Cigniti Technologies, the world's leading AI and IP-led Digital Assurance and Digital Engineering services company, has unveiled a new brand identity reflecting its renewed vision to help its clients in accelerating their digital transformation journeys and achieve market leadership. The new brand identity reflects Cigniti's strengthened resolve to be a trusted digital transformation partner for its clients, including 60 of its Fortune 500 and 80 of its Global 2000 companies, delivering at a global scale with increasingly localized capabilities, and leveraging quality-first digital assurance, product engineering, AI, ML, data and insights, data visualization, automation, and blockchain. In addition to conveying the futuristic vision, the new logo aspires to uphold a contemporary attitude, produce a powerful visual depiction of a shift toward digitalization, and at the same time imbibe the company's software quality-first mindset. Additionally, it aims to exemplify the intense commitment and forward-thinking transformation that the business is embracing through innovation, automation, and artificial intelligence. The company's digital thinking and digital avatar are a reflection of its ability to engineer, assure, and technologically transform and accelerate outcomes for global companies, helping them achieve market leadership in their chosen lines of business.

Bengaluru: Global professional services company Accenture will acquire umlaut, an engineering consulting and services firm headquartered in Aachen, Germany for an undisclosed amount. The acquisition will scale Accenture's deep engineering capabilities to help companies use digital technologies like cloud, artificial intelligence, and 5G to transform how they design, engineer and manufacture their products as well as embed sustainability. The acquisition of umlaut will add more than 4,200 industry-leading engineers and consultants across 17 countries to Accenture's Industry X services, and expand the company's capabilities across a range of industries, including automotive, aerospace & defense, telecommunications, energy and utilities, Accenture said in a statement. Industry X combines Accenture's powerful data and digital capabilities with deep engineering expertise to offer clients the broadest suite of services for digitizing their engineering functions, factory floors and plant operations, improving productivity, speeding up the transformation of hardware into software-enabled products, and allowing for faster and more flexible product development. "We predicted that digital would ultimately be applied at scale to the core of a company's business - the design, engineering and manufacturing of their products. And, for nearly a decade Accenture has been building the unique capabilities and ecosystem partnerships to combine the power of digital with traditional engineering services," said Julie Sweet, chief executive officer, Accenture.

On 17th May, L&T Technology Services announced the development of a smart parking solution working in collaboration with the Intel Corporation. The solution leverages the efficient capabilities of AI and has four key components according to the company. They are an operator portal that hosts user information; a mobile application for end-user interface; a digital signage module to ensure safe and secured access; and a digital camera. All these components are connected through the AWS cloud platform, hence making it easily available and accessible to people. The smart parking solution is powered by the Intel Distribution of the OpenVINO toolkit to run the AI inference model on Intel Xeon scalable processors and Intel Movidius VPUs.

Supriyo Das, Vice President and Global Practice Head – Software Engineering, Industrial and Engineering Services, Wipro Limited said, "We are thrilled with this recognition. Product complexity is ever increasing with growing digital adoption, proliferation of software across industries, need for a seamless end user experience and minimal product recalls. At Wipro we have invested in infrastructure, talent, industry focused solutions and strong partnership to help our customers overcome these challenges. Our investments in new-age technologies such as 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Internet of Things (IoT), Blockchain, Certification & Compliance Labs and talent has started reaping benefits. We are confident that our offerings and solutions powered by Wipro EngineeringNXT platform will continue to meet and exceed expectations of customers. This recognition is a testimony to our commitment towards achieving excellence."

The rapid rate of change enabled by software make this industry more vulnerable than most to the falling behind on the innovation curve. This problem has only accelerated in recent years as the number of disruptive technologies have grown at an exponential rate fueled by the growing size of the market and the number of software engineers. The open source community has been a driving source of disruptive technologies such as big data Hadoop and Spark, JavaScript frameworks like Angular and React, and machine learning frameworks like TensorFlow. Software based companies who do not embrace these disruptive technologies face the ever-increasing risk of being pushed aside by those that do. To make this even more challenging, the skills required to enhance the current product and the skills required to innovate using new disruptive technologies are different.

SINGAPORE: Thousands of jobs for professionals, managers, executives and technicians (PMET) are being created in the professional services sector, in new roles such as cybersecurity consultants, data engineers and legal tech experts. The sector - which includes architecture and engineering services, accounting and advertising - unveiled its industry transformation map (ITM) on Wednesday (Jan 24), which charts its vision to become a "global market leader in high-value and specialist services". At the heart of the roadmap are initiatives to drive innovation and equip the workforce with skill sets in areas such as data science and artificial intelligence over the next five to 10 years, the Economic Development Board (EDB) said. With the roadmap, the professional services sector is projected to grow at an average rate of 4.6 per cent from 2015 to reach a value-add of S$31 billion by 2020. The aim is also to generate 5,500 jobs every year till 2020.

India's outsourcing industry is pegged at $150 billion and has been hailed as an engine of job creation and plays a key role in driving the economy to greater heights. The trajectory of growth started around the year 2000 and led to the country building capabilities in the areas of Information Technology (IT), Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) and Engineering Services Outsourcing (ESO). This presented India with a natural and acquired advantage in terms of talent availability, putting it on the global map as a destination for high-quality and competitive technology skills. Today, the Indian ESO sector is well-poised to shift away from the traditional back-office services to more high-end technology work and serve growing sectors such as the global Aerospace & Defence (A&D) industry. Strengths and Opportunities Galore There are some key strengths that India inherently possesses as a potential growth destination of high-end engineering services.

Two days after K.S. Sunil Kumar received a promotion, Human Resources phoned him up and asked him to resign. This happened in April, just as Kumar was beginning his ninth year at Tech Mahindra, one of the giants in India's IT services industry. He worked in engineering services, where he designed components and tools for aerospace firms in North America and Europe. They'd send over specs--the materials available to construct a hinge, and the kind of load it had to bear, and the cost at which it had to be manufactured--and he mocked up options with the help of software. He was a foot soldier in the army of Indian engineers to whom work is outsourced from the West, so that it can be finished at a fraction of the expense. Sometimes he left his base, Tech Mahindra's Bangalore campus, to serve stints at clients' offices abroad: in Montreal, Belfast, or Stockholm.

Infosys' consolidated net profit rose 1.4% to ₹3,483 crore for the first quarter of fiscal 2017-18 compared with the same period a year earlier, but declined 3.3% sequentially from ₹3,603 crore. India's second-largest software services provider said that the consolidated revenue for the quarter under review (Q1) was flat (1.8%) year-on-year at ₹17,078 crore as against ₹16,782 crore in the same period a year ago. This was subdued (0.2%) sequentially from ₹17,120 crore quarter ago. "I am encouraged by the uptick in revenue per employee for six quarters in a row, and the strong momentum in our new high growth services and software, as we accelerate our focus on innovation-led growth," said Infosys chief executive Vishal Sikka. "The widespread adoption of our grass-root innovation and education initiatives continue to fuel our transformation," he added.