The integration means that customers of both Fits Cargo and Expedite All can now book, track, and manage their shipments directly through the Unisys Cargo Portal, rather than juggling separate systems for different legs of a journey. That end-to-end visibility is something the freight industry has been moving toward for years, and this deal, announced on May 6, represents another concrete step in that direction.

To understand why this matters, consider what currently happens when a business ships goods internationally. An air freight booking might go through one portal, customs documentation through another, and last-mile ground delivery through an entirely separate carrier system. Each handover is a potential point of failure, delay, or lost information. Platforms like Unisys Cargo Portal Services try to collapse these steps, so that a single interface handles the full chain.

“Expanding our bookings with Fits Cargo and connecting ground delivery through Expedite All provides clients with more options and demonstrates how we’re helping shippers reimagine the logistics experience. We’re empowering our clients to move freight smarter and faster, all within one trusted portal,” said Sean Tinney, senior vice-president and general manager of Enterprise Computing Solutions (ECS), Unisys.

Unisys had launched the portal in 2022, and has steadily added partners since. It already processes millions of shipments annually and counts major names in aviation among its users, including airlines, general sales agents, and freight forwarders. Recent integrations have included Air France-KLM and Lufthansa Cargo, two of Europe’s biggest cargo operators.

The addition of Fits Cargo brings greater international air freight reach, while Expedite All addresses a persistent weak link in many supply chains, which is the final stretch of a delivery within the United States. Last-mile logistics is often the most expensive and least efficient part of the journey, partly because routes and volumes vary so unpredictably. AI-assisted optimisation tools are increasingly being used to address this, and platforms that bring all stakeholders onto one system make that optimisation considerably easier.

For businesses that move goods regularly, the appeal is fewer systems to manage, less manual data entry, and a clearer picture of where their cargo is at any given moment. In an era when speed and reliability have become competitive differentiators, that kind of visibility is a baseline expectation.

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For a long time, mapping and geospatial systems were mostly seen as specialised tools used by utilities, governments, and infrastructure operators. Today, they have become central to how organisations manage assets, plan cities, operate transport systems, monitor utilities, and even support emergency response networks.

As those systems become more advanced, the pressure on data quality has grown enormously.

Many organisations are now dealing with huge amounts of infrastructure and location-based data spread across multiple systems. In many cases, the challenge is no longer collecting information. It is making sure the information is accurate, organised, and usable.

That is where both VertiGIS and 1Spatial have built their businesses.

VertiGIS has developed software platforms that help organisations manage and visualise geospatial information, particularly across utilities and infrastructure-heavy industries.

1Spatial built its reputation around improving the quality and management of complex location data.

In simple terms, one company focused heavily on how organisations use geospatial information, while the other focused on making sure that information is reliable in the first place.

The two companies already had a long-standing relationship before the acquisition, which is one reason the deal feels relatively aligned compared to many large technology mergers.

For VertiGIS, the acquisition also opens the door to broader international expansion.

1Spatial has established operations and customer relationships across the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and the United States. That immediately strengthens VertiGIS’ global footprint at a time when demand for smarter infrastructure systems continues to rise worldwide.

Artificial intelligence may be changing industries rapidly, but poor-quality data remains one of the biggest problems organisations face when trying to modernise operations. Even the most advanced systems struggle when the underlying information is inconsistent or incomplete.

That reality has made data management companies like 1Spatial increasingly valuable.

VertiGIS described the acquisition as part of its effort to build more intelligent and insight-driven geospatial networks.

The acquisition process has been unfolding for months. VertiGIS first announced its interest in acquiring 1Spatial earlier this year, with the deal later moving through shareholder approvals and regulatory reviews before officially closing.

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The Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) is one of the important reasons for telecom services providers rolling out 5G services in the Asia-Pacific region.

About 12.4% of telecom carrier respondents in Asia-Pacific consider IIoT among the top reasons for 5G deployment, according to the report from the International Data Corporation (IDC).

Most telecom carrier companies saw vital industries, including manufacturing, Smart Cities with smart mobility, and smart buildings, as the most critical use cases for the introduction of 5G, the study commented.

