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Dental platform Udenz raises $100,000 Bridge round

TCN Bureau
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Dental platform Udenz raises $100,000 Bridge round
  • Dubai-based startup aims to use the funds to promote and market the new services in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman.
  • The dental app is now valued at £2m.

Dubai: Dubai-based startup Udenz, the platform connecting dental patients to dentists through a mobile app, has raised a $100,000 Bridge round, led by Global Ventures, and several angel investors.

The dental app is valued at £2 million since the last crowdfunding round in 2017, led by Eureeca where Udenz raised around $201,000.

The company was founded in 2016 by Dr. Hisham Safadi, an entrepreneur born and raised in Dubai. 

The funds will be used to promote and market the new services in the UAE, Saudi Arabia, and Oman.

During the Covid-19 period, Udenz had introduced dentist-patient online audio/video consultations using EazeTx Technology, one of the fastest growing online consultation tech providers in the UAE.

In early May 2020, it began a pilot test for dental treatment installment plans via its new service UdenzPay to offer an online payment solution that allowed patients to pay in installments for their dental treatments.

The pilot cases succeeded in onboarding 10 dentists within the UAE that offer installment plans for patients referred through Udenz.

Dr.Fatema Ravat, General Manager of Udenz, said that their business has witnessed an increase due to the sudden increase in demand in the online health consultation services in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, which has led to a permanent shift in patient behaviours and attitudes.

“After the pandemic, it is expected that many dentists in the Arab Gulf region will record an increase in online oral health consultations between 20 and 30 per cent,” she said.

Qualcomm’s budget chipsets for 5G smartphones in 2021

TCN Bureau
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Qualcomm’s budget chipsets for 5G smartphones in 2021
  • Xiaomi will become one of the first OEMs to have a smartphone powered by 4-series chips.
  • Oppo and Motorola have committed to drive large-scale adoption of 5G devices.

Bengaluru:  Qualcomm is accelerating its 5G global commercialisation at scale by expanding its portfolio of 5G mobile platforms to the budget Snapdragon 4-series chipsets in early 2021.

The chipset giant’s Snapdragon 8-series powered a few of the flagship 5 smartphones in 2019. This year, it has Snapdragon 865 lineup, Snapdragon 765, 768G, 765G and 690.

“Qualcomm continues to pave the way for 5G commercialization at scale, and the expansion of 5G into our Snapdragon 4-series is expected to address regions that currently have approximately 3.5 billion smartphone users combined,” Cristiano Amon, president of Qualcomm Incorporated, said.

He said the Snapdragon 4-series 5G mobile platform is designed to exceed expectations for the mass-market segment by bringing an assortment of predominately high- and mid-tier features to a broader audience.

“It will deliver on the promise of making 5G accessible to all smartphone users,” he said.

Xiaomi will become one of the world’s first OEMs to introduce a 5G smartphone powered by the Snapdragon 4-series 5G mobile platform even though Oppo and Motorola have committed to designing 5G phones powered by the new Snapdragon 4-series chipset.

Most Indian banking apps behind the curve on functionality

TCN Bureau
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Most Indian banking apps behind the curve on functionality
  • ICICI Bank is the overall digital experience leader.
  • Report shows that banks have improved their user experience only marginally and lag behind in functionality.

Bengaluru: Despite the renewed push for digital due to the Covid-19 pandemic, most Indian mobile banking apps are behind the curve on functionality, with ICICI’s iMobile app being the exception, says a new report from market research firm Forrester.

Mobile apps are the touchpoint of choice for millions of Indian consumers to manage their finances.

Forrester data indicates that 70 per cent of Indian online adults with a bank account do their banking on a mobile app or website using their smartphone.

The report reviews the mobile banking apps of five banks in India: Axis Bank, HDFC Bank, ICICI Bank, Kotak Mahindra Bank, and State Bank of India (SBI).

Compared with 2019, the report shows that banks have improved their user experience only marginally and lag behind in functionality. Four banks’ functionality scores fell – ICICI Bank’s was unchanged and is the overall digital experience leader.

“ICICI comes out on top with a wide range of features and good UX design. Of the six functionality categories we evaluated, ICICI’s app leads in four: account access and management, money management, money movement, and assisted service,” it said.

Banks can win in mobile by reducing the cognitive load on the customer. This means identifying customers’ top tasks on the app and prioritising features and design updates that support these.

Forrester, through its evaluation, found some best-in-class practices at each of the banks they reviewed:

  • Improve navigation with the transaction and universal search.
  • Use categorisation to help customers understand how they’re using their money.
  • Give unobstructed access to help and support.
  • Provide relevant content that’s easy to read and understand.
  • Reassure customers that their money and data are safe.

