Welcome back to our event, Data-Driven Starts with Intelligent Infrastructure. I'm your host, Lisa Martin. In this segment, we're going to be talking about partnering for innovation in an uncertain market. As you know, in addition to solving for complexity and security and sustainability, IT leaders are also facing some pretty big economic pressures in a market that continues to evolve. In this segment, you're going to hear from two industry leaders on how they're partnering to help customers solve some of these problems. Please welcome my two guests, Kevin Purcellis here, Head of Global Strategic Partnerships at Hatachi Ventara and Giorgio Vanzini, VP Strategic Alliances and Partners at DXC Technology. Gentlemen, it's great to have you on the program. Thank you. Thank you. Great to be here, Lisa. Yeah. All right, Giorgio, we're going to start with you. Talk about some of the challenges, the biggest challenges that you're hearing about today from customers that are coming to you wanting to set up a data infrastructure. Yes. Well, as part of a systems integrator that works worldwide, we see the same challenges pretty much consistently across all the geographies, meaning the lack of resources and having the right delivery skillset on the customer side. But then also, going into kind of the cost-effective solutions that they want to deploy or modernize as well. And then obviously, the outcome-driven kind of commitments that they have, the ability to really drive to the bottom line there, which goes to the TCO and the return of investment. And basically, all of our customers are asked to do more with less. And so they're looking for efficiencies and they're looking for leverage points and also to reduce the overall technical depth. A lot of people are being asked to do more with less. Kevin, let's bring you into the conversation. Comment on some of the challenges that you're seeing from your standpoint in the market and then give us a little bit of backstory on how DXC and Hitachi Ventura are working together to help customers come out some of those challenges. Yeah, absolutely. And yeah, I think, you know, Lisa, Georgio spot on with many of those topics that he brought up.   You know, in some parts of the world, it's even worse than others. But I think the impact is causing a change in how, you know, many customers are dealing with not only purchasing solutions, but also how they address the challenges and how do they compete in their markets. So, you know, I think, at least from an Hitachi perspective and certainly working with Georgio and his team at DXC, we're looking at really developing joint solutions that are recession-proof ESG initiatives that I'm sure many have heard about in the, you know, in the media and across many of the businesses that we're working with, you know, we're looking to help drive more sustainable data centers through infrastructure that we provide that actually use less energy. So there's a lot of focus around green data centers, also, you know, from a joint perspective and what we're doing in the marketplace. And to be honest with you, it's so unique is that, you know, Atachi infrastructure has been really known for its uptime. And what was really interesting and real quick story when Georgio and I first met, you know, we talked about the fact that, you know, there isn't a lot of interaction with our senior executives. And one of the things that Georgio said to me was, look, probably the reason is because your stuff doesn't break, you know, and they don't hear about it. So one of the things that we're trying to do is really address some of the uptime challenges that maybe some of the banks are having in that marketplace, certainly in the automobile industry where we're focused on EV vehicles. And as you're probably aware, Atachi is an $80 billion conglomerate of companies that focus on many different industries, such as energy and rail and other parts of the industry. So yeah, there's a lot of uniqueness to our partnership. We're going to unpack that a little bit as well. Georgio, give us your perspective through your lens. How are DXC and Atachi Ventura working together? Specifically, Kevin mentioned the recession-proof solutions, but in a recession-like environment, what's that partnership like? Yes, no, you always try to differentiate yourself. So when you think about DXC and Atachi Ventura, so we're trying to go after cost-effective solutions, but not just in a generic term, but for a specific industry. So Kevin mentioned like banking and capital markets. So what can we do that differentiates our offerings and our solution in that specific market? And then also being cautious about the requirements that the customers have, specifically around the service offerings and being flexible around this, you see a lot of the shift in industry to as a service, pay for what you use and the usage-based kind of invoicing based on their infrastructure and their requirements and basically helping the customers move into that kind of direction, helping them finding out the competitive advantage and then addressing the macro-economic challenges. As you mentioned before, it's like doing more with less and customizing those solutions to their specific industry, be that automotive, be that banking and capital market or be that manufacturing to specifically go after those. I want to get both of your perspectives. You've talked about a uniqueness differentiation from a solution perspective. Kevin, question for you, Giorgio, same for you, is what's unique about the partnership and how you're working together with customers to