked at as a technology that can
address all three. In this pandemic, we
rolled out partnerships with AWS and
and Kubernetes
Application, which enables real-time data capture at solving some of the pain points of
the shop floor. Cloud has meant zero shifting to the cloud. Balakrishnan
capex, no one needed to maintain Anantharaman, MD-sales at Nuta-
systems, and I can use a variety of nix India, says they have an offering

“They couldn’t even go out to
buy servers. Even if they could,
servers wouldn’t have been availa-
ble. Even if they had got servers,
they would have needed people to
manage them. And they would have
had to flex it for different parts of
Azure. We found customers want to adopt
cloud, it came as a mandate from
management for digital transformation
Bala A | MD, NUTANIX INDIA
about shifting workloads to the
are so important
technologies, and the latest called clusters that helps you take
the environment on-premise and
versions of them
just shift it to the cloud. “Normally
Vivek Khanna | this requires a lot of refactoring –
EXECUTIVE PRESIDENT & CIO, POLYCAB tweak security and network set-
tings – if it has to run efficiently on Shilpa Phadnis & Sujit John | TNN
if suddenly many of your custom- mand, onboard new partners more the cloud. Ours is a frictionless so-

the world, up and down, with de-
mand. What’s more, the retailer’s
warehouses for physical stores were
different from those for the online
channel, and those systems were not
connected,” says Zurale.
The only way to address all of
these issues was to move to the pub-
lic cloud. And that’s what Accen-
ture helped them do. They made
very rapid modifications to their
underlying system. They rearchi-
tected the software to make it scal-
able. “Cloud also helped to create
new environments, try something
and shut it down if it doesn’t work,”
says Zurale.
The pandemic has had a dra-
matic impact on companies’ views
Verizon Media’s
cloud. A shift is not easy. Companies
worry about the investments al-
ready made in data centres and soft-
ware. They worry about rearchitect-
ing the software to make them scal-
able. They worry about security and
compliance. They worry about
managing their data centres togeth-
er with multiple clouds, or what is
called a hybrid cloud.
But so massive has been the
disruption caused by the pandem-
ic that many are now overcoming
their inertia. Cloud has phenom-
enal advantages, the most promi-
nent of which is its ability to scale.
If suddenly all your employees
have to work from home using a
variety of internet-based tools, or
ers start buying online from you,
your internal systems may not
hold up. But a cloud, with a few
clicks, or even automatically, ena-
bles you to scale your computing
capacities to what’s required.
This is useful even for AI sys-
tems, which may require large
volumes of data to be processed.
As 5G and edge computing increas-
es massively the amount of data to
be processed, cloud may become
inevitable.
These are among the reasons
why Bharti Airtel says it is building
an open hybrid cloud network with
the help of IBM and Red Hat. The
network, it says, will be able to scale
to meet increased customer de-
IGNITARIUM IS ANALYSING US RAIL TRACKS FOR DEFECTS
quickly, and speed the launch of
innovative cloud-based services.
Once fully implemented, it says, a
customer would be able to use the
network to leverage AI, IoT and
edge computing capabilities to
power applications that can deliver
better insights from factory floors
or enable remote doctor visits.
NetApp CEO George Kurian
told TOI recently how cloud was
crucial to AstraZeneca’s Covid
vaccine efforts. “We helped them
build a multi-cloud digital infra-
structure to accelerate the pace at
which they can discover remedies
or run tests or do clinical trials. We
are also working with them to help
capture for the first several billion
lution, it is a layer of software that
can work on an on-premise system
like HP, Dell or Cisco, and also on
bare metal on AWS. The security
settings, the IP settings all move
with that,” he says.
Containers and Kubernetes are
making data flows between clouds
and data centres seamless. Viswa-
nath Ramaswamy, vice president of
cloud and cognitive software and
services at IBM India, says it’s also
possible to ensure enterprise-grade
security in the cloud, and for flows
between the cloud and data centre.
Zurale says cloud environments are
super secure. “Your inhouse staff
may not have that high level of skills
to fend off attacks,” he says.
Team Ignitarium
S
uddenly, the other day, we all
discovered a payments link
on WhatsApp. And realised
we can even start making pay-
ments right away. Not long ago
– and even today for many appli- How should you
cations and software – the addi-
tion of a feature like that would prepare for the
have meant reinstalling the app, Kubernetes world?
rebooting your system. Ameeta Roy says for
In modern apps, the updates, developers, the fundamentals
security patches, new features all
will not change. They should
happen seamlessly, without us
ensure good design principles,
even realising it. It’s all thanks
to the technologies called con- look at building modularity
tainers and Kubernetes. That into their applications.
was the subject of our discussion “Fundamentally, containers are
on Times Techies Webinars last Linux. That’s the technology
week with Ameeta Roy, director that allows you to package and
of solution architecture at Red isolate your applications with
Hat India, and Murad Wagh, di- their entire runtime and all files
rector of systems engineering at
VMware India. Red Hat and VM-
ware are among the biggest com-
panies in Kubernetes today.
necessary to run. So you need
a good, solid understanding
of Linux in order to take up
courses in containers and

India team helps IGNITE YOUR CAREER

Roy noted that for many
Kubernetes,” Roy said.

