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Time of India
13 hours ago
- Automotive
- Time of India
From back office to brain trust: Purpose, patents and profit are becoming the new metrics for GCCs as they mature
Global capability centres (GCCs, the tech & operations arms of MNCs) have helped power India's technology ascent for years now, but the cost-arbitrage model that lured multinationals here is past its sell-by date. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now Indian hubs must now behave less like offshore centres or back-offices, and more like intellectual engines that invent, decide, and monetise. That was the consensus among leaders at the Nasscom-Times Techies GCC 2030 And Beyond conference in Bengaluru on Monday. Manu Saale, MD & CEO at Mercedes-Benz Research and Development India (MBRDI), illustrated the stakes with a story that began in 2018, when headquarters asked whether a car could read hand gestures. Bengaluru engineers seized the brief, trained neural networks to run on an edge device, and two years later were on stage at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas flicking the sunroof and stereo on a concept saloon open and shut with nothing but a wave. 'There was one slide that mattered – Where does this magic come from? – and underneath it read 'MBRDI, Bengaluru',' Saale recalled, still delighted that India, not Stuttgart or Palo Alto, cracked the problem first. 'That is how you earn respect at headquarters – and how you keep it,' he said. SAP Labs India MD and Nasscom chair Sindhu Gangadharan offered another concrete case. Eighty percent of the code for SAP's Joule enterprise copilot, she said, is written in Bengaluru, where developers work shoulder-to-shoulder with global customers to refine queries that track inventory, chase leads, or calculate taxes in natural language. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now 'We're talking about taking innovations like Joule from India to the world,' she said, pointing out that a quarter of SAP's patents now originate locally. The lesson for newer entrants, she argued, is to nurture end-to-end product thinking – engineers who can design, commercialise and localise software, not merely code it. That demands earlier and deeper partnerships with universities so graduates arrive GCC-ready: steeped in IP law, data-driven design and platform economics as well as algorithms. All of the leaders said the most successful GCCs are the ones that are most tightly integrated with the enterprise; and that's also when the enterprise gets the most value from its GCC. Lalit Ahuja said simplicity is its best ally. The ANSR founder, who helps multinationals set up GCCs in India, recounted a conversation with the chief executive of a leading global company who had trouble wrapping his head around the concept of a GCC. His eureka moment came when Ahuja suggested treating the GCC as 'the 19th floor of your office' – just in another country. The company in question had an office on the 18th floor of a building and were contemplating expanding into the 19th floor. 'Hire people there as you would if you were expanding into a new floor, plug them into the same systems, obsess about the same customers, and watch culture do the rest,' he advised. The executive followed through – and the Bengaluru office is now literally nicknamed 'the 19th floor' inside the company. Ahuja's moral: don't over-engineer the set-up. Indian adaptability means new centres can 'just arrive', usually in as little as three months, borrow the battle scars of incumbents and leapfrog straight to innovation. Sirisha Voruganti, who runs British bank Lloyd's offshore global services, underscored how quickly autonomy for GCCs can deliver. Her team is leading the bank's push into digital identity, an area where Britain lags but India excels thanks to Aadhaar. 'We've invited Nandan Nilekani to brief our board on what a billion-scale ID system looks like,' she said, adding that Lloyd's chose India precisely because local engineers live the mass-authentication challenge daily. How to stay relevant What can the thousands of GCCs already in India, and the hundred or so added each year, do to stay on the front foot? The leaders sketched a few imperatives. ● Pick moon-shot problems that headquarters has not yet solved and deliver them end-to-end. Gesture recognition did more for Mercedes-Benz's perception of India than a decade of incremental tasks. ● Focus on revenue generation, commercialise IP. Filing patents is laudable; licensing them or embedding them in products is what puts India on the revenue map. Joint industry-academia labs and cross-sector forums can help accelerate that path from lab to ledger. Nasscom president Rajesh Nambiar noted that increasingly, GCC success is measured in revenue. Boards no longer ask how many heads a GCC employs but which product lines it owns and what percentage of sales those lines drive, he said. ● Integrate by design. Ahuja's 19th-floor metaphor suggests that cultural alignment and shared metrics matter more than physical proximity. When Indian engineers attend the same sprint reviews and read the same customer dashboards as colleagues abroad, they act – and are judged – as peers, not contractors. ● Cultivate leadership. Saale argued that India's decisive edge will be forged by the people who run the GCCs. 'The leadership factor in the whole game matters most. We need to get our leaders to lead differently, inspire differently and start sharing larger dreams with their teams about how they should see the world from Bengaluru or Pune,' he said. The best results will emerge when companies rotate managers across functions and geographies, reward risk-taking and make GCC stewardship a fast track to the C-suite. Ajay Vij, senior country MD for Accenture in India, said leadership was particularly important in today's volatile times.