combat those challenges? Yeah, as Kevin mentioned, is like when we started the road together with Atachi and DXC, it basically, it all boils down to trust and competency that we bring together. And so we have a multi-year engagement, they look on trust and transparency of focusing on our joint clients. And the success basically proves that kind of approach where the clients come back and say, we believe in both of your solution and there's nothing more compelling than showing up together at a customer so that the customer doesn't have to worry about, oh, you guys not just have lip service, you actually show up together to the customer and provide the solution as well. The other thing is, we have regular engagements on the product roadmaps. So we know exactly where Atachi Intara is going and how that aligns to our offering. So when we do joint development, it actually coincides and comes across nicely together because it's a joint kind of development and approach. And so the technology stacks makes a lot of sense. And if you combine that with the flexibility on the cost infrastructure for the customers as a service, then it really is a win-win from a technology and from a business perspective. That trust is key. Kevin, in our last minute or so here, can you comment on from Atachi Ventara's perspective through that lens, what's unique about the partnership and what you guys are doing together, showing up together, obviously as Georgie were talking about. Yeah, absolutely Lisa. So I think if you look at where we are today and where we came from, the uniqueness and the differentiation we bring into the marketplace is really specific. Many of the as a service offerings that Georgia was talking about actually requires no commitment upfront. And that's a really new way of doing business together. What we're looking to do is provide flexibility to our joint customers. So as they need more infrastructure, we provide it when they need less, we provide less. And I think it's really working well. We're very much looking forward to the future. And I think we'll see some really great things in the next year or so. Very collaborative, very responsive to the customer's environment. George, your last question is for you. Give us a look peak on the horizon for the rest of the year priorities for the business, maybe even in so 2024. Absolutely, perfect timing because we started our fiscal year DXC next month. So we clearly did a lot of planning around fiscal year 24. The focus is really gonna be on solutions and offerings for our customers and doing the right things, especially around mainstream modernization, but also in the verticals. And so we have kind of the approach of like, we believe in like constraints will set you free. So we'll do fewer things, but we'll focus really on those things and do them really well for our customers.  Excellent, guys, thank you so much for sharing what Hitachi Ventura and DXC technologies are doing together for customers. It sounds like a great collaborative relationship. We appreciate your insights. Thank you. We wanna thank you for watching Data Driven Starts with Intelligent Infrastructure. I'm Lisa Martin, thanks for watching.


All right, I'd like to introduce Jan Kemster, who is the Dean of Distance Education at Pima Community College. And she's joined us today to tell us about the OER degree work at Pima Community College. Jan? Thanks, Una. Hello, everyone. As Una said, I'm Jan Kemster, Dean of Distance Ed at Pima. And in the summer of 2016, I was hired here at Pima, and I walked right into the Achieving the Dream grant OER degree initiative that the college had just received. It literally was hot off the press. So I walked into that having really no knowledge about OER, but I learned very quickly how things go. So a little bit about Pima. We're a comprehensive community college. We are a Hispanic-serving institution, and we have the notoriety of being the nation's fifth poorest community. We have six campuses across the city and approximately 45,000 students at this time. Our OER project, like I said, we were one of the grantees for the Achieving the Dream Foundation grant, and our task was to create a fully online AA liberal arts with an OER pathway of what turned out to be 21 courses and 64 credits. Again, we chose the degree because it is our most popular degree at Pima Community College, and we really set out to target adult students who want the flexibility of online learning but who struggle with the costs of education. Our motivation for going in the OER direction really came from our students. Again, in 2015, a student textbook task force sort of raised the issue that textbook costs were increasing exponentially to the point that it was causing students not to go to school. And they asked our board of directors and our faculty to do something about that. At the same time, our governing board then declared an initiative across the campus to lower the price of textbooks for students. At that time, there was some budding interest in OER, especially in Pima Online, the Distance Ed Division for the institution. So all of those sort of led us toward applying for the Achieving the Dream grant to create a foundation for us to move forward. Our goals in creating our AA liberal arts in an OER pathway, you know, we wanted to create high quality engaging OER courses. We did not want these courses to be one time offerings. We wanted them to have significance within their divisions and be something that would be offered continuously beyond the life of the grant. We also needed to develop a faculty culture around OER. While