Indian firms to be using at least 10 cloud platforms by 2023

TCN Bureau
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Indian firms to be using at least 10 cloud platforms by 2023
  • Enterprises plan to increase share of spend on hybrid from 42% to 49% by 2023.
  • Though 90% of companies globally were “on the cloud” by 2019, only about 20% of their workloads have moved to a cloud environment.
  • Majority of cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms amid public cloud spending is set to reduce from 50% share to 43% by 2023.

Bengaluru: Organisations in India are expected to be using at least 10 clouds from a growing number of vendors by 2023 but only 29 per cent of businesses have a holistic multi-cloud management strategy, IBM survey revealed.

Business executives in India are increasingly planning to invest in hybrid multi-cloud platforms by 2023 to drive business transformation and to unlock value.

According to the survey respondents, 17 per cent of their IT spend is allocated to cloud at present and they plan to increase the share of spend on hybrid from 42 per cent to 49 per cent by 2023.

The majority of their cloud budgets are being allocated to hybrid cloud platforms even as their public cloud spend is set to reduce from 50 per cent share today to 43 per cent by 2023.

Most industries will exhibit growth in the number of clouds they will deploy, which can go up to 10 clouds particularly in insurance, telecommunications and retail as these industries will continue to expand multiple cloud deployments in the next three years.

Viswanath Ramaswamy, Vice-President for Cloud and Cognitive Software and Services at IBM India/South Asia, said the adoption of cloud has been a central feature in developing new, digitally-driven business models.

“Interestingly, the findings show that hybrid multi-cloud is the fundamental enabler of an organisation’s operating model, helping them to embark on a journey to become a cognitive enterprise of the future,” he said.

Moreover, he said that hybrid cloud enables improved business performance and greater RoI and this is proven in the instance of leading businesses that have successfully achieved demonstrable competitive advantage through robust hybrid cloud management and governance platform.

Advantage hybrid cloud

The survey revealed that the value derived from hybrid, multi-cloud platform technology and operating model at scale is 2.5 times the value derived from a single platform, single cloud vendor.

In India, leading businesses such as Bharti Airtel and Vodafone Idea are achieving business transformation by leveraging hybrid multi-cloud platform technology and embedding AI.

“We are betting big on hybrid cloud which is secure, interoperable, open and free from vendor lock-in,” Ramaswamy said.

The survey was conducted from February to April 2020 by the IBM Institute for Business Value in collaboration with Oxford Economics and covered 6,000 executives globally including 412 executives from India, across industries, job titles and geographies.

Globally, 64 per cent of advanced cloud companies recognise the need for enterprise transformation and application modernisation to go hand-in-hand, 2.6 times higher than the respondents from India.

“Thirty-five per cent of global IT executives—and thirty-one per cent of India IT executives— said they are seeking this type of improved visibility and control of their cloud costs,” survey showed.

The survey showed that only 46 per cent of Indian organisations have cloud infrastructure based on open source technologies and only 37 per cent have a cloud infrastructure that enables multivendor portability without lock-in.

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Attacks on cyber-physical systems to increase due to lack of security spending

TCN Bureau
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Attacks on cyber-physical systems to increase due to lack of security spending
  • Financial impact of CPS attacks, resulting in fatal casualties, will reach over $50b by 2023.
  • A focus on operational resilience management, beyond information-centric cybersecurity, is sorely needed.

Bengaluru: Financial impact of cyber-physical system attacks, resulting in fatalities to people, property and environment, is expected to grow due to a lack of security focus and spending.

Gartner predicts that the financial impact of CPS attacks resulting in fatal casualties will reach over $50 billion by 2023.

The research agency defines CPSs as systems that are engineered to orchestrate sensing, computation, control, networking and analytics to interact with the physical world (including humans).

They underpin all connected IT, operational technology (OT) and Internet of Things (IoT) efforts where security considerations span both the cyber and physical worlds, such as asset-intensive, critical infrastructure and clinical healthcare environments.

Katell Thielemann, Research Vice-President at Gartner, said that liability for cyber-physical security incidents will pierce the corporate veil to personal liability for 75 per cent of CEOs by 2024.

She said that regulators and governments will react promptly to an increase in serious incidents resulting from failure to secure CPSs, drastically increasing rules and regulations governing them.

Some of the governments have already increased the frequency and details provided around threats to critical infrastructure-related systems, most of which are owned by private industry.

Ben Carr, CISO at Qualys, said that it’s not surprising to see an increased focus on executive responsibility to cyber incidents as both corporate boards and investors know the importance of cybersecurity on the company’s bottom line.

Moreover, he said the ever-growing intersection of cyber with normal day-to-day activities is only strengthening the connection to corporate responsibility in this area.

“While privacy is certainly an area of concern, the likelihood of physical damage or worse, personal injury, is increasing as well. As consumer devices from gate openers and HVAC systems, to cars, become further connected, CEOs should rightfully be worried that damage or injury will be areas of liability concern if they aren’t devoting the right resources and due diligence to the problem,” he said.

