India’s Tech Talent: Driving the Global Cloud and AI Transformation

In this episode of The Digital India Podcast, host Mohd Ujaley, Editorial Director, Tech Observer Magazine, explores how India’s technology sector is shaping the future of global digital transformation. With the cloud services market projected to reach $1.5 trillion by 2030, India now supplies 45% of the world’s cloud technology workforce. This episode examines what this means for businesses worldwide and how companies are leveraging India’s expertise.

We take a closer look at AHEAD, a US-based technology consulting firm that relies on over 500 professionals in India to deliver cloud strategies, AI solutions and managed services. Keith Odom, EVP at AHEAD, explains why India plays such a critical role in their global operations.

Key discussion points include:

• How India’s talent pool supports global cloud adoption

• The challenges companies face in implementing AI

• Balancing innovation with cost efficiency

• Why security has become the top priority in technology

• Industries leading digital transformation, including healthcare and finance

The episode also covers AHEAD’s plans to expand its workforce in India, highlighting the country’s growing importance in the tech industry.

Whether you work in technology, business or simply want to understand India’s role in digital innovation, this episode offers valuable insights.

The Digital India Podcast provides analysis of India’s technology landscape and its global impact.

Listen now to stay informed about the latest developments in tech.

The Indian life insurance industry is on a meteoric rise, projected to hit $200 billion by 2027. But with 73% of policyholders now preferring digital-first interactions (EY Survey), legacy players must evolve—or risk extinction.

In this episode of The Digital India Podcast, Mohd Ujaley (Editorial Director, Tech Observer Magazine) sits down with Kirti Patil, Joint President & CTO of Kotak Life Insurance, to unravel how the company’s "hollow the core" strategy has turbocharged digital adoption—shifting 80% of service requests to digital channels (up from just 25% pre-pandemic).

🔹 Jungle Mapping in Tech: Kirti compares her *30+ years in tech leadership* to navigating an uncharted jungle—where every step is a risk, a revolution or a bear trap.
🔹 AI’s Surprising Evolution: From email implementation in the '90s to today’s AI revolution—how conversational AI is reshaping insurance CX.
🔹 Phased Modernisation Wins: Why Kotak’s incremental approach—not Big Bang overhauls—is key to stable, scalable transformation.
🔹 Empathy in Automation: Can *AI-driven interactions* retain human warmth? How Kotak ensures *"human-in-the-loop"* design.
🔹 Leadership in Setbacks: As a woman in tech, Kirti shares how she steers teams through failures while keeping morale high.

Tune in for a masterclass in *digital resilience, strategic patience and tech-led empathy*—straight from one of India’s most seasoned insurance tech leaders.

Follow The Digital India Podcast for more conversations on how technology is reshaping India’s future.

#DigitalTransformation #InsuranceTech #WomenInTech #AI #KotakLife #TechLeadership

Welcome to The Digital India Podcast, where we explore how technology, leadership and innovation are shaping the future of India.In this exciting fourth episode, we have the privilege of hosting a distinguished leader and dedicated public servant – Lt Gen Gurmit Singh, Governor of Uttarakhand. Join us as we discuss his exceptional journey, his views on technology-driven governance and his vision for a digitally empowered India. 🇮🇳From his illustrious military career to his current role in fostering progress, Lt Gen Gurmit Singh offers unique insights on how technology can bridge divides, empower communities and strengthen the nation. Whether you are passionate about tech, policy or India’s digital evolution, this episode is filled with inspiration and practical wisdom. 🔔 Don’t forget to like, share and subscribe to The Digital India Podcast for more insightful conversations with the leaders shaping our digital future.🎧 Listen now and join us on this journey.

Hello and a very warm welcome to The Digital India Podcast, where we speak with top technology leaders from government and enterprises driving digital transformation.

In this episode, I am joined by Mr. Anand Eswaran, CEO of Veeam, a US-based data protection company. He shares why India plays a pivotal role in Veeam’s growth strategy—contributing 45% business growth and emerging as a hub for talent and innovation. We discuss Veeam’s investments in R&D, customer support, and operations in India, along with insights into tackling data resilience challenges, combating ransomware, and leveraging AI in a rapidly evolving digital landscape.

Tune in for a compelling conversation on how India is shaping the future of Veeam and the global data ecosystem.

In this episode of Leader's Edge hosted by Mohd Ujaley, HUDCO CMD Sanjay Kulshrestha shares his experiences from his first year of leadership, discussing key challenges, achievements, and the strategic vision for expanding infrastructure financing. He explores HUDCO’s integration of technology, the importance of compliance, and ambitious goals to triple loan book growth by 2030. Tune in for insights into HUDCO’s role in shaping India’s development under the government’s vision of 'Viksit Bharat'.

Don't forget to share your feedback —editor[at]techobserver.in—and let us know who you'd like to hear from next!

Hey there! Welcome to Ujaley's Podcast where we talk to top technology leaders to understand what's going on in the world of technology.

