MAM
Stanley Seating brings La-Z-Boy to India
BANGALORE: The US-based Leather upholstery specialists Stanley Seating (SS) have partnered with La-Z-Boy Inc., USA (LZB) to bring their world famous reclines to India. SS will bring in bare CKD kits of six models sourced from LZB Thailand to India and tailor the upholstery to customer specifications.
La-Z-Boy is a brand with a recall rate – 98 per cent, this equals Coca-Cola, claims a LZB official quoting the Gallops survey findings. On an average 15,000 recliners are sold daily worldwide and TV and La-Z-Boy have always been a good pair, with their recliners figuring in some o f the most popular TV shows in the USA including the Bing Croby Show, Frasier and Friends.
LZB has been receiving the largest number of enquiries from customers as well as dealers from India, and this has prompted the tie-up with SS. Highly impressed with SS quality of work in India and also the variety of upholstery available with SS, LZB is considering manufacture of the recliners at SS .
Popular personalities such as Jennifer Aniston, Courtney Cox, Lisa Cudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry and David Schwimmer all have their own La-Z-Boy designs named after them.
SS has revenues of Rs 500 million plans to grow the market from the existing three to four thousand to around eight to ten thousand and bring in additional revenues of Rs 250 million this year. SS’s multi-channel distribution system exceeding 200 retail centers and showrooms and over a 100 dealers across India will be utilized to market the offerings from LZB, and SS Brand Manager Nagesh Manay hopes to grow this multi-channel distribution system by appointing more dealers and distributors.
Stanley Seating boasts of an impressive clientele ranging from automobile giants like General Motors, Ford, Mitsubishi, Toyota Kirloskar, Volvo, Honda Siel, Mahindra & Mahindra to corporate clients such as General Electric, DELL, Wipro, 3M, Windsor Sheraton and the Leela Palace.
A print media campaign is on the anvil as per SS founder and CEO Sunil Suresh, while TVC’s are also in the next nine to twelve month horizon. Creatives initially will be sourced out of the US.
Brands
Google completes $32 billion Wiz deal to boost AI and cloud security
Wiz joins Google Cloud but keeps multi-cloud support across rival platforms
NEW YORK: Google has completed its $32 billion acquisition of cloud security company Wiz, marking the biggest deal in the tech giant’s history and signalling a major push to strengthen security in the era of artificial intelligence and multi-cloud computing.
The New York-headquartered cybersecurity firm will join Google Cloud while continuing to operate under the Wiz brand. Crucially, the company will maintain support for multiple cloud platforms, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Oracle Cloud, reflecting the reality that most large organisations run their systems across several cloud providers.
Google said the acquisition is designed to help organisations build and scale applications more securely as businesses and governments increasingly move critical systems and data to the cloud. At the same time, the rapid adoption of generative AI has introduced new cybersecurity risks, with attackers also using AI to launch faster and more sophisticated attacks.
Wiz has built a reputation for simplifying cloud security. Its platform maps entire cloud environments, identifying vulnerabilities, potential attack paths and misconfigurations before they can be exploited. By connecting insights from code, cloud infrastructure and runtime environments, it allows security and engineering teams to detect and fix risks early in the development cycle.
Bringing Wiz into Google Cloud will create what the company describes as a unified security platform capable of detecting, preventing and responding to threats across cloud and AI environments. The combined offering will also integrate Google’s own security capabilities, including threat intelligence tools, security operations platforms and the cybersecurity expertise of Mandiant.
Google CEO Sundar Pichai said the move reflects the growing importance of security as more organisations rely on AI and cloud technologies. “Keeping people safe online has always been part of Google’s mission,” he said, adding that the partnership will help organisations innovate with greater confidence.
Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian, said the goal is to make security an enabler rather than a roadblock for businesses building modern applications. He noted that the combined technologies will simplify the complex task of protecting hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
For Wiz, the acquisition opens the door to global scale while keeping its core philosophy intact. Co-founder and CEO Assaf Rappaport said the company remains committed to an open, multi-cloud approach and will continue supporting customers regardless of where their workloads run.
Over the past year, Wiz has expanded its platform to address emerging risks tied to AI applications, including tools that help organisations monitor AI usage, detect AI-specific vulnerabilities and secure AI workloads during runtime.
With Google’s infrastructure, artificial intelligence capabilities and security ecosystem now behind it, Wiz plans to accelerate development of its platform while continuing to serve enterprises, governments and start-ups operating across different cloud environments.
For Google Cloud, the acquisition adds a powerful piece to its security puzzle as competition intensifies among global cloud providers. For customers, it promises a future where building fast in the cloud does not have to come at the expense of staying secure.