“The shift to a greener, lower carbon future will be made possible through digitisation and connectivity,” said Piyush Singh, Senior Market Analyst, Telecommunications and IoT, Asia Pacific at IDC, while interacting with the IANS.

One of the concepts in ‘Industry 4.0’ is efficiency equals energy saving.

“Anything and everything organisations do to save energy ultimately increase efficiency,” the official added further.

Manufacturing facilities all throughout the Asia-Pacific region have implemented private/dedicated networks for controlling various pieces of equipment on-premises.

“Unstable wireless communication and latency are the barriers for the adoption of digital transformation in any firm which can be solved with the help of 5G. IoT devices require very dependable communication, which may also be provided via private 5G network easily,” said the report.

As the Asia-Pacific region experiences exponential growth in 5G connections, driven by the potential of IIoT and the need for enhanced connectivity, organisations are poised to benefit from improved efficiency, increased sustainability, and greater opportunities for digital transformation, the study mentioned further.

As per a Mobile Economy Asia-Pacific 2022 report by the GSM Association (GSMA), 5G adoption will grow across Asia-Pacific, with more than 400 million 5G connections, equivalent to just over 14% of total mobile connections, by 2025.

Amid the progress of 5G adoption across the region, monetising 5G remained top of mind for the operators, according to the report.

Consumers in the region are warming to 5G, and are increasingly adding content and services such as live sports to their 5G plans, found a separate GSMA consumer survey.

The report also stated that immersive experiences, which take advantage of the low-latency and high-bandwidth capabilities of 5G networks, were also gaining traction among consumers. Entertainment experiences such as concerts, and gaming labs, which customers pay a premium for in the physical world, would provide avenues for operators to demonstrate the value of 5G in the coming days.

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The webinar will feature insights from industry experts and a masterclass on how to deal with uncertainty. The course will be taken up by Nathan Furr, an author and associate professor at INSEAD. The event is going to take place on December 8, 2021.

Derya Matras, Meta Vice President of the Middle East, Africa and Turkey, told the media, “The challenges that small and medium businesses continue to experience as a result of COVID-19 are significant, and we remain firmly committed to supporting them in both recovering and, in due time, thriving. We are continuing those training efforts in partnership with Mastercard, helping further boost a burgeoning startup ecosystem to positively impact socio-economic growth across the region.”

He added saying that the primary goal of this partnership is to provide the necessary digital skills for startups and small businesses to survive, recover and deliver results online and offline. Speaking about the challenges, Matras included factors like access to training and digital tools, power supply interruptions and infrastructure.

Earlier last month, MasterCard teamed up with Mexico-based business banking company Jeeves to come up with a new card that allows companies to pay in any local currencies from anywhere Mastercard can be used.

With the help of this collaboration, MasterCard is hoping to contribute to a fast digital transformation that provides startups with the correct products that directly align with their needs and facilitate access to financial services.

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Under the new partnership, Ooredoo and Visa together will offer virtual prepaid cards. It is reported that these cards will be accepted at Visa’s more than 53 million merchant locations worldwide. The proposed virtual prepaid cards are reloadable cards that will be safe and reliable for customers.

Fatima Sultan Al Kuwari, chief consumer officer at Ooredoo Qatar, told the media, “This agreement opens new avenues for Ooredoo to collaborate with Visa, with financial institutions and with others in the payments ecosystem to deliver greater value, more choices and new experiences for our joint customers, and supports Qatar as it progresses towards the 2030 vision of a digital economy. Giving consumers choice in how and where they pay is essential to our vision of enriching our customers’ digital lives, and we welcome the opportunity to work with more partners like Visa who share this vision.”

In fact, customers and merchants will get access to VisaDirect which aims to push cross-border disbursements and remittances to cards faster, media reports said. Ooredoo and Visa have agreed to further collaborate on awareness initiatives and marketing campaigns to boost cross-border payment solutions in Qatar.

Visa MENA general manager Marcello Baricordi, told the media, “This is a significant step forward in our efforts to collaborate with our local partners in digitising commerce especially at a time when we are seeing an even greater appetite for fast and secure digital payment systems.”

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The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic is not fully reflected for the fiscal third quarter.

