Rohit Kapoor, COO and co-founder, EXL Service, talks to Business Standard about the company's third-quarter performance, growth plans and outlook.
To encourage innovation, IT industry body Nasscom and ICICI Knowledge Park are setting up a $25 million venture capital fund to help startups that are in the intellectual property space. The fund -- to be registered with market regulator Sebi -- will look after the brick-and-mortar costs of startups.
Situated in a special economic zone in Noida, HCL Technology's upcoming campus is spread across 46 acres of land. The half-constructed new HCL tech-hub provides a picture of the grandeur that is to follow as the campus is scheduled to be completed in the next five years.
With the US dollar poised to go below Rs 38 mark, the future looks bleak for the small infotech companies. Even as the nearly $40 billion information technology industry is still trying to stabilise itself from the impact of the rupee exchange fluctuation, since most of their business comes from overseas, the roots of smaller companies have been shaken further.
Neeraj Bhargava, CEO of Mumbai-based business process outsourcing (BPO firm) WNS Global Services, and his team have voluntarily decided to forfeit their bonuses if they are not successful in getting the attrition rates below 30 per cent. This is probably the first such move of its kind in the industry in which attrition has become a critical issue. WNS has over 15,000 employees, and its current attrition rate stands at 43 per cent.
Google has unveiled an ambitious strategy that will make cellphones cheaper and speed up internet surfing. Google's director of mobile platforms, Andy Rubin, said in a telephonic conversation from the US that the new platform called Android should reduce the prices of today's $500 smart phones to around $100-150 in a year or so. "If there's ever a Gphone, it will be built on the Android platform," he said.
Mobile TV -- basically an application that enables television services on handhelds such as mobiles, handheld TVs, car TV, GPS terminals, game devices, laptop PCs, and other portable devices -- is a step closer to seeing the light of day in India.
Indian IT service providers are increasing their exposure in the healthcare and pharma segments. Multi-million dollar deals in this space by IT firms over the past three-four months only buttress this trend. Healthcare outsourcing has moved away from just undertaking medical transcription and business process outsourcing (BPO) work to core functions such as drug discovery, testing, research and development.
Unlike the first quarter of FY08 when Indian IT small- and mid-caps were hit hard due to a nearly 7 per cent appreciation in the rupee against the dollar, the July-September period was relatively kind to these firms. It spared them to some extent, since the rupee appreciated around 1.5 per cent over the period. However, the rupee rose around 12 per cent against the dollar over the last 12 months.
In fact, while IT bellwether Infosys Technologies (his earlier employer) got a drubbing at the bourses for not posting "better than expected" results, iGate stumped investors a couple of days back by announcing it plans to buy back shares from the public and delist from the Indian stock markets, while remaining listed in the US.
Analysts expect that Bharti Airtel, Reliance Communications (RCom) and Idea Cellular will post over 50 per cent annual growth in revenues (year-on-year) and more than 10 per cent sequential growth (over the previous quarter). Bharti continues to lead in the subscriber addition race (2.1 million in August).
The process started from October 6, and trademark owners have the chance to register domain names in the new .asia top-level domain (TLD), prior to a general release of .asia names in 2008. With the support of 73 countries in the region, .asia is looking at means to bind the Asian community.
IBM's attempt to patent a technology that would help companies to figure out which jobs to send overseas getting a quiet burial. The company today confirmed that it has withdrawn its patent application for "outsourcing of services" which it had filed on July 12 this year.
It's for the first time that someone from the industry will hold the position of president at Nasscom.
The earnings of Indian IT companies in rupee terms are dwindling with every upward movement of the currency. The domestic currency has risen by 11.6 per cent this year to touch a nine-year high on Wednesday.
Rising wage costs, competition from countries like China, the impending withdrawal of tax incentives under the STPI scheme, the slowdown in the US and the rising rupee have all punctured the optimism of the IT industry.
Nortel Networks (India) is upgrading the communications at four Indian international airports, which should help make the staff more responsive to travellers.
Old economy companies such as Hero, M&M (Tech Mahindra), Aditya Birla, Essar, Hindujas and Larsen & Toubro have sprung into action with large acquisitions and major deals.
Computer hardware majors like Dell, HP and HCL launch products to woo companies.
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