Author: Ajay Lulia

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This is the era of technology. Today, we are more connected to each other via technology than in-person. When it comes to business, we use sophisticated and effective methods of communication. Video conferencing is one type of distance communication tool where two or a group of people, sitting at different locations, can connect visually and communicate.

Pandemic Impact on Video Conferencing App Downloads

As employees have to stay indoors due to the coronavirus pandemic, they are turning to mobile video conferencing apps to ensure the business is not hampered. According to stats from leading mobile market data provider App Annie, video conferencing and business communication apps saw record levels of downloads and rose to 62 million in March and April 2020. Nothing could have helped better than a video conferencing app while embracing a work-from-home culture quickly.

Remote Working through Video Conferencing is the Way to Forward
 

More and more organizations are planning to permanently switch to an online working environment. While Google has asked its employees to work from home till the end of 2020, Twitter announced that its employees will be working from home permanently. In India, TCS too made a similar announcement. With a remote working culture, meetings through videoconferencing are going to be the way forward.
 

Pros and Cons of Video Conferencing

Yet while the benefits may seem apparent, like every technology, there are downsides as well.

Pros

• Saves travel expenses
• No time limits
• More interactive communication
• Better productivity
• Happier employees and a higher retention rate

Cons

• Network instability and time gap
• Less personal contact and understanding
• Technical issues
• Appearance anxiety
• International time zones

Conclusion

Video conferencing software and applications have made it possible for businesses to connect easily. Today, almost every organization is equipped with more than one custom video calling and conferencing app. If you are looking for developing a video calling application for your business, get in touch with STS today! We are also experienced in developing video chat apps. Call us today to know more!

While businesses adapt to the new normal, on-demand apps seem to pave the way. In case you haven’t understood what these are, just think of Uber, Grab, Swiggy, Walmart Grocery, or their counterparts. On-demand apps basically act as the link between businesses and customers through a mobile application. Let’s take a look at how they can benefit businesses in a post-COVID economy:

The Revival of Local Businesses

Most of the local stores have seen a drastic reduction in footfall over the last few months. On-demand apps will allow them to reach out to many more customers. Customers can simply choose their preferred products on the business’s app, and the latter will be intimated of their needs. The firm can then easily supply the products or the services right at the individual’s doorstep.

Database Expansion

Most on-demand apps require customers to sign up with basic information like name, contact number, email ID, and address. These details can be customized to the business provider’s needs, like asking additionally for gender or age group. Aside from expanding their customer database, enterprises can use this information to study buying behavior, better understand consumer needs, and also provide a more personalized experience to them.

Cost Reduction and Flexibility

On-demand apps can help businesses reduce overhead costs. It is also an effective marketing tool to advertise and inform customers about discounts and promotions as and when they occur. An on-demand app also empowers you with increased flexibility by allowing your business to adapt to the rapidly changing trends of the market. The app can be quickly modified to include new products, adjust to fluctuating market conditions, and gain from competitive advantage.

Security

If a business resorts to a generic mobile app (probably because it’s cheaper), there’s no way they can ensure that a customer’s data will remain private and secure. And in the digital era, data security is a top priority. It’s ideal to procure a custom-made app for your business so that you can claim that any data collected will be confidential. You may spend a little more, but it’s an investment that will give you returns sooner than you expect.

Your business could either be a start-up or well-established. No matter what the size, on-demand mobile applications will be the way forward for you. That’s one of the best things about an on-demand app. Regardless of the size; every business will be able to benefit similarly, from developing its own customized apps.

There is a sizeable increase in the way technology controls our lives now. Very few people in the yesteryears would have thought driverless cars can become a reality, technology has shrunk our ability to actually do stuff manually by bringing in automation everywhere. And same is the case with the Next Big Thing becoming obsolete in no time.

The technological deterrence to this obsoletion is not some nascent out-of-college tech, but it’s been around for more than a decade now. There is an overwhelming promise shown by this technology, IoT (Internet of Things).