Murad Wagh also emphasised

Linux. “You should also know

keep Yahoo relevant

years, organisations had huge
monolithic applications, and
they felt the need to break it up
into more discrete, functional
units that could be independent-
Akhil.George@timesgroup.com ly updated, instead of the whole
Our teams in Bengaluru application being redone. Thus
how infrastructure operates,
how cloud operates. On that
depends how quickly you can
troubleshoot, especially in
networking and security, which
itself is a massive topic when it
comes to Kubernetes,” he said.

F
or those born in the early 90s, the
thought of logging on to Yahoo
to access mail will immediately
induce nostalgia. Google’s Gmail is
now the dominant email service. But
people still use Yahoo Mail with a
passion, says Rathi Murthy, chief
technology officer at Verizon Media,
the company that took over Yahoo’s
assets in 2017. “People who used Ya-
hoo Mail in the past have not got out
of it. And it’s continuing to grow. Our
app did better than the Google app
in the app store recently. It’s the 1TB
free storage that keeps me as a user,”
she says.
Murthy grew up in Bengaluru,
did electrical engineering at Banga-
lore University, and then did an MS
in computer engineering at Santa
Clara University, California. She
went on to work at Sun Microsys-
tems, Yahoo, eBay, American Ex-
press, GAP, and joined Verizon early
this year.
CUTTING EDGE
MADE IN INDIA
Verizon Media’s Bengaluru en-
work on several mission
critical projects across areas
like production engineering,
global product development,
and sales. We see
Bengaluru emerging
as a key centre of
excellence for the
company
Rathi Murthy |
CTO, VERIZON
MEDIA
grate with Facebook’s application
programming interface (API) while
also ensuring a proper security
model was in place while dealing
with token exchanges between Veri-
zon Media and FB’s messenger API.
APIs are software intermediaries
that allow two applications to talk to
each other, while token exchanges
are part of the security protocol.
Another key contribution by the
team here was the development of
Carta – a fraud management tool
that leverages machine learning.
“Carta provides great features to
keep our payment fraud rate and
emerged microservices. “But the
infrastructure side of it was not RESOURCES:
ready to implement this. That’s
why we saw things like service- You will find great
Four former Wipro technologists – Sanjay resources on VMware’s Kube.
oriented architecture emerge.
Jayakumar, Ramesh Shanmugham, Sujith Mathew academy
But now, we are in a situation
and Sujeeth Joseph – started Ignitarium in 2012
(with containers and Kuber- Red Hat has websites
as a product engineering design house. The four
netes) where we can really take where you can try out
came from semiconductor, embedded software and
off. Today, we can take that dis- Kubernetes; there are also
product engineering backgrounds crete, functional unit and put all instructor-led learning, with
the dependencies into a contain- certifications
Sanjay had spent 22 years with the VLSI and
er and then be able to port it,” CNCF (Cloud Native
systems business unit at Wipro. Ramesh had played she said.
key roles in semiconductor delivery and pre-sales Computing Foundation)
Sanjay Jayakumar, Ramesh Shanmugham and Sujith Mathew Wagh said a container is port- offers certification courses
at Wipro. Sujith was a VLSI architect at Wipro for able because it is abstracted from
13 years. Sujeeth was director of architecture for Last year, Ignitarium launched two AI software for Kubernetes administrator,
the underlying hardware. He application developer,
the removable products group at SanDisk, and prior platforms targeting smart factories and smart compared it to a container on a
infrastructure. The platforms are built using security professional
to that was chief architect of the semiconductor & ship that goes from one place to
systems unit at Wipro. deep neural networks and scale across different another. “In IT, the container con- containers need someone to shep-
hardware form factors, from micro-controllers to tains an application or part of an herd them, ensure they do the job
The Bengaluru firm is part of the Nasscom SoC, FPGAs, GPUs, as well as cloud application, and whatever it re- they are supposed to do. This soft-
DeepTech Club and has 220 employees. It combines quires to run. And you can run it ware is called a container sched-
expertise in semiconductor, AI, and wireless-enabled Recently, these platforms were used to enable on any platform – on-premise, on uler and that’s where Kubernetes
embedded systems to solve real-world use cases. intelligent solutions for railway infrastructure cloud, on the edge,” he said. comes in. Kubernetes manages
maintenance in the US. Ignitarium deployed its But a large enterprise could the schedules of your containers,
Ignitarium works with companies like Intel, ARM, high precision rail-track defect detection software potentially have thousands, even provides a platform for contain-
Nvidia, and Xilinx, as well as startups on product
development. Its customers include mobile aerial
on Skycam’s aircraft-based image acquisition
platform. The high-quality video captures details of
millions of containers. And those
require to be managed, ensuring
ers to run successfully, scale out,
scale in, be secure, and move from
camera systems maker Skycam and medical tech the rail track and these frames are then analysed by aspects such as security, scale, one location to another,”
company Hmicro Ignitarium’s defect detection software platform resiliency, and observability. “The Wagh said.