we had some early adopters and early interest, overall the faculty were unfamiliar with OER and in some cases a little bit suspicious about it. We of course wanted to save students money. And ultimately also improve student retention and completion of online courses by having materials available on day one and also by having what is in the course and in a text be highly relevant to the learning outcomes. So as we went down the path of our degree development, you know, our primary challenge was creating faculty awareness and acceptance of OER. So we worked in that in different ways. We attended department meetings. We offered presentations. We offered information days. And we started to gain faculty interest. Once we had some of that established, though, we still face the hurdle of the time on task for this kind of course development and the design expertise to actually get it done in D2L, our learning management system. It was a reality that this was a major time commitment from any faculty who took this on. So realizing right from the start, we needed to address that. We partnered our staff in the Center for Learning Technology with our faculty subject matter experts who had agreed to create courses for the grant. And that partnership involved connecting a faculty member with an instructional designer, a media specialist, a web designer, and a librarian. So it really became a team effort to create the courses. And because of this, we were successful in meeting our deadlines and following a really a structured process that began with a kickoff meeting and clear understandings about the course of development through the completion of the project. For us, our OER degree centered in Pima online, which is our centralized division supporting distance education. And that came about simply because some of our faculty department heads in online learning had the initial interest in OER. So we picked it up from there. Our degree implementation is supported by a dedicated online student advisor who helps in getting information to students. Faculty awareness was one of was our primary challenge, but a very real secondary challenge has been how to let students know about these course offerings and about the ability to sign up for courses with OER. So we've struggled with that as I think other institutions have and our dedicated online student advisor has certainly helped spread the word about the availability of our courses. We also had a good partnership with our bookstore who helped us eventually create a tag in the textbook offerings that identify a course that has OER materials and that's been very helpful for students. And then we've had efforts to market the degree on our website. And of course we have more work to do in that area as well. Just to kind of sum up our progress by fall of 2018, our OER pathway for the AA and liberal arts will be complete. We're on track to meet all the goals that I listed earlier in the presentation. So that's been a really successful rollout for us. To give you an example of the impact of OER at Pima Community College, I'll share the example in one division. Our department head in writing and communications work to create writing 101 and writing 102 as OER courses as part of the grant. And then with the conclusion of that course development, he was able to offer 28 sections of writing 101 and 18 of writing 102 this fall for the first time. And just offering those sections alone saved our students nearly $90,000. This also spread word of mouth among students about OER and how to get into the courses. And it's just a great example of how in this one division we are developing a faculty culture and awareness around OER that will continue on into the future as these courses are offered, not only in more online courses but also into the face-to-face and hybrid modalities. With our grant work concluding this fall, I'm very aware of our need to roll out a sustainability plan to continue to create OER courses at Pima Community College. I'm working on that now. We're working on developing incentives for faculty to create OER and continue the support that we can for those who agree to engage in the work. We also have efforts to make towards our marketing of OER because we aren't really supported by a very high quality webpage right now and we've been investing some efforts there trying to get the institution to come along with us and create something more dynamic and presentable. So those are our challenges ahead for sure. So that's what I wanted to share about Pima's experience with our OER degree initiative and does anyone have questions for me? Hello, can you hear me? This is Pete Surgeon at Community College Baltimore County. I can. Sorry, it took me a while to get my microphone going. I was just wondering if you can give us a little information on where you found the best OER resources if there was one particular place or where were you bringing the, did you claim yourself? Where were you bringing them in from? Well, that's really a good question for our librarian who assisted us on the project, but I know that we utilized open stacks in several course scenarios. And we also utilized some of Lumen's, Candela and Waymaker material. Other materials were gathered in different ways, but again, the librarian would be the best person to speak to that. I wasn't involved directly in the curation of the materials. Okay, thank you. His name, if you'd like it, is Keith Rokie, ROCCI at Pima and he would be happy to share more with you. Okay, great. Thanks. Hi, this is Juviel from Central Virginia. Hi. Okay, I have a question