Avient Corporation, the global manufacturer of specialized polymer materials, recently opened its Global Delivery Center in Pune. The state-of-the art facility will act as a key enabler for the manufacturer’s digital transformation initiatives globally.  

With a core focus on key pillars such as ERP systems, IT infrastructure, and Global Business Services, the center aims to significantly strengthen Avient’s global service capabilities and support its innovation roadmap.

The center is also expected to create new job opportunities, specifically in Pune, as it plans to double its headcount in the next few months. 

Vikas Vij, Managing Director of Avient said, “The inauguration of our new Global Delivery Center in Pune marks a significant milestone for Avient in India. This facility will not only enhance our ability to serve our global customers but also create valuable employment opportunities in the region.” 

Dr. Yogesh Dadke, IT Delivery Leader, Avient, will be leading the facility’s operations and its strategic direction. “The establishment of our Global Delivery Center in Pune marks a significant milestone in Avient’s global expansion journey. This initiative not only represents a compelling growth story for our company but also demonstrates our strategic investment in the region’s talent pool. Our Pune center will serve as a hub for innovation, technological advancement, and operational excellence, underscoring our commitment to leveraging local expertise to drive global success,” Dr. Dadke added. 

Avient has been championing sustainability and innovative approaches to products for many decades. It leverages unique technologies to improve the recyclability of products and enable recycled content to be incorporated, thus advancing a more circular economy. Avient’s Dyneema is touted as the world’s strongest fiber and the company has been working with light-weighting solutions that replace heavier traditional materials like metal, glass and wood. 

Technology has been a key priority for Avient in driving many of these breakthroughs and the new global delivery center reinstates the company’s emphasis on technology.

“Our new Global Delivery Center in Pune is a testament to Avient’s commitment to innovation and excellence. This center will be crucial in our ongoing digital transformation efforts, and we are excited to be building our team with talented employees in Pune,” said Zaneta Potoczny, Vice President, Global Business Services, Avient. 

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A recent survey of one hundred Fortune 500 executives and another hundred Fortune 1000 executives based in US in reveals that an overwhelming majority of executives (99%) agree that work will only become more distributed in the future. The research from Atlassian Corporation found that all large organizations work in a distributed way, whether they have an in-office policy or not. Distributed work is essentially done online by collaborating across locations vs shoulder-to-shoulder.

As per Atlassian’s Team Anywhere policy, employees can choose to work from home, an office, or a combination of both. This approach has been a success as the company is able to attract and retain top talent. Also, the representation of women at Atlassian in India is more than 2x higher now since practicing Team Anywhere. According to 92% of the employees, the company’s distributed work policy allows them to do their best work, and 91% say it’s an important reason why they stay at Atlassian.  

Annie Dean, Head of Team Anywhere at Atlassian said, “Atlassian is in the business of unleashing team potential. We want to help teams do distributed work well – and the best way to do that is to live it ourselves. Distributed work isn’t a sacrifice – it’s a huge opportunity for businesses and for people — especially underrepresented groups. We’re finding that teams designed to be distributed are actually figuring out better ways of working.” 

“Atlassian is living proof that location flexibility, vibrant offices, and employee engagement can co-exist, even at scale. Our evidence-based approach to distributed work is an opportunity to solve the challenges our customers will face. That’s why we’re so passionate about sharing what we discover – we take what we learn to shape what we build,” she added. 

Some of the findings from the survey include: 

• According to the report, the biggest blockers to productivity, connection, and innovation are not location-based. 98% of the executives agree that where teams work isn’t the problem, it’s how.  
• Only one-third of executives with an in-office policy mandate think that their in-office policies have had any impact on productivity. 
• 87% of executives say their teams do not have visibility into each other’s goals. The biggest barriers to collaboration are that employees don’t know who to collaborate with (39%), employees don’t know how to collaborate effectively (38%) and a lack of ownership of tasks (37%). 

In addition to the survey findings, the Atlassian report ‘Lessons Learned: 1,000 Days of Distributed at Atlassian’ serves as a playbook that shares Atlassian’s experience on what they’ve learned. There have been some important concerns against remote or distributed work, which tend to be based on feelings and gut reactions. The company has made decisions based on data, and this report addresses each of these challenges mentioned in the summary below: 

Distributed challenge 1: Productivity 

Atlassians who participated in an experiment where they “timeboxed” their top priorities declined 17% more meetings than usual and spent 13% less time in meetings. 