Patrick Moorhead of Moor Insights & Strategy, told the media, “The company is insulated right now more than others from big impacts from COVID-19,” Moorhead said, noting that it does not rely on “discretionary” consumer spending or advertising. In addition, Microsoft offers products and services that are helping organizations get through the crisis whether they are remote working or transforming businesses like retail, which is driving demand. These are not discretionary business spends but required spend to weather the pandemic.”

It appears that the company has observed tremendous growth in productivity and business processes in recent months. Revenue generated from its productivity and business processes reached $11.7 billion, with an increase of 15 percent.

In addition, revenue in More Personal Computing was $11 billion and rose 3 percent. The company’s surface revenue rose 1 percent, media reports said. Amy Hood, executive vice president and chief financial officer of Microsoft, said in a statement, In this dynamic environment, our sales teams and partners executed a solid third quarter, with Commercial Cloud revenue generating $13.3 billion, up 39 percent year over year.”

Overall, the company has observed two years’ worth of digital transformation take place in two months.

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Financial services firms today are facing mounting competitive pressure to streamline operations while delivering a differentiated experience to their customers, including leveraging new technologies such as blockchain. This fintech revolution, combined with the growing burdens of regulatory compliance, data privacy, and security issues are pushing CIOs to fundamentally transform the technological underpinnings of their institutions. The report reveals exactly how the financial services industry is embracing the capabilities of cloud computing to address these needs.

It is also abundantly clear from the survey results that many financial organisations are still struggling with modernising their outdated legacy IT architectures and processes, resulting in inefficient operations and potential vulnerability to data breaches. In fact, the report revealed financial services run more traditional data centres than other industries, with 46% penetration. Despite their progressiveness on the hybrid cloud front, financial organisations have lower usage levels of private clouds than any other industry, at 29% penetration compared to the average of 33%.

Like other industries, the financial services sector cites security and compliance as the top factor in deciding where to run its workloads. Nearly all respondents also indicated that performance, management, and TCO are critical factors in the decision. However, more than 25% cited these same factors as challenges with adopting public cloud. In other words, as is often the case with new IT solutions, the most important criteria are also the most difficult to achieve. This could account for part of the disparity between the high desire to adopt hybrid cloud, and today’s relatively low hybrid cloud penetration levels of just 21% in the financial services sector.

The bullish outlook for hybrid cloud adoption globally and across industries is reflective of an IT landscape growing increasingly automated and flexible enough that enterprises have the choice to buy, build, or rent their IT infrastructure resources based on fast transforming application requirements.

Other key findings of the report include:

• The financial sector values application mobility across clouds. Application mobility is the ability to move apps and workloads back and forth across private and public cloud infrastructures as workload type or economics warrant, while enjoying unified management and operations. Both financial companies and other industries chose application mobility between clouds second most often as the number one perk to hybrid cloud, and the financial sector chose it 3% more often than the average. 63% of financial industry respondents said they considered inter-cloud application mobility “essential.”
• Financial services companies control cloud spend better. Another motivation for deploying hybrid clouds is likely enterprises’ need to gain control over their IT spend. Organisations that use public cloud spend 26% of their annual IT budget on public cloud, with this percentage set to increase to 35% in two years’ time. More than a third (36%) of organisations using public clouds said their public cloud spending exceeded budgets. In comparison, 33% of financial respondents reported being over budget, revealing that they are doing marginally better than others at managing public cloud expenses.
• IT skills are a barrier to adopting hybrid cloud in the financial industry. While 88% of respondents said that they expect hybrid cloud to positively impact their businesses, hybrid cloud skills are scarce in today’s IT organisations. These skills ranked second in scarcity only to those in artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML). Financial services respondents generally reportedly slightly greater deficits in skillsets across all categories except for AI/ML.

91% of financial services organisations surveyed said that hybrid cloud was the ideal IT model. This belief in hybrid cloud, and the fact that the sector has higher than industry average adoption of hybrid cloud, is likely driven by the recognised need for digital transformation. Yet conversely, the data shows a lower adoption of private clouds than the global average across industries. This might be explained by the fact that portions of the financial services space have been change-averse and also an indication of the overall complexity of modernising existing legacy infrastructures.

