THE TIMES OF INDIA, BENGALURU
WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 13, 2021
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How India’s helping global retail
take on the Amazon challenge
Tech Centres Here
Are Digitising
Store Operations,
Supply Chains,
Providing Insights
Avik.Das1@timesgroup.com
e are not here for
“W
cost; it is about tal-
ent, capability and
building a team to
support various functions, includ-
ing our online platform. Our Ben-
galuru office is the engine room for
analytics,” says John Kenny, direc-
tor of KAS Services, the India tech
arm of Australia’s biggest discount
department retailer, Kmart.
The company is among the nu-
merous global retailers that are es-
tablishing technology centres in
India, or expanding existing ones, to
become more digital, so that they
can take on the likes of Amazon and
Alibaba. The Covid-19 pandemic has
only underlined the urgency – the
internet is where customers increas-
ingly want to buy on, and without a
digital backbone, supply chains can
get badly disrupted.
Bengaluru is home to the major-
ity of these centres – Walmart, Tar-
get, Tesco, Lowe’s, JCPenney, Hud-
son Bay, L Brands, Ikea, Falabella.
Not one has a single store here (an
Ikea is coming up), but they are all
developing new technology to make
the shopping experience pleasant.
“The retail industry represents
the highest levels when it comes to
maturity of global capability centres
(GCCs, as the captive centres are
now called). They have become stra-
tegic to their parent companies,”
says Lalit Ahuja, CEO of ANSR, a
company that helps set up such cen-
tres in India. “Retail was slow to
Amazon-ise, and now these retail
AMD’s Jaya Jagadish
balanced pregnancy
and grad school
Ardra.Shankar@timesgroup.com
early three decades ago,
N when a young Jaya Jagadish
expressed her desire to study
engineering, it was met with a
tepid response, as many – barring
her family of engineers – tried to
talk her out of it. It was a time
when career choices were heavily
gendered, she says, way more than
they are now. “But I was really fas-
cinated with technology and its
ability to create solutions and
build new things. By the time I
graduated high school, I had al-
ready made up my mind,” says the
Bengalurean.
She studied electrical engineer-
ing from BMS College, Bengaluru,
and following her marriage, moved
to the US where she enrolled in a
Master’s programme at University
of Texas. Jaya walked a tightrope
INSPIRATION
between career and family in more
than one instance, and even jug-
gled pregnancy and graduate
school. She had her daughter in the
last semester. “Yes, it was hard to
manage,” she says. “But I had
made a decision, and my passion
for technology was enough to sur-
pass any challenge.”
She took a year-long break be-
fore joining AMD’s Austin office as
a design engineer in 1994, where she
worked on the chip giant’s seventh
generation processor, K7. She later
worked with companies like Men-
tor Graphics and Analog Devices,
before moving back to India with
her family in 2004. A year later, she
rejoined AMD as one of the first
few employees when the firm
started its operations in Ben-
galuru. Jaya became part of the
India leadership team in 2011
as director, and today, as India
engineering lead and corporate
VP for silicon design engi-
neering, she leads a
team of over 500 en-
gineers. “We start-
ed with just a
handful of en-
gineers back
when lim-
Google 9 GoogleFundamentals:
Cloud Platform
Johns Hopkins University
Algorithms, Part I Algorithmic
10
University of
Using Python to California San Diego
University of Michigan
INDIA IS THE SECOND HEADQUARTERS FOR MANY
Some of these retail centres are operating
as the second headquarters. They have
matured from back offices and shared services
to global leaders – taking on functional
responsibility, influencing business outcomes,
and having a seat in planning and strategy
Lalit Ahuja | CEO, ANSR
Given that a lot of retail GCCs are in India, and
some for a long time, the country now has
extremely relevant talent – talent that
understands all aspects of retail. So, we
have those who know tech, those who know
the domain, and those who know the needs
of transformation
Lalitha Indrakanti | HEAD, GLOBAL BUSINESS
OPERATIONS, INGKA GROUP (IKEA)
The new retail captive centres from
2018 onwards are leveraging India not
just for technology, but also for insights
and analytics
KS Viswanathan |
VP, INDUSTRY INITIATIVES, NASSCOM
centres are coming up to drive
change and bring new technology
and innovation,” he says.