Distributed challenge 2: Connection

Team gatherings increase team connection by 27%, and this boost lasts 4-5 months. New hires and new graduates experience the biggest boosts in team connection following an in-person gathering. 

Distributed challenge 3: Offices 

Despite Atlassian having no mandates, the company consistently saw 80% of the Atlassians visit an office each quarter. 

Atlassians working in India annually save approximately a month, as against the global average of approximately 10 days. 

Distributed challenge 4: Culture 

As collaboration increasingly happens online, work and how it gets down will become more of a cultural constant than offices. 

The report concludes by stating that neglecting to adapt to the distributed new normal is not just a missed opportunity but a detriment to an organization’s ability to harness its full business potential. It’s not rocket science: when teams work smarter, they can achieve more, faster, and with better results. 

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IBM has launched a $500 million venture fund to invest in a range of AI companies – from early-stage to hyper-growth startups – focused on accelerating generative AI technology and research for the enterprise.

The IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund will invest in current and future AI leaders that are helping businesses around the world realize the potential of AI for business. The fund will provide each startup with opportunities to develop meaningful partnerships with IBM, while gaining operational expertise on product and engineering and go-to-market strategies.

The company aims to capitalize on the latest wave of AI innovation in generative AI with watsonx, the company’s AI and data platform. With the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, the company will grow its ecosystem of AI partnerships – including working with companies leveraging and building on watsonx.

“AI is slated to unlock nearly $16 trillion in productivity by 2030. With the launch of the IBM Enterprise AI Venture Fund, we’re opening another channel to harness the enormous potential of the AI revolution into tangible, positive outcomes for IBM and the companies we invest in,” said Rob Thomas, Senior Vice President, Software and Chief Commercial Officer, IBM. 

The move comes as part of a series of AI initiatives that the company has embarked on. 

In August this year, IBM announced that it is participating in the $235M Series D funding round of Hugging Face, the leading open-source collaboration platform for the machine learning community building the future of AI. IBM has contributed hundreds of open models and datasets on Hugging Face, including the recent release of the Geospatial Foundation Model in partnership with NASA. 

IBM also recently participated in HiddenLayer’s Series A funding to expand its talent base, increase go-to-market efforts, and further invest in its Machine Learning Security (MLSec) Platform. HiddenLayer is the leading security provider for AI models and assets, and this funding round marks the largest Series A funding raised by a cybersecurity company focused on protecting AI this year.

Today’s news builds on the momentum and market adoption of IBM’s watsonx and furthers the company’s strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to accelerate open innovation in AI. In September, IBM announced the general availability of the first models in the watsonx Granite model series — a collection of generative AI models to advance the infusion of generative AI into business applications and workflows. IBM also confirmed that the standard contractual intellectual property protections for IBM products will apply to IBM-developed watsonx AI models. 

Earlier this year, IBM also announced plans to host Meta’s Llama 2-chat 70 billion parameter model within watsonx, furthering the company’s strategy of leveraging both third-party and its own AI models to maintain open innovation.

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When Paolo Juvara joined Pure Storage in 2021, he knew he had a vastly different role to fulfill. After being the CIO of one of the largest cloud companies in the world (Google Cloud), Paolo’s role at Pure Storage as the Chief Digital Transformation was to be quite an unusual venture. 

A software developer at heart, his diverse background in both business and technology domains has helped him ace the role.

In this exclusive interview with CIO Dimension, Paolo shares his unique experiences as the chief digital transformation officer who drives Pure’s ambitious digital agenda to meet the company’s innovation and growth goals. 

Watch the full video here: 

People should be at the center of every digital transformation project 

DX is all about leveraging technology. But you really cannot succeed if you are not focusing on people and process, says Paolo. He believes that digital leaders must be empathetic towards the needs of diverse set of users. 

“If you do not involve humans to begin with, by understanding their needs and challenges, then you are not going to find the right bottlenecks – whether your goal is to improve process efficiencies or drive innovation,” he adds. One of the ways he implements this strategy is through the formation of a product management team within the DX organization.