about motivating the faculty that are just so reticent and just do not want to participate. Do you have any tips? Well, yes, I do. So I guess, you know, my biggest piece of advice for institutions who want to take on OER work is to be able to have some kind of compensation for faculty who do it because honestly, I don't believe we could have got it done without the financial incentive to do the work. That combined with our ability to partner our faculty with the Center for Learning Technology team was really instrumental in keeping the work on schedule and for creating really high quality versions of the courses. There may be people out there who have managed to do it without compensation, and I would sure like to hear how they managed it, but from my point of view, that was the incentive to begin the initial work and to learn to understand more about OER. They just simply weren't going to build it into their schedules without some motivation to do it. Well, how much did you have to pay your faculty if you are willing to share that? No, well, through the grant, we were able to compensate them. I think it turned out to be, this is a rough estimate, right? Just around $2,800 per course. As part of our regular online course development at Pima, we pay $820 per credit hour of the course for new course development at the institution. So that gives you kind of a ballpark of what our faculty felt was reasonable enough for them to get involved in it. And, you know, I think it's worth every penny because what I've witnessed is once faculty took the time to understand and learn how to use these resources, they became advocates for it and they started to change other courses of theirs just on their own because they believed in the resource. Thank you. Can you hear me? Yes. Wonderful. I was just wondering, are your OER materials that you've developed for each of the courses now available on your website for everybody else, like for us to go in and look at and learn from and because it's, you've developed new materials. So it's, in some instances, you've maybe just adopted a textbook from OpenStacks, but in others you've recreated something whole new, entirely new. Are those materials now available public facing? Yes and no. So from what I understand, the courses that we've created for Lumen will be shared, well, for the ATD grant, will be shared via Lumen Learning's catalog of courses. So we will have our courses there as part of that. And there's a link to that that I'm sure Una can provide or I can provide to you to Lumen Learning's, excuse me, Lumen Learning's course catalog. Now we do have courses internally. For example, our Bio 100 course, our professor for that has made that course available for others to view through a link that he created. So that can be shared. But other than that, no, they're not available from Pima in a public facing way at this time. Okay. Is that something that could be beneficial for the rest of us is to be able to access those? I think it could be. We're challenged again by our antiquated webpage and the ability to make changes to that. But I would say, you know, I'm happy to share the list of OER courses we created as part of our initiative. And if you have a particular interest in any one of those courses, it would just be a matter of asking me to access the resources for it. Okay, thank you. Janice, you have a couple comments slash questions in the chat window if you wanted to take a look. Okay, let's see. Do I think there should be a global universal clearinghouse or database of all open ed resources? Well, I suppose that would make things easier in some ways, but my sense from this project was that once faculty kind of learned where to go for their particular subject matter. They didn't struggle too much with that. What we learned along the way, as many of you have, is that there are many rich and diverse OER resources on certain subjects and limited OER resources on other subjects. For example, we began a humanities 260 course as part of the grant that we eventually had to abandon as a grant project because we just couldn't find the right OER resources for it. And I know other schools have had challenges with technology based courses and even some business courses. So you kind of learn along the way what's available and what's out there. And again, you know, assisting your faculty with an actual OER librarian will definitely support that quest and cut down their time on task to find those kind of resources. Let's see here. Jessica said I wasn't paid for my work. However, I am lucky enough to have a dean who supports me by giving me the schedule I want. So yeah, yeah, so, you know, there's other ways to think about compensation in the higher ed realm, of course, release time and scheduling. But again, I just come back to that idea that there has to be some reason to venture into this because just given faculty workloads, it's a struggle to do it otherwise. Let's see, would I be interested in a list of courses with someone who might be able to answer questions? Yes, absolutely. Do I think open ed resources should be available for free independent learners, especially K-12? Yes, absolutely. I don't see why not. I think that captures what's in the chat room, Una. Are there any other questions for me? I think you answered all of them very well. Thank you, Jan. Okay, thank you. All right, I think if we don't have any other questions, we're going to go ahead and stop the recording and we'll be back in about 10 minutes for our next session. Thank you for joining us and thank you, Jan. Very, very informative presentation.