India has nearly two decades of
experience in retail tech. Target and
Tesco came to Bengaluru in the
early 2000s to consolidate back-office
operations and make them more ef-
ficient with the use of IT. Flipkart’s
emergence and Amazon’s entry, and
their intense rivalry added to the
retail tech talent pool. The new re-
tail GCCs are benefitting from this
talent. “The country now has ex-
tremely relevant talent – talent that
understands all aspects of retail,”
says Lalitha Indrakanti, head of
global business operations for Swe-
den’s Ingka Group, which runs Ikea,
and which recently established a
global business operations cum
digital centre in India.
Chilean retailer Falabella’s In-
dia centre has built the point-of-sale
(PoS) system for its stores in seven
Women should embrace
their femininity as their
core strength and should lead
the way by standing firm on
what is right
Jaya Jagadish |
INDIA ENGINEERING LEAD, AMD
ited design work was done in India.
Today, the India centre is pretty
much on par with global standards
and makes a significant contribu-
tion to the industry,” she says.
Personal aspirations are impor-
tant, Jaya says, but as a leader, it’s
even more important to prioritise
your team’s and company’s goals.
“The passion to make the firm suc-
cessful is what makes people place
their trust on the leader,” she says.
It’s a testimony to Jaya’s leader-
ship that many of the employees
from the founding team today oc-
cupy senior positions in the com-
pany. Last year, she received the
‘Rising Woman of Influence’ award
from the Global Semiconductor Al-
liance for her achievements as a
woman leader.
While she acknowledges the gen-
der disparity in the male-dominat-
ed industry which forces women to
constantly prove themselves, Jaya
hopes that in future, women leaders
would just be called ‘leaders’. “It’s
certainly more difficult for women
to move up the corporate ladder due
to the added pressure of balancing
work and family. Which is why it’s
important to have a strong support
system in both places,” she
says. “Women often tend
to be more caring, and
that can bring in the
much required sensi-
tivity to understand,
comprehend and re-
solve many people-re-
lated issues. We do not
need any special recogni-
tion, we just want
equal opportu-
nity and
treat-
ment,”
s h e
adds.
13
Live on
Core
Facebook today,
Infrastructure
January 13,
Google Cloud Our discussion today is on the from 6pm to 7pm.
Future of Computer Science Event page link:
Toolbox
Education, and what students http://bit.ly/
and engineers should prepare techieswebinar33
for. We’ll be talking with Prof
Or scan the
S Sadagopan, director, IIIT QR code
Partner Name Bangalore, one of the foremost
Source: Coursera
technical institutions in India.
TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE
A
AI for small business
I and machine learn- these technologies will be
ing (ML) are becoming crucial in enabling us to
integral to all aspects of answer key questions. In
work where data driven this evolved world, it’s not
decision making is involved. ‘what you know’ but rather
Which also means, it’s go- ‘the quality of the questions
ing to get difficult for small you ask’ that will be most
RETAIL GCCS
IN INDIA
EMPLOYEES and mid-level companies to
invest heavily to build these
important. AI will become
deeply entrenched in eve-
The way our teams are structured allows us to
operate with agility and make business
Tesco 6,000 capabilities. The power of
AI-as-a-service (AIaaS) will
ryday business operations
assisting in achieving previ-
Walmart 5,000
critical changes. For instance, the idea that
how the self-checkout system, largely Target 3,400
enable AI implementation
from scratch without the
ously unattainable
innovations. AIaaS
redesigned and developed in India, was
presented to the leadership and rolled out
Lowe’s 3,000 need for large scale invest-
ments or hiring data and ML
platforms will
likely emerge
Ikea 1,000
Ankur Mittal |
MD AND VP (TECHNOLOGY), LOWE’S INDIA
H&M 1,000
experts. As cloud adoption
increases and decisions on
and solidify
due to these
GAP 1,300 optimising workloads-to- requirements for
The Bengaluru office is the engine
room for analytics because of the JCPenney 1,000 infrastructure ratio every busi-
talent that is available here. That sort of Hudson Bay need to be made (to ness across
talent is not available in Australia at the (Saks Fifth Avenue) 500 keep costs down), industries.
scale and speed at which we require them L Brands Sandeep Soni | GM AND VP OF ENGINEERING - INDIA, CLUMIO
(Victoria’s Secret) 700
John Kenny |
DIRECTOR, KMART AUSTRALIA’S INDIA ARM Ascena (Ann Taylor) 500
Levi’s 300
The cost arbitrage is zero. India is no
less expensive than South America stores, pricing, inventory and
and there is no reason to do it in India store design.
