Google to buy Fitbit

Google has agreed to buy Fitbit for $2.1 Billion in a move giving the US tech giant entry into the wearable technology space. The move comes with Google seeking to expand beyond its core the business of online search into hardware, and with Fitbit struggling against rivals including Apple.

While Fitbit was among the first to popularize fitness bands, it has lost ground in recent years to rivals. A survey by research firm IDC for the second quarter of 2019 found Fitbit in fourth place in a market led by China's Xiaomi leading the global market, followed by Apple -- which makes the leading smartwatch -- and Chinese-based Huawei.

Fitbit has introduced its own smartwatch in 2017 but it has failed to keep pace with the Apple Watch. Google, which faces pressure from regulators around the world over its dominance of internet search has been boosting its hardware offerings, including a line of Pixel smartphones and tablets, along with connected speakers.

Fitbit’s fitness trackers monitor users’ daily steps, calories burned and distance traveled. They also measure floors climbed, sleep duration and quality, and heart rate. The company has been partnering with health insurers and has been making tuck-in acquisitions in the healthcare market, as part of efforts to diversify its revenue stream.

Infosys ties up with Hitachi, Huawei, and Microsoft

Infosys is an Indian Multinational Corporation that provides business-consulting, information technology, software engineering and outsourcing services. It is India’s second largest IT services company. Infosys is headquartered in Bangalore, Karnataka. Vishal Sikka is the current CEO of Infosys. It had widened collaboration with Microsoft, Hitachi Data Systems, and Huawei in a bid to expand offerings in Cloud Computing, Big Data & Analytics, Communication, Infrastructure, and Data Transformation segments.

The Bangalore based firm, which is a systems integration partner of Microsoft Corp, will also establish a global ‘centre of excellence’ for Microsoft Azure Machine Learning that will train over 1,000 engineers by the end of Fiscal year 2015. This collaboration will offer enterprises easy access to an analytics platform without the need of big investments and extended time to market. A recent report said that, Infosys is strong in delivering services but lacks innovation, hinting if its areas of execution became less significant, customers might switch.

The expanded partnerships with Hitachi Data systems will add to Company infrastructure and data centre transformation solution capabilities. Infosys would set up a centre to co-create pay per use solutions with Hitachi Data Systems. The new solutions will facilitate transition of clients IT infrastructure to Cloud based environments and will be tailored to meet the refresh cycles of enterprise data centres at lower costs. China has committed $20 Billion investment in India over next five years and has agreed to provide greater market access to Indian products in farm, Pharma, gems and jewellery sectors with a view to reducing trade gap.

Under the partnership with Chinese Huawei, the two companies will jointly develop IT solutions that combine Huawei Cloud Infrastructure and Infosys IT services expertise. The solution develops under this partnership will target enterprise customers looking to modernize their operations by leveraging and infrastructure.  Infosys Cloud Ecosystem Hub, a solution that help firms build and manage a unified hybrid cloud environment, will be integrated with Hitachi Unified Compute Platform to reduce time to market and simplify complex migrations. The combination will enable enterprises to move to a 100 percent virtualized environment with management, orchestration, and hypervisor integration.