To put what this technology does in a nutshell, one could say, it gives you the power to control all your home appliances or any device assigned an IP to be controlled via the Internet. With IPv6, almost anything and everything can be assigned as a node with an IP; this has strengthened the resolve to create more efficient and intuitive Machine-to-Machine (M2M) communication methods.

Similarly, searching for your car keys or TV remote, etc., which you forgot somewhere in the midst, has gotten a lot easier. Pixie app, a lot (Location of Things) has made life easier by helping you locate misplaced things exactly where you last left them. Pixie has caught eyeballs because of its rather simple approach to locating things pictured in its mobile app as pixie points, and triangulating them with the pixie beacons.

Centers For Excellence-Internet Of Things (CoE-IoT)

Synergy Technology Services (STS) has been brainstorming to check the feasibility of applications in M2M communication by partnering with product firms to identify and solve IT bottlenecks that arise when integrating cross-platform technologies.

Our mobility team works in tandem with the IoT team to come up with a groundbreaking app that will bridge the communication gap and facilitate seamless connectivity between a smartphone and any home appliance that we wish to control.

For this groundbreaking app to perform at its peak; always, we have brought in a substantial change in the outlook and approach to M2M communication. For large infrastructures to be controlled using IoT there has to be a comprehensive action plan that can, not only provide but also sustain data overheads in the long run. And this can be achieved only through the cloud-hosted application, this is mostly because of the scalability of technologies with data hosted on the cloud.

Telematics is one area that we have been aggressively pursuing to provide the best IT services. Vehicle manufacturers and Logistics corporations are always looking to provide instant support to their customers and continuously monitor their service delivery. We have developed a system for one such corporation to capture a chain of events and deliver real-time data over the air.

LoT has caught our attention in a crude way; we have set up internal think tank groups to identify and explore areas for innovation and make this technology inclusive.

However, IoT and LoT have a long way to go before they can be viable technologies for everyday use.

And yes, we are working relentlessly to fast-track these possibilities and make a tangible impact.

With the overwhelming successful project deliveries, we are pleased to announce that our Synergy is still growing!

After more than 12 years of successful 600+ project deliveries, Synergy is now growing to provide advanced solutions for IT services and products- moving to a bigger space than before!

In our new office space; we will expand our prevailing services to advanced technology, increasing support to our growing number of clients. We will continue to provide IT services from the new office of Synergy Technology Services Pvt. Ltd. At 504, Acropolis 5th floor, Andheri east, Mumbai.

For over a decade, agile methodology has proved to be a panacea to all or any or the developmental ills faced by software developers. This incremental and iterative method of development defined and paved a whole new way for how software delivery worked. This also resolved the glitches and dear deadline misses that regimental methods brought in.

Now, with evolving needs,

Is The Traditional SCRUM Method Sufficient In IT Software Delivery?

Insufficient, mainly because service-oriented delivery of software possesses to see subtle changes; this primarily addresses the not-so-obvious pain points of agile methodology such as constant close collaboration throughout testing, incurring time overheads, etc.

Secondly, the price factor of a project incorporating agile methodology is subjective to the process. This again, is primarily thanks to the scope creep that is addressed throughout the development process and along with it agile methodology brings an ambiguity in pricing due to a lack of incremental build.

Advantage Of CI With Agile Methodology

With Continuous Integration (CI) working in tandem with agile methodology, incremental project development is achieved.

As each member of the team integrates a number of times every day, these integrations are validated by a build that’s automated, and testing is regressively done to spot errors (if any) as early as possible. This eliminates the need for continuous close collaboration that is otherwise required in conventional agile methodology, thus saving resource utilization time.

With incremental builds generated and delivered, fixed pricing models are often tweaked to realize a common ground with the client.

How STS Does It

In order to eliminate the bottlenecks STS does not classify entire projects under the level of complexity, instead, we break down entire projects into short stories and then classify those under the level of complexity. This act helps us reproduce the last word deliverable in small individual builds to envisage the value addition.