Yahoo
22-07-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
SAP's Profits Top Estimates, Though Cloud Revenue Growth Slows
SAP (SAP) reported second-quarter profits that topped analysts' estimates, though cloud revenue came in lower than expected as growth slowed. The German software giant posted adjusted earnings per share of 1.50 euros ($1.76), up from 1.10 euros per share in the year-ago quarter and above analysts' estimates compiled by Visible Alpha. Revenue of 9.03 billion euros ($10.61 billion) was roughly in line, as cloud revenue grew 24% to 5.13 billion euros, slowing from over 25% growth in the year-ago period and just short of estimates. SAP maintained its full-year cloud revenue forecast of 21.6 billion euros to 21.9 billion euros. Wall Street analysts were looking for 21.31 billion. CEO Christian Klein said the results come as the company's AI assistant Joule is becoming available "everywhere and for everything." "Enterprise operations are about to enter a new era, and SAP is best positioned to benefit from that evolution," Klein said. SAP shares were down close to 2% in extended trading. The stock was up nearly 25% for 2025 through Tuesday's close. Read the original article on Investopedia
Yahoo
20-07-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Chinese Scientists Invent System for Extracting Oxygen, Water and Rocket Fuel From Moon Dust
Chinese researchers say they've devised a new way to extract water from lunar soil and convert it into fuel. As detailed in a new paper published today in the journal Joule, the team found that their proposed "photothermal strategy" — essentially converting light into heat — could effectively convert carbon dioxide from extracted water into carbon monoxide, hydrogen, and oxygen gas, a "potential route for sustaining human life on the Moon and enabling long-term extraterrestrial exploration." "The sustainable utilization of local resources is essential for long-term human survival on the Moon and beyond," the researchers write, pointing out that bringing water from Earth is cost-prohibitive at roughly $83,000 per gallon. "We never fully imagined the 'magic' that the lunar soil possessed," said Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen professor and coauthor Lu Wang in a statement. "The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach," he added. "The one-step integration of lunar H2O extraction and photothermal CO2 catalysis could enhance energy utilization efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development." While plenty of questions remain about our future efforts to harness local resources on the surface of the Moon, it's a glimmer of hope that humanity could indeed establish a more permanent and potentially sustainable presence there. For their research, the team focused on simplifying existing proposals for how to extract water from lunar regolith, which tend to be energy-intensive and stop short of breaking the water down into its usable elements. The researchers also propose using the extracted water to turn carbon dioxide exhaled by astronauts into carbon monoxide and hydrogen gas, which could be used to make fuels. The team tested their photothermal approach on actual Moon samples gathered during China's Chang'E-5 mission, which launched in November 2020, and collected samples from the northwest of the Moon's near side before returning to Earth. While their lab-based experiments turned out to be a success, the actual lunar surface will likely prove a far more challenging place to extract and convert lunar water. As the paper points out, radiation, low gravity, and extreme temperature fluctuations could complicate matters significantly. However, the advancements highlight how far the Chinese space program has come in a matter of years. A mere two decades ago, China was a distant underdog in the international space race. But now that the country is launching its own astronauts to space while the Trump administration is effectively looking to eviscerate NASA when it comes to space science, China could stand a chance to surpass the US in its plans to build a Moon base by 2035. More on extracting lunar water: Chinese Scientists Extract Water From Lunar Soil Solve the daily Crossword
Euronews
20-07-2025
- Science
- Euronews
Soil on the Moon could sustain human life, study finds
The soil on the Moon might be able to sustain life, according to a new study. Researchers from the Chinese University of Hong Kong developed a technology to extract water from lunar soil and used it to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and chemical fuel. The technology does this by converting light from the Sun into heat. According to the study, published in the Cell Press journal Joule, the research could 'potentially open new doors for future deep space exploration' because it could mitigate the expensive costs needed to bring essential resources such as water to the Moon. A single gallon (3.78 litres) of water costs $83,000 (€71,230) to ship up by rocket, the study continued, with one astronaut drinking roughly four gallons (15.14 litres) a day. 'We never fully imagined the 'magic' that the lunar soil possessed,' said lead researcher Lu Wang. However, the study notes that any strategies that are already in place to extract water from the surface of the Moon involve multiple 'energy-intensive' steps and do not break down how much CO2 is used by fuel. The Moon's extreme lunar environment will still make it challenging to harvest more oxygen and water from the land, the study continued, because there are 'drastic temperature fluctuations,' radiation and low gravity to deal with. The CO2 emitted from the breaths of the astronauts won't be enough to supply all the water, fuel and oxygen that the team of astronauts might need.
NDTV
19-07-2025
- Science
- NDTV
Soil On The Moon Could Potentially Support Life, Study Claims
In groundbreaking new research, Chinese scientists have suggested that the soil on the Moon could potentially support life, thanks to a breakthrough technology that may help humans survive on the Moon. According to a study published in the journal Joule, researchers were able to extract water from lunar soil and use it to convert carbon dioxide into oxygen and fuel-related chemicals. This innovation could pave the way for deeper space exploration by reducing dependency on Earth for essential resources like water, oxygen, and fuel. "We never fully imagined the 'magic' that the lunar soil possessed," Lu Wang of the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen, said. "The biggest surprise for us was the tangible success of this integrated approach. The one-step integration of lunar H2O extraction and photothermal CO2 catalysis could enhance energy utilisation efficiency and decrease the cost and complexity of infrastructure development," Lu Wang added, per In the past, space agencies have floated the idea of using the Moon as an outpost for far-flung explorations of the cosmos. But this might only be possible if experts are able to make the necessary fuel, water and other resources on the Moon itself. The Chinese researchers pointed out that studies have shown that transporting supplies from Earth to any future moon base would be expensive because the greater the mass of cargo, the harder a rocket has to work to launch into space. Citing one of the studies, they determined that it would cost $83,000 to ship a gallon of water to the Moon, and yet each astronaut would be expected to drink 4 gallons of water per day. Previous attempts to extract water from lunar soil used large amounts of energy and didn't break down CO2 for fuel and other essential uses. But now the new system overcomes those problems, scientists said. The team developed a technology that would both extract water from lunar soil and directly use it to convert the CO2 exhaled by astronauts into carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen gas, which could then be used to make fuels and oxygen for the astronauts to breathe. The technology accomplishes this through a novel system that uses light from the Sun and turns it into heat. Researchers said that the technology was a success in the lab. However, they noted that the extreme lunar environment still poses challenges that will complicate its usage on the lunar surface, including drastic temperature fluctuations, intense radiation and low gravity.