Hema’s math skills have led her to Swiss Re

gineers have been instrumental in
keeping Yahoo’s mail service rele-
vant. Murthy says the membership
platform team in Bengaluru recent-
ly developed an option that allows
Yahoo Mail users to recover their
email account easily and more se-
chargeback rates below market av-
erages. Fraudsters use payment
platforms to test out stolen cards.
With card velocity rule engine and
real-time transaction scoring built
in Carta, we are able to keep fraud- Arpita.Misra@timesgroup.com in math. She then thought of changed her worldview. “IIT tance of process,” she says.
sters at bay,” says Murthy. doing a post-grad in applied You always need to be taught me that you don’t need to When she joined Swiss Re in

curely using their Facebook Mes-
senger account. “The coding was
done in India. The team here also
conducted a study with users from
the US, and collaborated closely
with their US-based counterparts
from product and design to fine-tune
the option,” she says.
The Bengaluru team had to inte-
Most of Verizon Media and Ya-
hoo’s payment transactions flow
through Carta. Suspicious transac-
tions are reviewed by fraud analysts.
Murthy says Carta was able to sig-
nificantly reduce the amount of
manual work by identifying which
transactions could be suspicious and
which not.
Verizon Media Bengaluru team
W
hen Hemalatha Dave
wanted to appear for a
pre-medical test in
class 12, her family didn’t agree.
They had bought into the idea
that an ‘overqualified’ girl might
struggle to find a groom. Financ-
es were a concern too.
INSPIRATION
Hema was good at mathemat-
ics. She had been drawn to the
subject because of her mother,
who, though not conventionally
educated, was very sharp with
calculations and took care of ac-
counts in her father’s modest
business. So Hema went to Mum-
bai University for a Bachelor’s
mathematics from IIT Bombay.
Her folks assumed she wouldn’t
make the cut. But she did. And
she went on to become the first
person in her family to hold a
postgraduate degree.
Hema was born in a village in
Rajasthan. But she moved three
states and four schools in the first
15 years of her life. Primary
schooling was in Coimbatore,
where she stayed with her uncle’s
family. Then for two years she
went to a boarding school in Ooty,
and completed the rest of her edu-
cation in Maharashtra. All along,
her family’s focus was on getting
her married once she turned 18.
“But the situations I was put
on the front foot,
transform and adapt to
newer technologies.
Curiosity and agility can
keep you motivated and
make the ride enjoyable
Hemalatha Dave | VICE-PRESIDENT,
DATA SCIENCE AND CHANGE LEAD, SWISS RE
into made me a very different
person and I’m thankful for
that,” says Hema, who is
today vice-president of data
science and change lead at
Zurich-based reinsurer
Swiss Re.
Hema, 39, says the
IIT experience
be a master of everything. It 2015, she was assigned the task
taught me that you should be able of setting up the company’s
to navigate ambiguity,” she says. sales analytics team for Ben-
Hema got married soon after galuru. Currently, she supports
her post-graduation, and then valuation teams, working on
began her first job – in calculating optimal reserves for
Bengaluru, with Mar- future claims.
ketics Technologies Hema had an opportunity to
(now WNS Global help a cross-functional team at
Services). “Be- Swiss Re with their process im-
cause Marketics provement. The existing process
was a startup, I used to take two days to com-
learnt the entre- plete. The tool she created using
preneurial side of programming language R and
t h i n g s. L a t e r, automation helped reduce the
with TCS, I time to three minutes. The tool,
learnt she says, is now being used by
the im- the global team as a part of the
p o r - regular process.