And also having incorporated agile methodology with continuously integrating builds, we ensure there’s no deviation within the builds even if the teams working are in a distributed environment.

In conclusion, the concept of Integrating Continuously with SCRUM will enable faster plug by giving the teams the posh of working in a close domain. Hence, whenever an integration failure is identified, teams can spring into action with not having to travel back to the drawing board to do the root cause analysis.

There are only a very few places left on earth where all people are treated equally irrespective of their nationality, race, creed, religion, gender, or orientation, and one of them ‘was’ the internet. Recently, with online neutrality losing its ground to cheap tactics of some greedy ISPs (Internet Service Providers), this one place also will be infested with people that discriminate based on allegiance (if, I can say so).

To give you a gist of what Net Neutrality is, it’s thought that all websites or networks should be treated equally, or to put it in a more elaborate manner all data that is available online should be treated the same, no matter the user, content, geo-location, hosted a party, device used, etc.

For example, let’s consider our ISP to be identical, if I want to be accessing Linkedin and you were accessing Slideshare, net neutrality forbids our ISP from charging us differently for accessing different sites/portals.

However, this established order was changed by the TSPs (Telecom Service Providers) once they started an all-out war against Over-the-Top (OTT) services.

Earlier and even now in most cases, the revenue models of the TSPs were more of voice dominated and fewer of knowledge dominated. Post dotcom burst, with the exponential increase in data-driven services, many OTT services leveraged the infrastructure of these TSPs to deliver their services. And this resulted in a conflict of interest because TSPs believe OTTs eat into their revenues, actually, that’s not the case. Most of the TSPs have seen a mild increase in data-driven revenues with the advent of OTTs.

Airtel Zero

December last year, Airtel in India disclosed their intention to charge VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) (vis-à-vis Skype, Viber, etc.) services separately i.e. for every call that is made through any of these services, will be charged extra. But immediately after the public outcry, Airtel scrapped its intention to go with the proposed plan; however they made a defense statement on #airtelpledge,

“Airtel Zero is a technology platform that connects application providers to their customers for free. The platform allows any content or application provider to enroll on it so that their customers can visit these sites for free. Instead of charging customers, we charge the providers who choose to get on to the platform.”

There are two scenarios that can arise from this,

1. The affiliate providers will increase the price of whatever they are selling online, to cover the costs incurred by partnering with Airtel, eventually, it’s the customer who has to bear the brunt.
2. Hidden costs, which cannot be quantified arise.

And this would be probably how Airtel will react,

• Airtel can repudiate the price factor and claim it’s up to the affiliate providers to show prudence. Well, this is true. Nevertheless, the result is an outcome of Airtel zero.
• Airtel can always claim there are no charges for accessing affiliated partner data, how do you corroborate it? How can one quantify the bandwidth consumed on Airtel zero with the charges levied overall?

On August first week, Airtel posted its earnings call. Their revenues rose by 40% beating the market estimates, with mobile data revenue increasing to 56.9% and overall usage up to 83%.

It is quite evident that OTTs have not eaten into their revenues; instead, it’s their greed that is curbing our right to a free digital world.

Internet.Org

Facebook’s internet.org has construed the term Net Neutrality publicly. Their claim is to provide free internet access to users who otherwise cannot access the internet due to a lack of resources.
Remember, this is often not free access to all of the internet’s content but rather access to content/data from a few handpicked big boys from the business world who can pay for their data being hosted on internet.org

If Facebook, genuinely wanted to help the poor it should have set up the infrastructure that is needed to reach the masses, partnered with the TSPs and reduce the tariffs on data plans, and provide all of the internet’s content for reduced cost on bandwidth used.

Reliance Communications (RCom) has launched internet.org in India for its subscribers. When a user logs in to the internet.org site on RCom, they’re given two tabs one with free services to 33 affiliate websites/portals. And the Reliance tab where one can examine the info plans offered by Reliance. Facebook on RCom has provided a scaled-down version of their service to suit internet.org, and for downloading images – users have to buy data plans from Reliance.