Here we are going to explain the basic economic agents. In the production or the economy what are the basic economic agents? Mostly the economic agents they will be categorized in the form of the two, but broadly they are not the two rather they will be the three. Once though group of the consumers or the individual that consume the commodities they will be the one group and they are the basically named under the title of consumers and they have the capacity that they are going to market for the purchase of the certain goods and from which capacity they are going to purchase they may have certain their endowments with them and that endowment can be in the form of initial stock or the initial endowment and previously these initial endowments were in the form of the land or this initial endowments were in the form of the gold or certain coins that those consumers may have for the purchase of food, for the purchase of cloth, for the purchase of their shelter or any type of the luxury in the nowadays. And here the consumers they have to decide through their selection, through their prioritize and the one motivation that keeps them moving here their motivation will be their utility, their preference and this utility and the preference will be satisfied with the capacity of the income that is earned or the purchasing power parity that is earned by those consumers and that earned through the consumers in the form of the wages, in the form of the interest or in the form of the rent. So, when these consumers they work as a supplier of the labor they become the part of the factors of production and that firms part of the production comes under the theme of the firms. Now, this is our second group where the firms they are again the individuals or they can be the group of the individuals, but they behave here in the form of the producers and these producers they are motivated not by their consumption, their desires to consume rather they have a desire or the motivation to earn something to earn certain profit. So, for this they have to maximize the level of the output in their production possibility frontier or in their production function of their firm. But these firms or these producers when they have to purchase the factors of the production in that factors of production market they again act as a consumer. In fact, if I tell you that the same person who is a marketer or a producer or a business owner is going to buy the resources of the production when he has to purchase the labor, when he has to purchase the energy units, when he has to purchase the chemicals, when he has to purchase the food, we will give it to the name producer but his behavior in the factor market will be exactly the same as in the commodity market of a consumer. Here too, in the commodity market, the price for consumers cannot dictate, rather the price is taken. In the same way, the same producer who is a commodity, if he is responsible and he is paying for the garbage, then he can talk about his cost of production for the value of the garbage. But when he has to buy the food, he has to buy the petrol, he has to buy the bees, so there he will be working as a syrup or as a consumer. So, this is the interplay or the different roles of the individuals that they exhibit in the economy and this is the that phenomena that we say that in the economy, there are the alternative uses of the various resources. Now, because we have already talked about that on one side there will be the individuals, on the other side the production sector, those production sectors and the consumers, they are coming to interact in the form of the markets. Regulations of wealth in certain hands. So, here, if we look at the third major economic agent, like in mixed economy, we cannot negate the government intervention. So, here the government as a third economic agent will be present and it will be as a market regulator. And at the same time, not only regulator, this social structure to develop, physical structure to develop, investment will also be done. Now, in physical infrastructure, if we look at the road, railway, telephone, facilities, all these are all infrastructure, these will be in the form physical infrastructure. And human capital, which is present in the economy, its growth, its development, to polish it, provision of the social structure in which we have school, college, universities, healthcare system, and all these systems, the system of law, the system of judiciary, police for security, if we look at all these systems, then these will be provided by the government. And here, the motive of the government is neither to maximize utility, which is for the consumer, nor to maximize output, which is the motive of the producer. Here, the main motive of the government, for which it will be working, will be its main motive, that what is the interest of the public, how can people be given service? And the overall objective of the economic growth, how can it be attained?


It's hard to be grateful these days as we hit the six-month wall of the pandemic, watching the wildfires and storms and melting glaciers, worrying about kids, about elders nearby, about friends and family across the globe, grieving the deaths in our communities, the murders at the hands of police. Sometimes it's hard to be grateful. But there is something about the seasonal rituals like Thanksgiving that nudge and encourage us into gratitude. And when we do, there is so much waiting for us. The changing lives are beautiful. The people practicing kindness are comforting. The diligence of essential workers is inspiring. Indigenous wisdom is powerful. I return gratitude. I am particularly grateful for those I know by name, migrant workers who bring our food from fields and factories to our tables, caregivers and personnel support workers who provide caring comfort to elders in private homes and long-term care facilities. All at great risk to their own lives. It is an honor to continue to find ways particularly in this pandemic to stand with these people who are so essential to our communities with our solidarity and our action. Supporting the call for prominent status for these essential workers is a concrete expression of this gratitude. Let this be a reality so they too can find meaning in Thanksgiving. This Thanksgiving, we wish for you connection. Connection with those you love and those you may not know personally, but know their contributions even if only on screen or over the phone. We give gratitude to Creator and all our relations for life in fullness on this wounded earth. We hope that all of us out of this gratitude will renew our action for migrant and ecological justice, for human rights and indigenous rights, for gender and racial justice. Thank you for your support. Thanksgiving blessings from all of us at Kairos.