“Increased competitive pressure combined with higher security risks and new regulations will require all of the industry to look at modernising their IT infrastructure,” said Chris Kozup, SVP of Global Marketing at Nutanix. “The current relatively high adoption of hybrid cloud in the financial services industry shows that financial firms recognise the benefits of a hybrid cloud infrastructure for increased agility, security, and performance. However, the reality is that financial services firms still struggle to enable IT transformation, even though it is critical for their future.”

To create this report, Nutanix commissioned Vanson Bourne to survey more than 2,300 IT decision makers, including 333 worldwide financial services organisations, about where they are running their business applications today, where they plan to run them in the future, what their cloud challenges are and how their cloud initiatives stack up against other IT projects and priorities. The survey included respondents from multiple industries, business sizes and geographies in the Americas; Europe, the Middle East, Africa (EMEA); and Asia-Pacific and Japan (APJ) regions.

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The expanded engagement allows the two companies to continue to co-innovate and drive faster, smarter insights from finance data. Genpact supports Mondelēz International’s global finance operations in 75 countries, delivering simplified and standardised operations across more than 150 finance and accounting processes. Over the last three years, Genpact has helped Mondelēz International centralise its finance and accounting delivery model from a dispersed, country-based structure into six efficient, productive global centres. Robotic process automation, dynamic workflow, mobility, and other digital technologies have automated and streamlined operations to drive more strategic business decisions and speed time-to-market.

“This new agreement underscores Genpact’s success in helping us fast-track our finance transformation, harnessing the power of digital technology and deep process expertise to reimagine our operations and drive competitive growth,” said Brian Gladden, executive vice president and chief financial officer, Mondelēz International. “Genpact’s global reach, and deep understanding of both finance operations and our industry, makes it the strategic partner we need as we build the best snacking company in the world.”

Mondelēz International can achieve value-added insights faster than ever before through easy access to accurate, actionable data. The finance organisation has significantly improved the time-to-close cycle; every month and quarter close has trended better than the previous one. Mondelēz International is investing the savings unlocked through simplified, more efficient operations into innovation and special projects to drive revenue. The new contract with Genpact will extend transformation benefits across other parts of Mondelēz International’s shared services organisation.

“Driving agility and improving margins are table stakes in the competitive snacking industry to meet evolving consumer trends. To succeed, companies need to reimagine how to unlock areas for growth,” said Balkrishan ‘BK’ Kalra, business leader, Consumer Packaged Goods, Genpact. “Our co-innovation with Mondelēz International will continue to create new ways to drive profitability, including leveraging advanced technologies like artificial intelligence. Our deep domain expertise, combined with products and services powered by our Genpact Cora platform, deliver significant value to support Mondelēz International’s growth strategy.”

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In addition to running various entrepreneurial activities in the restaurant and digital infrastructure service businesses, Robert Bouchard joined the Econocom Board of Directors in 2009. He became Vice Chairman in 2015 and was appointed Chairman of the Group’s Audit Committee the same year, where he served for two years. In 2016 he took on an operational role and was appointed COO of Econocom in 2017. As head of all the Group’s operations, he successfully completed the ‘Mutation 2013-2017’ strategic plan.

“Having worked closely with Robert for over 20 years, I am confident that he has all the requisite qualities to take on these new responsibilities and lead the Group successfully into a new phase of growth and value creation. I would also like to stress that he shares and upholds the Group’s values and entrepreneurial spirit. Like me, he firmly believes in the value and effectiveness of our original development model,”  Jean-Louis Bouchard added.

Since 1986, the European-based Econocom Group has been listed on Euronext Brussels. The Group is a B2B service provider founded in 1974. With more than 10,700 employees in 19 countries and revenue of €3bn, the company operates in three segments: Technology Management & Financing, Products & Solutions, and Services.

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The DIW is scheduled to be held between October 7 to 11 this year. The event comes with a focus to profile Dubai as a business hub for regional and global markets.

According to Arabian Business, he said it is important to establish an all-round view of investment opportunities to bolster economic sectors.

The event will present a global platform for talks with government entities, free zones and global consulting firms to exchange views on the economic trends, event’s key themes and investors or policymakers’ topics of interest.

Fahad Al Gergawi, CEO of Dubai FDI, said the event seeks to drive future growth in areas such as digital transformation and investments in new companies.

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