For a company that transformed storage into an innovation technology, all of Pure’s technology and business advances are complemented by digital transformation – to greatly amplify the outcomes. The starting point of a successful transformation project, says Paolo, is often the back office. “I would say back office is the foundation of everything else in digital transformation. If operational complexities are not addressed, they start becoming a huge bottleneck for the scalability and growth of the company. My number one priority has been to focus on the back-office operations so that we can remove all the internal friction.” 

In this interview, Paolo also highlights how the traditional ways of measuring the success of DX projects are changing, the importance of employee and customers experience in such initiatives and why organizations must clearly define the business outcomes at the very outset. 

Also read:
Digital Transformation is all about questioning the status quo: Mani Mulki, Kedaara 

Pure Storage, Microsoft expand partnership to address cloud adoption challenges

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Let’s talk numbers! An astonishing 70% of digital transformation projects reportedly fail – despite it being an all-encompassing focus for enterprises for over a decade. There could be several reasons for a digital transformation initiative to misfire. But, one of the key reasons is a ‘wrong start’, says Mani Mulki, Operating Director for Technology at Kedaara Capital and one of the topmost tech transformation gurus in the industry. 

Mani has led several transformation projects during his illustrious career as a CIO, working for many iconic brands like Tata Capital, ICICI, Godrej and Pidilite. And his biggest takeaway – digital transformation is about putting process before technology. 

In an exclusive interaction with CIO Dimension, Mani Mulki lays out the complexities of digital transformation and explores where organizations go wrong. 

Watch the full video here: 

“Most often, companies fail to understand what it really takes to digitally transform. It’s very easy to get a digital landscape in place. The tough part is doing the ‘transformation’ bit. A lot of organizations that embark on digital transformation merely automate whatever they are doing currently. Very few organizations actually question the status-quo,” he says. 

From his on-the-ground experience spearheading several digital transformation projects, Mani concludes that organizations that successfully transform themselves go back to the basics and challenge the existing processes. 

Mani has successfully amalgamated some of these best-practices to his current role, where he has the larger mandate of guiding a diversified set of Kedaara’s portfolio companies – spanning across healthcare, financial services, pharma, manufacturing and consumer tech. He works with key stakeholders of these portfolio companies in devising robust technology roadmaps that aligns tightly with the desired business outcomes. 

“I am pleased to be able to move into an influencer’s role from an operational role,” he says. 

And that’s perhaps a natural transition that every CIO seeks to make, in order to create a larger impact both within and outside the organization. 

As someone who has closely witnessed the evolution of the CIO role, Mani believes that the CIO role will disappear before long. In its stead, something more powerful will emerge. “IT was a complex function a few years ago and that’s what lent that complex credibility to the CIO or CTO title. With the advent of Cloud and other models, the use cases are more important than the technology itself. The role of a CIO or CTO will hence diffuse into that of a ‘chief transformation officer’ and the potential for that is going to be massive,” he sums up. 

Also watch:

Innovation talk: Muralidharan Ramachandran, Tech Evangelists & CIO of Startek

Shweta Srivastava, Head – IT Applications, JK Cement on the impact of LCNC on app development

Maheswaran S, Country Manager, Varonis, on shifting to data & user-centric security

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AWS announced the AWS Generative AI Innovation Center, a new program to help customers successfully build and deploy generative artificial intelligence (AI) solutions. 

AWS is investing $100 million in the program, which will connect AWS AI and machine learning (ML) experts with customers around the globe to help them envision, design, and launch new generative AI products, services, and processes. 

The AWS Generative AI Innovation Center team of strategists, data scientists, engineers, and solutions architects will work with customers to build bespoke solutions that harness the power of generative AI. For example, healthcare and life sciences companies can pursue ways to accelerate drug research and discovery. Manufacturers can build solutions to reinvent industrial design and processes. And financial services companies can develop ways to provide customers with more personalized information and advice.

“The Generative AI Innovation Center is part of our goal to help every organization leverage AI by providing flexible and cost-effective generative AI services for the enterprise, alongside our team of generative AI experts to take advantage of all this new technology has to offer. Together with our global community of partners, we’re working with business leaders across every industry to help them maximize the impact of generative AI in their organizations, creating value for their customers, employees, and bottom line,” said Matt Garman, senior vice president of Sales, Marketing, and Global Services at AWS. 

