Cognizant today announced that it has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) with Garuda Aerospace, one of India's leading drone startups, to power its drones with advanced digital capabilities and bring innovative solutions at scale for enterprises aiming to achieve greater agility, productivity, and overall outcomes. "We are excited to collaborate with Garuda Aerospace, combine our deep industry knowledge with capabilities such as advanced data analytics, real-time insights and software development to elevate drone-based solutions and new use cases for enterprises across sectors," said Achal Kataria, Vice President and India Country Head, Cognizant. "Drone services are one of the fastest growing technology segments with the potential to provide extraordinary value to industries such as agriculture, manufacturing, energy and utilities, retail and logistics," Kataria added. Cognizant and Garuda Aerospace are collectively set to bring a plethora of end-to-end drone-based management and monitoring offerings for businesses across sectors. For the agriculture sector, a new offering provides intelligent water and soil management, crop spraying, and aerial planting, among others.

Hansen Technologies, a leading global provider of software and services to the energy, water and communications industries, is pleased to announce that it has signed a multi-year agreement with the City of New Bern, part of the State of North Carolina, as the city charts a new digital transformation journey and envisions a new technological infrastructure. Under the terms of the agreement, Hansen will provide Hansen CIS, part of the Hansen Suite for Energy and Utilities, to the historical city, delivered through a SaaS (Software as a Service) model – marking another successful progression in Hansen's Cloud and SaaS-based CIS strategy within North America. This continues to meet the evolving needs of North American utilities and municipalities as they look to migrate towards more flexible and scalable software platforms. This will modernize New Bern's existing infrastructure and enable the replacement of their existing systems. Equipped with enhanced UI configuration capabilities and an expanded integration framework, Hansen CIS empowers utilities and municipalities to manage the full customer service and revenue lifecycle for water and energy-related services.

As they steer through the fast-evolving environment, oil and gas companies are continuing their digital transformation journeys with a view to drive growth, productivity, efficiency, and safety across their operations. As the industry's adoption of technologies continues to advanced, their efforts to explore and forge new business models has also developed accordingly. Oil and gas companies worldwide are going through a widespread change. On the one hand, the considerable price volatility as shifting geopolitical dynamics sees the supply-and-demand equations diverge in various geographies, and on the other, it is necessary to comply with increasing environmental regulations designed to support de-carbonization. Meanwhile, an escalating inclination for oil and gas companies is to create partnerships and collaborative arrangements in areas like supply chain integration, logistics, trading, and payments.

The energy sector is under constant development, and more of significant inventions and innovations are yet to come. The energy use has always been involved in other industries like agriculture, manufacturing, transportation, and many others. Thus these industries tend to enlarge the amount of energy they consume every day. Energy seems to be very demanding in terms of new technologies application and development of new energy sources. The rapid development of the energy sector and utilities directly influences social development.

As the world gasps for clean, safe, cheap, and reliable energy, demand from developing countries and the requirements of new usages rises, fueling a backlash against traditional, centralized power sources. As a result, reliance on renewable energy sources continues to grow, and the sector moves from regulation to innovation while its customers transform from passive consumers to demanding prosumers. Technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence will be instrumental in capitalizing on these shifts. But are organizations poised to make a success of them?

IBM (NYSE: IBM) today announced a new portfolio of Internet of Things (IoT) solutions that team artificial intelligence (AI) and advanced analytics to help asset intensive organizations, such as the Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), to improve maintenance strategies. The solution is designed to help organizations to lower costs and reduce the risk of failure from physical assets such as vehicles, manufacturing robots, turbines, mining equipment, elevators, and electrical transformers. IBM Maximo Asset Performance Management (APM) solutions collect data from physical assets in near real-time and provide insights on current operating conditions, predict potential issues, identify problems and offer repair recommendations. Organizations in asset-intensive industries like energy and utilities, chemicals, oil and gas, manufacturing, and transportation, can have thousands of assets that are critical to operations. These assets are increasingly producing enormous amounts of data on their operating conditions.

The global machine learning as a service (MLaaS) market is poised to grow from $1.07 billion in 2016 to $19.86 billion in 2025, at a CAGR of more than 38%, according to a new report from Transparency Market Research. Demand for MLaaS has been highest in the healthcare and life sciences industry, due primarily to the need to integrate structured and unstructured data in these areas, especially data generated by electronic health records. Other industries that will benefit from this technology moving forward include manufacturing, retail, telecom, finance, energy and utilities, education, and the government, as MLaaS can improve the decision-making capabilities of devices used in those areas, the report stated. Enterprises' move to the cloud is another important factor behind the expected growth of the MLaaS market, the report noted--as more companies shift toward cloud computing, it is easier for them to take advantage of machine learning. SEE: 5 steps to turn your company's data into profit MLaaS solutions are typically deployed in both the public and private cloud, though private cloud accounts for most of the revenue generated in the global MLaaS market, the report noted. "Enterprises are preferring private cloud-based MLaaS solutions over their public cloud-based counterparts due to data security reasons," according to the press release.