CEOs need to understand the risks

Soon, Thielemann said that CEOs won’t be able to plead ignorance or retreat behind insurance policies.

“Even without taking the actual value of a human life into the equation, the costs for organisations in terms of compensation, litigation, insurance, regulatory fines and reputation loss will be significant.

“Technology leaders need to help CEOs understand the risks that CPSs represent and the need to dedicate focus and budget to securing them. The more connected CPSs are, the higher the likelihood of an incident occurring,” she said.

With OT, she said that smart buildings, smart cities, connected cars and autonomous vehicles evolving, incidents in the digital world will have a much greater effect in the physical world as risks, threats and vulnerabilities now exist in a bidirectional, cyber-physical spectrum.

However, many enterprises are not aware of CPSs already deployed in their organisation, either due to legacy systems connected to enterprise networks by teams outside of IT, or because of new business-driven automation and modernisation efforts.

Carr said that CEOs need to have a direct relationship with their CISO or CSO and genuinely understand the impact of the risk decisions these security leaders are advocating.

“Corporate boards need to ensure they have a board member who understands the issues and works with the CEO and CISO for effective oversight and governance. This is especially true when physical or personal harm is a potential risk,” he said.

While organisations are struggling to determine how they respond to garden variety ransomware incidents, few, if any, he said are considering the impact of a ransomware event that affects a system where injury or loss of life is the result of not paying the ransom. CEOs and Boards need to take this seriously and assess the personal liability of not addressing these risks and bring their CISO into the discussions.

“A focus on ORM (operational resilience management), beyond information-centric cybersecurity, is sorely needed,” Thielemann said.

Covid-19 helps enterprises rev up cloud spending in GCC

Naushad K. Cherrayil
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Covid-19 helps enterprises rev up cloud spending in GCC
  • Overall enterprise IT spending in 2020 is expected to fall between 3% and 5% in the GCC; the biggest impact is in Saudi Arabia (4.3%) and the UAE (4%).
  • GCC public cloud market is expected to grow from $956m this year to $2.35b in 2024.
  • IaaS is expected to grow by about 33% and SaaS by 24% this year.

Dubai: The pandemic has impacted IT markets across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries but there is positive momentum in cloud adoption, an industry expert said.

Jyoti Lalchandani, Group Vice-President and Regional Managing Director for the Middle East, Turkey and Africa at research firm International Data Corporation (IDC), said that work from home and disaster recovery are putting a new onus on cloud spending.

“Enterprise IT spending is expected to fall between three per cent and five per cent in the GCC, varying across the countries but the biggest impact is in Saudi Arabia (4.3 per cent) and the UAE (4 per cent), the biggest markets in the region,” he said.

GCC public cloud market (IaaS, SaaS and PaaS) is expected to grow from $956 million this year to $2.35 billion in 2024, at an annual growth rate of 25 per cent.

Only the positive trend, he said is the IaaS and SaaS segments.

“IaaS is expected to grow by about 33 per cent and SaaS by 24 per cent this year. In the long run, IaaS and PaaS are going to grow at a much faster pace,” he said.

However, he said that cloud adoption is the new platform for most of the enterprises for cost reduction, agility, efficiency and innovation.

Hyperscalers continue to open and announce new availability zones in the region due to strong demand.

IDC predicts that the contribution of “digital coworkers” will increase by 35 per cent by 2021 as more tasks are automated and augmented by technology.

By 2024, enterprises with intelligent and collaborative work environments will see 30% lower staff turnover, 30 per cent higher productivity, and 30 per cent higher revenue per employee than their peers.

Major shift in CIO re-prioritisation

There has been a significant shift in CIOs’ priorities, he said and added that the short- to medium-term priorities are changing.

 “We are seeing a three major shift in CIO re-prioritisation – cloud shift and infrastructure modernisation, distributed architecture and digital trust, and app modernisation and automation,” Lalchandani said.

As per IDC’s survey, 53 per cent of CIOs are accelerating their existing digital transformation efforts, even more, to meet new customer and operational agility needs while 48 per cent of organisations are expected to continue with digital transformation initiatives as planned at the start of the year.

“We see a lot of apps and services moving to the cloud as organisations speed up digital transformation journey in the region,” he said.

Investments by CIOs in the next 12-18 months, he said will focus on team collaboration applications, unified video communications and conferencing systems and digital workplaces.

Many organisations are increasing their investments in automation and robotic workers to reduce operational costs and improve efficiency, he added.

“The current crisis will accelerate workforce transformation as more non-human workers are expected into the workforce as the economy expands, building dynamic and hybrid workforce in the future. Hybrid cloud is emerging as the model for many CIOs and head of IT across the region,” he said.

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