unless the idea is to transform the Kmart’s Kenny says one of the
organisation or bring in 10x growth advantages of having a base in Ben-
galuru is the presence of other re-
Ashish Grover | CTO, DIGITAL RETAIL &
tailers, which facilitates sharing and
MANAGING DIRECTOR, FALABELLA INDIA
learning unlike other places. “The
team here works on high-end tech-
Latin American countries, and in- omnichannel inventory manage- nology. We have built PoS solutions,
tegrated its indigenous e-wallet in ment, warehouse automation, we have built solutions that make
the retail ecosystem. The centre stores as fulfilment centres for on- teams more effective. We have a de-
also manages the e-commerce op- line orders, autonomous last-mile mand fulfillment team that allows
erations and digs into data to pro- delivery, virtual trials, assisted us to forecast stock in store a lot
vide more personal experiences. shopping, social commerce, and more accurately,” he says.
“Falabella has multiple retail move to marketplaces. It estimates Minneapolis-based Target start-
formats, and a host of other busi- that globally, the retail sector has ed in India as a shared services cen-
nesses including financial pay- invested in three years’ worth of tre. Today, the centre supports glob-
ments, banking & insurance, driven
by the goal to build an ecosystem
for our customers. It requires a ho-
digital transformation within six
months, spurred by the pandemic.
Walmart’s engineers in India
al strategy across technology, mar-
keting, human resources, finance,
merchandising, supply chain, ana-
Docker containers:
How they simplify
listic technology transformation have helped build the tech stack for lytics, and reporting. The company
across the conglomerate. We knew the US supply chain and have de- says the work involves creating high-
it wouldn’t be possible to do that in veloped tech solutions for its Mexi- value tools and products to create a
Chile or anywhere in Latin Ameri- can e-commerce platform. They are competitive advantage.
ca alone, so we chose India as a key
location, given the talent pool,”
Ashish Grover, MD of Falabella
India, says.
reimagining in-store and online
shopping experiences.
US home department chain
Lowe’s centre in Bengaluru is in-
Retail GCCs, says KS Viswana-
than, vice president of industry ini-
tiatives at Nasscom, are increas-
ingly working on services like mar-
a developer’s life
The digital acceleration is tak- volved in developing and pricing keting, social media campaigns, Sujit John & Shilpa Phadnis | TNN
ing place across ten key retail products. It has product manage- designs for new shops and managing LEARNING DOCKER
themes, consultancy firm Zinnov ment, engineering, data analytics e-commerce operations and online f you build a big complex ap- To get started with
says. These include automated
checkout, contactless payments,
and operations teams in India that
help manage assortments at the
customer experience. And are pro-
viding analytics and insights. I plication like an online store
as one monolithic application,
you’ll have serious difficulties
Docker, go to:
Docs.docker.com
Dockerlabs.collabnix.com
managing it. If you make a
SINDHU JOSEPH’S PHD THESIS TURNED INTO COGNICOR You can get in touch with a
change in one part of the applica-
tion, you run the risk of the ap- nearly 5,000 strong Docker
plication crashing, because the community here:
part you are changing could im- launchpass.com/collabnix
pact other parts in ways you did
not anticipate.
Microservices emerged in
recent years to address this.
Here, each module in the overall
Ajeet Raina says you would
do best to start
with Docs.docker.
com, understand
application – say, catalog service,
order service, reviews – is built
separately, each with its own da-
tabase. Each can be built using
the technology,
and then start
contributing to the
community.
different technologies, and they
communicate with each other velopers. Last week, we had
through APIs. In such microser- Ajeet Raina, the only Docker
vices, if one service is seeing
IGNITE YOUR CAREER
Captain in India, speaking to us
at our webinar. Docker Captain
– there are 46 in the world now
more demand, you can scale that – is a distinction that Docker
CogniCor’s team in Kochi without having to scale the awards to those who are both
experts in their field and are pas-
whole application. If one service
Sindhu domain – into a scalable, robust fails, it does not impact the oth- sionate about sharing their
Joseph and enterprise solution. ers, so the whole system does not Docker knowledge with others.
