By Krishna SinhaChaudhury
Chiang Mai (Thailand), Feb 5 (IANS): Targeting to make further inroads into the government and healthcare sectors in India, Zebra Technologies, a global leader in providing solutions and services to enterprises, is confident of registering double-digit growth in the country in 2018, a senior company executive has said.
Zebra Technologies, which registered $4 billion in revenue in 2017 globally, said the Asia-Pacific Region (APAC) has consistently been a hotbed of growth for the company and it looks at India as the key market.
"We will not only work with existing consumers in the three main verticals (retail, logistics and transport) but also start working in the government and healthcare sectors to see better revenue percentage coming for us," Deep Agarwal, Regional Sales Director-India, Zebra Technologies, told IANS here.
Nearly 14 per cent of its global revenue comes from the APAC region, and with its Enterprise Asset Intelligence (EAI) solutions, the US-based technology company is confident of bolstering its presence in India.
"We see a lot of traction coming from the government and healthcare verticals for our solutions in India. Now, with the changing dynamics, we think their contribution towards the revenue will increase as a lot of discussions are happening in these sectors," Agarwal added.
In terms of healthcare technology, Zebra makes wristband print solutions that provide immediate access to critical patient information at the bedside and across all hospital departments.
"Some of the top hospitals in metros like Delhi and Mumbai are already using our wearable technologies in the form of wristbands for patients," Agarwal informed.
These wristbands help the hospital to better ensure that patients receive the right treatment, reducing errors and delays.
"In the healthcare technology, we have got patient tracking, asset tracking and communication collaboration... these three pillars are very important," added Tom Bianculli, Chief Technology Officer, Zebra Technologies.
Highlighting the company's focus for 2018, Bianculli said: "Location technology, identification technology and Radio-Frequency Identification (RFID) are what we are going to work on this year."
Zebra Technologies has eight Research and Development (R&D) centres across the globe and the largest one is in Bengaluru.
"We have only one R&D centre in India but it is one of our largest with a strength of over 500 employees," said Anders Gustafsson, Chief Executive Officer, Zebra Technologies.
R&D continues to play an important role in the company's business and it invests 10 per cent of its global revenue annually in R&D.
This is a significant investment in comparison to industry standards which is one per cent or two per cent, said the company.
The engineers in the Bengaluru R&D centre are constantly innovating new technologies that can be seen in most of Zebra's products.
Meanwhile, the company has already launched a series of products such as Zebra "TC 2", which is essentially an Android smartphone customised for the Small and Medium Businesses (SMBs).
Zebra calls it a mobile computer that is a rugged Android phone, billed as a mobile computer and aimed primarily at the SMBs in the retail sector, among others.
The handset sports a 4.3-inch WVGA display with Gorilla Glass on top. It runs Android 7 Nougat Operating System (OS).
When asked how it tackles security issues pertaining to its Android devices, the company said its mobile computing devices are protected by its proprietary software security solution called "LifeGuard for Android".
"LifeGuard for Android" extends the lifecycle of Zebra Android enterprise mobile computers. With "LifeGuard", users will receive extended security support, predictable periodic security updates and legacy OS security support when transitioning to a newer OS.
Frequent updates will enhance the security and "LifeGuard" makes them easy to install at user discretion, either locally, or remotely via Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM), said the company.