Today, we are diving into a hot topic that has been making waves since last one week: the risks of forced updates in proprietary software, especially after the recent hiccups with Microsoft and CrowdStrike.

So, what’s the deal? Forced updates are those changes that tech companies push to your systems without asking you first. They can mess things up big time, like we have seen recently—from airport operation to dial 100 to critical healthcare services—all went for a toss, thanks to a single line of code going haywire.

We have got Dr. Doug Milburn, President and Founder of 45Drives, here to shed some light on this. He has got some strong opinions about why letting these updates happen without checking them first is a bad idea.

Dr. Milburn will talk about why businesses should look at open-source technologies for more control over their systems.

He will share some real-life stories, including how his own company got hit twice in one week because of these forced updates.

And he has got some great tips on how to keep your systems secure and reliable, even with all these changes happening.

So, stick around! We have got a lot to cover, and you would not like to miss it.

Topic: Steadfast Security in Remote Distributed Enterprise
Speakers: In Conversation with Subramanian Udaiyappan, Regional Sales Manager – SecOps, Cisco India & SAARC and Ankush Kumar, Editor, Tech Observer

Traditionally, all users have been connected to a secure office network with multiple layers of security. However, due to the ongoing pandemic, users abstained from the secure office network and connected directly to the internet and thus remain exposed to the internet for long periods. If these user endpoints are not powered and managed by the cloud, the administrator loses visibility and control for threat mitigation and response. Addressing threats, and detecting and remediating them without affecting the user’s productivity, is where the shift from traditional endpoints to new-age endpoints can make a difference.

The sudden transformation from office to new remote working environments has distributed the business while creating a cybersecurity bubble around the workers. As the hybrid work environment continues to flourish, migration to the cloud has accelerated and an effective endpoint solution needs to be cloud-powered and cloud-managed.

The Endpoint Detection and Response Solutions (EDR) are quite autonomous in detecting complex threats that cannot be prevented and work towards remediating them manually. In today’s hybrid work environment, you need your endpoint to be your enforcement arm and move from being an EDR to an XDR. With XDR solutions like Cisco Secure Endpoints, customers would be able to integrate, correlate, automate, and orchestrate actions in an endpoint remotely to reduce the impact of attacks.

Cisco SecureX is a unified platform that integrates firewall, email, and web to help detect and respond to attacks faster. It offers a single dashboard to monitor, integrate and protect across threat vectors & integrate with 3rd party threat intel where the administrator can see all the events that are critical to their enterprise. This customizable dashboard provides an overview of events, helps in threat hunting, incident response, to orchestrate & automate responses to attacks like a SOAR. Having an integrated architecture and an enterprise security environment that proactively reduces Time to Detect & Respond is very critical.

This Podcast is published under Tech Observer Brand Solutions initiative. Connect us at contact@techobserver.in to know more.

Topic: Power your Data Center Performance with Automation
Speakers: In Conversation with Harsh Vaishnav, Head of Sales, Cloud Infrastructure and Software Group, Commercial and Small Business, Cisco India & SAARC and Ankush Kumar, Editor, Tech Observer.

The rules of business are being rewritten in the digital age. To support this, it is essential to ensure one thing diligently and that is ensuring application performance and customer experience. Helping customers achieve this, Cisco has helped to build and implement an intuitive and smart data center strategy across core, edge, and cloud. Data centers, which are the epitome of heterogeneity are now able to provide reliability, stability, scale, and speed to businesses by ensuring workplace ubiquity, performant applications, and most importantly have brought applications to the center stage.

To support workforce transformation by giving users what they want, when they want, and securely on a device of their choice, the underlying infrastructure plays a pivotal role. Through platforms like Cisco Hyperflex, a world-class offering of hyper-convergence and unified computing system with 3-tiered architecture, customers can engage for near-term, mid-term, and long-term solutions. Secondly, data centers can now support workload transitions and reduce complexity. An application-centric infrastructure with the ability to offer deterministic workload performance tracking and deliver performance applications is helping customers to reduce costs and undergo transitions smoothly.

This is also a phase where remote management of data center infrastructure is critical and requires a differentiated approach. It requires a SaaS-delivered, AI-enabled management engine that provides performance benchmarking and predictive analytics. Cisco Intersight Workload Optimizer provides 100% visibility into the deployed infrastructure and allows customers to remain agile, flexible, efficient, and compliant, allowing them to save costs by up to 30%.

To provide an unwavering experience along with a coexistent, intuitive, and secure operations system, the ability to scale has become a theme for cloud providers. In the fast-evolving data center sector, organizations are now focusing on the adoption of automation, using the power of analytics, and delivering a non-compromised experience with a layer of machine learning.

Due to the given situation that directly influences profitability, functionality, and customer experience, the operations management tools assisted by AI are seen as an extremely savvy way to leverage speed and dexterity. Cisco is driving the data center landscape with a product portfolio of unified computing systems that offer data analytics to deliver meaningful and contextual outcomes.

This Podcast is published under Tech Observer Brand Solutions initiative. Connect us at contact@techobserver.in to know more.