Hello and welcome to the Pride of India show. Our guest today is Srinivas Kamath, Director at Natural Science Claim. This Indian brand was launched first at Juhu Beach of Mumbai way back in 1994. Since then, it has grown into a pan India chain with more than 135 or more stores, I guess. Welcome to the show, Mr. Srinivas Kamath. Thank you. Pleasure to have you. Please take us through the initial journey of naturals. So naturals were started by my father way back in 84 and before that he was working with his elder brother in the Santa Cruz area of Mumbai. My dad's elder brother was running a restaurant. So it was a Uddupi restaurant. We came from Mangalore so that was a specialty and so he got married. He was expecting his first child. So it was a moment where he thought like I should be starting something of my own and since he was already interacting with a lot of the customers and being in the restaurant industry, he sensed that there's going to be a huge demand for ice creams in the coming years and that's how the idea sort of came into his mind. But what he wanted to do was something very different. Like there were other ice cream parlours but he wanted to concentrate on natural offerings. When I say natural offering, it's like fruits, milk, whatever, the combination of without adding any additives, chemicals or any artificial flavor. So that's how he started and it's very interesting how he decided to find the location like very close to Jew Beach. Like that time there were no malls, there were no shopping complexes. So a lot of people for the entertainment people used to only go to Jew beaches or at the most watch movies and there was a kind of a culture where people used to have early dinner like let's say seven o'clock and then used to go out and eat fast food items that quick and that's where he concentrated on opening somewhere where already the customers were already there and that's how we decided upon opening in Jew. What were your initial challenges? Well for us, the most difficult part was that all these fruits that we selected like be it Sitafal, the custard apple or Sharifa is called in North. There were no as such technology where you could deceive the fruit. So you had to use only your manual, you have to use your hands to do it. So it was very tedious, it was very taking a lot of time and that time there were only five or six people including my mom, my grandmother also used to help my dad in setting up the kitchen, deceiving the fruits, peeling the fruits and that was the initial challenge. You find the technology like to sort of even if there was demand for our ice creams, we could not scale up as much as we wanted. Slowly my dad had to sort of use his engineering mind though he was a 10th dropout but he was always fascinated by engineering and inspired by a lot of the, but there were a lot of factories around in Andheri area and this thing so he used to always go take inspiration from whatever technology he could and yeah he used some jogart to every stage of his life to find solution to unique challenges that we had and that's why we were able to scale up.  What wonderful jogart he has. So over the years how have you connected good consumers? I mean word of mouth was one of them. Yeah. What end? See for us you know the only avenue was our stores you know to connect with our customers like you know because we didn't have any marketing budget or where we wanted to spread awareness so and luckily what happened was the word of mouth publicity worked very well for us so we had celebrities coming into our stores so that acted itself like a mini celibhunt like you know people used to like you know they know they can naturalize. So that was the first initial boost that we got like you know from the customer and of course the product spoke for itself and you know we didn't have to you know release multiple ads or create awareness our customers just spread the word for us. Please tell us about your most popular advertising campaigns in recent years. Yeah so interestingly I at the most the one that I can recall is the one that when we were opening in Delhi we had a nice build up you know towards creating the hype like you know we didn't straight away announce that we are opening. So just maybe one or two months back before opening first store in Delhi we had wrapped up the entire store and you know this is around 2014 so you know the social media was already at peak you know the influencer marketing was already at peak so a lot of the influencers and we didn't have to engage them they self you know they were able to promote okay I think that shows us coming to Delhi that created a lot of hype and banking on that you know we then when we released the DEAD next day when our opening day it sort of matched you know the hype and the opening date sort of met and you know that gave us amazing response like you know we were we touched one million sales in less than seven days so it was a record for us for that type. That's great. So which ad agency do you work with and what was your expenditure before the pandemic and what is now? So we work with a very it's a boutique ad agency called Drinkwaters they are also based out of Bombay. The great thing about them is like you know it's a small team of four to five individuals with the bus experience by themselves they also started their journey with us so it's been a close association with them and you know for us the marketing budget we roughly you know we try to have it less than two or three percent of our annual turnover. Pandemic yes did hit us badly so you know that time because you know like I said our stores were the way of communication to you know communicating our whatever story or our philosophy to the customers that was obviously hampered