Rail Analysis India March 2018 Digital Magazine | Page 130
Exclusive Interview | 129
Track & Infrastructure
Track & Infrastructure
130 | Exclusive Interview
leverage on global partnerships for transfer of technology
collaborations, in order to leverage on the strong partnerships
that India has across the globe, especially also in the rail
industry already for many years. We at Cyient have seen that
for many of our rail customers, India has been a key market
in the recent years.
There are some key dimensions, which are universal to rail
projects globally and play a decisive role in the execution
strategy (e.g. reflected in certain international standards and
the recent updates of the same) – and India as a nation needs
to ensure that we leverage upon the lessons learnt there
globally through these global partnerships.
Exclusive INTERVIEW WITH Ms Beatrice Lippus
Before we understand your industry views, can you
give us a bit of background on Cyient and yourself?
Cyient is a global rail engineering solutions provider with over 25
years of rich engineering heritage. We have been in the Railway
industry for the last 14 years, and have extended engineering
support to over 200 projects globally. We have partnered with our
customers to deliver technologically superior products, achieve
faster time-to-market and deliver projects in a cost-efficient manner
in the segments of rolling stock and signalling – across the globe. We
partner with rolling stock OEMs and rail signalling providers enabling
them to effectively Design, Build and Maintain assets and efficiently
realize projects globally.
Ms Beatrice Lippus
Associate Vice President,
Transportation, Cyient
I have been with Cyient for 10+ years now, and I’m an Associate Vice
President at Cyient’s Transportation Business Unit and Managing
Director of our German entity. I’m actually half Swiss which probably
can explain my passion for railways – as Switzerland is known to be
a country where there is a divided opinion on whether we set our
trains by clocks. Or the other way around. Just for your reference, an
average Swiss person travels 2430 kilometres by train every year.
especially like to highlight the focus on safety and increased
use of new technologies which is emphasized in there. To
me, rail industry’s “raison d’être” are safety, reliability, and
efficiency – with digitization and IoT being key technology
drivers to it. Smart railway networks leverage interconnected
technological solutions combined with modern infrastructure
such as automatic ticket systems, digital displays, and
smart meters. However, the specifics of railway industry
being legacy heavy, project driven and technology focused
require from my perspective an adaptation of IoT compared
to consumer world as an “Internet of Trains” – for which the
investments as envisaged are definitely needed.
It is heartening to see that the Indian ecosystem is investing
heavily to scale up the current legacy systems to new
generation technologies for which we have seen the benefit
in the global projects we have been involved with already
– whether it is the TCAS or ETCS or the CBTC based
technologies.
And how do you see India embedded in a global
context there?
In the recent budget announcement, India has shown its plans
to procure a significant amount of physical assets as well as