Through no cost workshops, engagements, and training, AWS will help customers imagine and scope the use cases based on best practices and industry expertise. Customers will work closely with generative AI experts from AWS and the AWS Partner Network to select the right models, define paths to navigate technical or business challenges, develop proofs of concepts, and make plans for launching solutions at scale. 

Engagements will deliver strategy, tools, and assistance that will help customers use AWS generative AI services through APIs. Some of these services include Amazon CodeWhisperer and Amazon Bedrock, a fully managed service that makes foundational models (FMs) from AI21 Labs, Anthropic, and Stability AI, along with Amazon’s own family of FMs, Amazon Titan.

 They can also train and run their models using high-performance infrastructure, including AWS Inferentia-powered Amazon EC2 Inf1 Instances, AWS Trainium-powered Amazon EC2 Trn1 Instances, and Amazon EC2 P5 instances powered by NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPUs. Additionally, customers can build, train, and deploy their own models with Amazon SageMaker or use Amazon SageMaker Jumpstart to deploy some of today’s most popular FMs, including Cohere’s large language models, Technology Innovation Institute’s Falcon 40B, and Hugging Face’s BLOOM.

Companies like Highspot, Lonely Planet and Twilio are among the AWS customers who are in the process of leveraging the services offered by the innovation center. 

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Despite global economic uncertainty, innovation rose as a top corporate priority for 2023. According to a new report released today by Boston Consulting Group (BCG), 79% of companies around the world see innovation as a top-three priority for this year and 66% plan to increase spending—42% by more than 10%. This is in stark contrast to the last downturn in 2009 when fewer than two-thirds of companies ranked innovation as a top-three priority and only 58% planned to increase spending.

For its 17th Most Innovative Companies report titled, Reaching New Heights in Uncertain Times, BCG examines how leading companies are raising their commitment to innovation, and how innovation is building their resilience to economic uncertainty. The report draws on the firm’s annual survey of more than 1,000 global executives on innovation trends and its global innovation performance database of more than 1,000 companies.

“The connection between innovation, growth, and advantage is stronger than ever,” said Justin Manly, a BCG managing director and partner and a coauthor of the report. “The companies that both prioritize innovation and make sure that they are ready to act will continue to widen their lead and deliver outsized returns.”

The 50 Most Innovative Companies of 2023

Despite the market headwinds that they experienced in 2022, tech companies continue to dominate the top 50, including five of the top ten slots. For the third consecutive year, Apple holds the top spot on the list. Tesla climbs three positions to second place, and Amazon remains at third. Nine new companies join the top 50. In addition, international energy companies hold five spots, possibly reflecting survey respondents’ concerns over climate change and the fact that they’re looking to the energy industry to be a creative part of the solution.

The 50 most innovative companies for 2023 are a geographically diverse group, roughly evenly split between North America and the rest of the world. Europe and Asia are well represented, and the Middle East joins the list for the first time.

BCG’s report also underscores the role innovation plays in driving performance. Since 2005, BCG’s portfolio of the 50 most innovative companies has outpaced the broader market in shareholder returns by a significant margin—an average of 3.3 percentage points per year.

Companies Are Investing in AI More Than Any Other Technology

Artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly expanding innovation possibilities, and companies’ investment priorities reflect this: 61% of companies are investing in AI and machine learning this year. This is 15 percentage points higher than robotics and process automation, which survey respondents selected as the second most attractive technology for investment.

However, while 83% of these firms have systematically implemented AI to support innovation in one or more use cases, only 45% have managed to translate this into business impact.

Those select companies that ultimately realize impact from AI become idea-generation powerhouses. They generate more than five times as many ideas than others and incubate more than twice as many minimum viable products.

“The best innovators develop a self-reinforcing, virtuous cycle. AI is a great example of this—more ideas means greater likelihood of finding the best use cases for AI, and implementing AI helps generate more ideas,” said Michael Ringel, a BCG managing director and senior partner and a coauthor of the report. “Once the innovation cycle starts, it creates its own momentum and produces transformative competitive advantage.”

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Ekgaon is a startup technology platform which provides financial and agriculture services to farmers. Their technology solutions now connect the entire agriculture value chain – right from farm to market. Leveraging Artificial Intelligence, they provide customised advisory services to farmers which has led to higher farm productivity and enables them to connect to markets.

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