Rosh Cherian’s go down. Ajeet runs the Docker Bangalore
CogniCor is a Research firm Forrester finds that 53% of A large enterprise could have Meetup community, the largest
conversational US adults are likely to abandon their online multiple applications with hun- such community in the world
AI platform purchase if they can’t find a quick answer to their dreds or thousands of microser- with over 10,000 members.
for wealth question. CogniCor’s CIRA platform addresses vices. And they would need to Raina said a Docker contain-
and financial services. The wife-and-husband team this by helping to automate hundreds of routine move across different environ- er packages your microservice
founded the company in 2012, and they today have a tasks, including finding relevant information ments – internal data centre, along with all the other ele-
75-strong team of engineers, researchers and financial and forms, answering policy related questions multiple clouds, IoT system, and ments it depends on (libraries,
& marketing experts in Palo Alto and Kochi. CogniCor is and transactional processes like onboarding, through the different stages of binaries), and then that con-
part of Nasscom’s DeepTech Club. status checking and change of information. the software lifecycle, from de- tainer can run anywhere. Since
CIRA provides financial advisors with contextual velopment and testing to produc- it’s extremely lightweight, it’s
CogniCor emerged out of Sindhu’s PhD thesis on AI information via natural conversation. tion and scale out. So you need a far more portable than a virtual
– on how cognitive systems interact and resolve issues tool that helps you make your machine, which was the tech-
on their own – done at the Universitat Autonoma de Leveraging CIRA, CogniCor’s customers have application portable across all nology used till now for porta-
Barcelona. She holds 6 US patents in machine learning been able to achieve 35% reduction in calls, 30% environments, one that is not bility and more efficient use of
and natural language processing. reduction in call transfer rates, and have been dependent on the underlying underlying hardware.
able to boost customer satisfaction (CSAT) scores hardware. That’s how containers Docker was the 1st most
Rosh previously worked at HP, Telefonica, Agilent UK, to 90%. Cherian says CIRA is used by top wealth came into being. wanted, 2nd most loved, and 3rd
and Honeywell. He today leads CogniCor’s engineering management and retail banking clients, including Docker sparked the container most used tech platform in
division, responsible for developing its conversational Singapore’s OCBC and US-based brokerage firm revolution. And it has drasti- Stack Overflow’s 2020
AI platform CIRA – purpose-built for the financial LPL Financial. cally simplified the lives of de- Developer Survey.
India’s world No. 3 in nano research, but...
Ashutosh.Desai much mention as Indian IT in
Nanotechnology is
products, unlike the US, Europe, The professor says there is
@timesgroup.com news coverage. But it is an area China, Japan and South Korea. much to be done in areas like
essentially about materials
where India has ranked third in “One exception is the smart- healthcare, waste management,
manufacturing. Products
ndia is on the world nano- the number of research articles phone, which is a product of environmental remediation, and
“I tech map,” says Prof Di-
pankar Bandyopadhyay,
head of the centre for nanotech-
since 2013, behind China and the
US, according to nanotech publi-
cation StatNano. And its share
seemingly as simple as the paint
used on cars, anti-reflective
coatings on lenses, pregnancy kits,
self-leveling epoxy floorings in
multiple nanotech processes,
including in the body, screen,
processors, built-in sensors. In-
energy. The government launched
the Nano Mission initiative in
2007. But Bandhyopadhyay says
nology and professor in the de- has been gradually rising. dian society has shown techno- government should do more. Gov-
sports facilities are all results
partment of chemical engineer- But, Bandyopadhyay says, logical dependence on these de- ernment, he says, should give
of nanotechnology
ing at IIT Guwahati. “We are India still has a lot of ground to vices and that created a market companies incentives to take on
doing well in terms of nanosci- cover. India’s 9% contribution to Dipankar Bandyopadhyay for it,” Bandhyopadhyay says. certain projects – such as waste
ence and nanotechnology re- research papers in 2020 rests in | PROFESSOR, DEPARTMENT OF Other markets are beginning management – to manufacture
the shadow of the 41% of contri- CHEMICAL ENGINEERING, to emerge. Covid suddenly created products and thereby create a sup-
HEAR THE PROF butions by China. And in the ap- IIT GUWAHATI a market in India that required ply chain in the space.
search. In manufacturing and plication of nanotech, India is investment into the R&D of anti- He also feels education should
product development, we are do- even further behind. “We have be implemented. Investors will gen rapid test kits and vaccines – be geared towards nurturing not
ing a cutting-edge job too.” the best scientists, but we have only show interest when they which requires expertise in nano- just job seekers, but job creators.
Nanotechnology is the spe- our traditional weaknesses in perceive a market for it,” Band- tech. E-spin Nanotech, a company Big companies are too entrenched
cialised field of work that’s car- industry, in terms of developing hyopadhyay says. incubated by IIT Kanpur, manufac- in the ways they function. Emerg-
ried out at an atomic and mo- new technologies and having a He says the problem is India tures masks made from ‘nanofi- ing technologies require entrepre-
lecular scale. It doesn’t find as market where the technology can is not a big user of technology in bres’ through electrospinning. neurs who think differently.