because you know there were restrictions in opening hours we were not allowed to open in certain pockets of India where you know where the cases were rising. So that you know and we took a austerity call to cut off you know our budgets but post second phase once it did we resumed our robot activities that we were doing like what you know in fact we increased our spends on communicating the product actors like you know the safety of the product because there was misconception around whether ice cream is you know can be not not suitable for doing the covid times because it's you know it's a cold product so we had to create awareness around that we have to build awareness that you know ice cream is perfectly fine we make it in a safe environment hygienic environment so that was the bunch of the marketing budget went and creating those you know those are vendors. We see a lot many ice cream brands in the market at present so many national international ones yeah do you see as your biggest competitor? Well you know I think you know earlier there was a time when you know we used to say Baskin Robbins, Amul they were the biggest competitors because they also operated in a similar format like in the parlor format like you know like we have we have only have exclusive parlor format we don't sell in mom and pop shows or any supermarkets so we used to see any ice cream brand that into parlor format is a competitor but that has changed drastically over the last two years because not just because of the pandemic but also because the rise of Swiggy, Zomato, the online aggregators we've seen a lot of boutique stores opening not necessarily having ice cream parlor of their own maybe operating to dark kitchen or cloud kitchens I'd say call it and it's like the small brands now opening in each pocket of every corners and every area so it's a very interesting time where you know we are facing competition not from big brands but smaller new brands that are coming up in the market. So are you planning to change your marketing strategy as you mentioned you operate only through the parlors so are you planning to you know keep your products in in malls yeah so the first step has been we already took last year which is like you know unfortunately what had happened was that while we were allowed to manufacture ice cream we were not allowed to sell ice creams because ice cream parlor people thought it's a restaurant right so restaurants were almost you know they were hit hard because of they were not allowed to walk in customers were not allowed you're not allowed to sell customers directly so we had to sell we had to find some way out so we tied up for the first time with cloud kitchen partners like right now we are tied up with rebel foods which are you know the the recently they also became a unicorn where they operate from cloud kitchens all over India so that's what the first step that was something very new for us we we had to take this step otherwise you know we would have been lost amongst the customer like people would not recall us but when things we and we didn't frankly no one would have anticipated how long it's going to be how things are going to be back to normal so that was the first format and yes though we are not looking at hypermarket or supermarkets right now but we are definitely looking at other online avenues could it could be like you know like Swiggy has come up with Insamart, Dunzo has their own you know grocery and ice cream and food related so we are looking at tying up with those travel so our reach increases we are not just only dependent to sell our ice creams to our own stores but we have other videos to sell our products. What are your long-term plans Srinivas? So I would say first thing first you know the one important lesson that we have learned is to how we mitigate our risk you know in times like this you know we cannot just be only dependent on operating only through our follow format we have to look at the avenues so which is we are actively looking. Second is to increase our footprints across you know all over India right now we are heavily concentrated in western and southern region we though we have stores in Delhi but we are not even penetrated you know 75% of India so that we want to increase our footprint but that mitigates the risk suppose if there is a curfew or lockdown in one part of India we are not suffered you know if it's not like you know in this case Aydarabad was not affected but Kerala was very badly affected so we could survive because in Aydarabad market was relatively open so that way we've learned our lessons so we want to increase our footprint that that's the second part and third we want to work on our backend channel very important because it's not just us the manufacturer of ice creams and you know sellers of ice cream are affected even our supply chain our supply partners our vendors are equally affected so we want to work very closely with the partners to ensure that you know there is whatever type of challenging time we are able to get those raw materials and you know we can cater to the demand what's there in the market. Any plans to go global? Not yet but you know as they say never say never so right now we like I said we're not even penetrated 75% of the market so our whole and sole focus is right now expanding in India as much as we can and though we have tremendous demand we on a daily basis we get hundreds of queries you know from Dubai, Singapore, America, US, England so but yeah we are quite sure that you know we want to increase our footprints in India in fact right now we are at 138 outlets as we speak our plan is to double that count within the next two to three years. Thanks for taking time out and speaking with us in the media. Thanks and take care. Bye.