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Wipro acquires Aggne for $66 million

Leading Indian IT services company Wipro has acquired a majority stake in Aggne, a US-headquartered technology company focused on the insurance industry, for an enterprise value of $66 million.

A statement from Wipro said the acquisition brings its capabilities and intellectual property (IP) in the property and casualty (P&C) insurance space.

Aggne’s services include IP-led consulting, implementation, and managed services with a strong focus on the Duck Creek platform—a full suite of cloud-based, low-code products. The company said the combined capabilities will help deliver enhanced value, faster speed-to-market, and differentiated services to clients in the P&C sector.

Infosys bags order from Pacific International Lines

Infosys has entered into a collaboration with Pacific International Lines (PIL), a Singapore-based shipping company. Under this partnership, Infosys will help revamp PIL’s existing customer portal and deploy a scalable and modern technology platform for them. This will enable PIL to further its ‘Driving Connectivity’ initiative, which is aimed at connecting its businesses across the markets that they serve.

In addition, PIL’s web and mobile applications will undergo a comprehensive overhaul to simplify user experience and enhance customer engagement.

The multi-year, multi-phased collaboration seeks to address critical business challenges such as modernising web and mobile applications, enhancing scalability, and providing advisory services on the latest technology and business trends.

Pratt & Whitney opens new digital capability centre in Bengaluru

Pratt & Whitney, a part of global aerospace and defence company RTX, has established its new India Digital Capability Center (IDCC) in Bengaluru. The facility will be co-located with Pratt & Whitney’s engineering and supply chain operations centres of excellence. The location will also facilitate close collaboration with other RTX businesses in India including Collins Aerospace and RTX Enterprise Services.

A statement said Pratt & Whitney has begun recruiting its first tranche of employees for the IDCC and is expected to grow to over 300 employees by 2027. The center will be focused on delivering multiple digital technology capabilities across various priority areas of Pratt & Whitney’s digital transformation.

Pratt & Whitney’s other investments in the country include India Customer Training Center in Hyderabad and its research and development collaboration with the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Pratt & Whitney has sourced nearly $55 million in the past 10 years from leading aerospace suppliers in India and also sourced over $500 million in engineering services into India over the past two decades.

Tata Elxsi opens new design centre in Pune

Tata Elxsi, a design technology services company, has expanded its presence in Pune with the inauguration of a new Global Design and Engineering centre. The new centre is specifically tailored to cater to the requirements of automotive OEMs and Tier I suppliers. It will house over 1,000 engineers, designers and technology specialists, and advanced labs to spearhead collaborative initiatives in engineering R&D across software-defined vehicles, connected services, autonomous technologies, electrification, mechatronics, and design.

L&T Technology Services partners with BlackBerry

L&T Technology Services has partnered with BlackBerry, a security software and services company. The collaboration is set to leverage the BlackBerry QNX suite of automotive software solutions and enable the development of innovative software-defined vehicles (SDVs) for global original equipment manufacturers (OEMs).

The partnership sees LTTS integrating BlackBerry technologies—including QNX Neutrino OS, QNX OS for Safety, QNX Hypervisor, BlackBerry IVY vehicle data platform, and QNX acoustics middleware—into its service offerings. This will help expedite product time-to-market while ensuring safe and secure solutions.

LTTS will deploy industry solutions by BlackBerry in building next-generation SDV platforms on High Performance Compute (HPC) and domain controllers with complex software architectures, and middleware that reduces time-to-market. As part of this partnership, LTTS and BlackBerry will also jointly train engineers on QNX OS and QNX Hypervisor platforms.

Synechron deploys GitHub Copilot for Indian developers

Synechron, a digital consulting firm, has deployed GitHub Copilot, an AI developer tool, for broad use by its developers in India.

According to Synechron, it has conducted multiple internal experiments across numerous projects within its global Financial Innovation Laboratories (FinLabs) and examined the impact of various generative AI (GenAI) tools, including GitHub Copilot, on developer productivity, versus traditional, non-AI enhanced development processes. These broad initiatives resulted in productivity gains of up to 40% when GitHub Copilot was used as part of the software development lifecycle (SDLC)—including code generation, code migration and optimization, documentation, and test automation, the company said.

Synechron found that the use of GitHub Copilot reduced both the time and effort required across the entire development lifecycle.

Zendesk completes acquisition of Klaus

SaaS company Zendesk has completed its acquisition of Klaus, an AI-powered quality management platform. The acquisition of Klaus is the latest addition to the company’s existing workforce engagement management (WEM) solutions which includes Tymeshift.

According to Zendesk, with digital agents resolving more service inquiries without human interaction, having a QA solution that analyses both human and digital agent performance is crucial to maintaining quality control and providing best-in-class customer service. Klaus pinpoints conversations with positive or negative sentiment, and identifies outliers, churn risk, escalations and follow-ups across all conversations—even those done by outsourced teams. It spots knowledge gaps and coaching opportunities that can be used to improve agent performance and productivity, all of which result in higher customer satisfaction.

Fulcrum Digital unveils new GenAI platform

Fulcrum Digital, an enterprise AI company, has launched Ryze, its advanced Generative AI platform. The company said Ryze has configurable and agnostic components for large language models (LLMs), accommodating a wide array of preferred models such as OpenAI, LLAMA2, SQL Coder, and GenZ. It also allows for the integration of customisable applications and the automation of business processes.

Fulcrum Digital noted that Ryze can find applications in the insurance and retail sectors. In the insurance segment, it can streamline the claims processing workflow by digitising paper-based and unstructured data, reducing manual intervention. They are also developing a specialised solution to extract relevant information from redacted invoices, ensuring compliance with privacy regulations while maintaining data accuracy. In the retail segment, it helps in automating the inventory management processes.

Vertiv introduces new data centre solution for India market

Vertiv, a digital infrastructure solutions company, has announced the availability of Vertiv Avocent ACS8000 Series Console in India for remote data centre management and out-of-band management of IT infrastructure.

The Avocent ACS8000 Advanced Console Server is designed to support secure console and power management, server and network management, and secure access to test and development lab environments. It can be utilised in settings including telco central office test and development labs, and remote facilities.

Featuring a dual-core Arm processor architecture with expanded memory capabilities, the updated Linux operating system and Vertiv DSView management software. It has an automated configuration with zero-touch provisioning, and can access and troubleshoot remote locations using automatic network failover to cellular, Ethernet or analog mode.

HCLTech gets tap ranking in Gartner survey

HCLTech, a leading Indian IT services company, has received the highest number of overall responses and was placed in the customers’ choice quadrant in November 2023 Gartner Peer Insights for Voice of the Customer: Data Center Outsourcing and Hybrid Infrastructure Managed Services, Worldwide.

The company said it is also a leader in the 2023 Gartner Magic Quadrant for data centre outsourcing and hybrid infrastructure managed services worldwide. It received 43 reviews with 88% of the respondents to the Gartner ‘Voice of the Customer’ survey expressing their willingness to recommend HCLTech.