So ideally nothing is free.

The irony is that internet.org wants the poor (or people without access) to return online and use the elevating power of the digital world. However, they’re not granting the poor right to choose, the content is already chosen for them.

They call this “Zero Rating”… a sugar-coated kind of depravity…

TRAI

The Telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI) has sought opinions from the cellular operator’s lobby, NASSCOM, and the public generally on Net Neutrality, to form a decision on the future course of their action. Over 10lakh emails were sent by the public in support of Net Neutrality and NASSCOM suggested Net Neutrality possesses to be upheld to enable the start-up ecosystem of our country to flourish against the bullies.

However, the Department of Telecom has not come up with a choice and remains seeking comments/suggestions from the public on Net Neutrality. the govt. of India has decided to extend this deadline after seeing a surge in comments/suggestions that poured in.

All that one can hope for during this vicious circle of tug-of-war is, some sanity creeping into the govt. and its regulatory body.

If India truly stands for Freedom of Speech/ Freedom of Expression then the govt. should prove it by giving us the Freedom of Un-Curbed Digital Accessibility.

Can Cloud Containers Drive IT Operations within the Future, Comprehensively?
Posted on August 16, 2021, by Ajay Lulia
Cloud containers are maturing their way from a raucous whisper within the hallways to mellowing screams within the data centers. Developers are already excited about the prospect and thus the operation teams are mulling the idea of moving all their applications to containers and managing them separately.

But, there are apprehensions that include cloud containers.

Each container, unlike the VMs, possesses to be managed separately i.e. one application one container scenario. Consider docker containers where you cannot club more than one application; the entire system has to be considered a role-based VM.

Another pressing area of concern is security, which is currently obscure because containers work more closely with the running kernel. increase these migration limitations, generally, VMs are often migrated while still executing which isn’t the case with containers.

However, containers score some brownie points for mitigating the overheads that include the VMs, and again this hasn’t stopped the veterans of operational efficiency from claiming otherwise. Largely because, the operations team would want to use something where they’re going to show cost reduction and efficiency, working in tandem. With containers, this is often highly unlikely, because the licensing factor of the containers must be reviewed. The EULA of the vendors must be gauged against the performance efficiency. there’s a haphazard scare that looms when shifting to containers during a distributed environment as well.

Despite the restrictions, they’re successful among the developers because, containers enable RAD (Rapid Application Deployment), porting across containers with very less compatibility issues, and rapid delivery. Moreover, with one container you’ll add many containers, unlike the VMs where you’d like individual resources for each VM. Need Having said that the container’s drivability of IT operations remains a far-fetched idea, which is solely enthusiastic to the scenario and calculated overheads.

Finally, choosing between VMs and Containers is like choosing between scissors and ax. It should be an outcome-bound choice.

Rajesh Kumar may be a seasoned and target-oriented IT professional with over 15 years of experience in Enterprise Architecture, Technology Initiatives, Design, Customer Relationship Management, Delivery Management, and Team Management. His proven capabilities dwell in devising technical solutions, enterprise architecture, and application design.
His vision and approach to the IT system functioning lead to ensuring customer satisfaction and project profitability. With a diary of accomplishments built upon the ability to create relationships, effectively delegate, and produce results has always awed our clients.

With 18 years of experience in the information technology industry, Ajay thrives in challenging, fast-paced IT organizations delivering advanced technological systems, solutions, architectures, and applications.
Ajay is always at the helm of affairs, with a rich mix of business management skills and technical know-how, he has led multiple development teams through accelerated technology environments and has overseen the delivery of business-critical solutions for our clients. He is also adept at defining high-level design, improving architecture’s overall capabilities, and instituting policy and standards.
He has been pivotal in articulating the idea of constant cognizance by bridging the knowledge gaps and meeting the performance goals, thus ensuring that financial objectives are also met.