Microsoft, the world's largest software company, is keen to partner India in a project to issue unique identification to each citizen, its chairman Bill Gates said on Friday.
Sunil Maheswari, the chief executive officer and co-founder of Mango Technologies Pvt Ltd, has many accomplishments to his credit. MINT-Wall Street Journal described Mango Technologies as one of the 'Top Ten Startup Companies of 2008'.
Higher impetus on automation through higher funding of e-governance projects and rationalization and clarity on levy of taxes would bring relief to the industry.
Global business consultancy firm, Deloitte, plans to almost double its India workforce to 24,500 over the next 30 months, a top company official said.
IT and BPO industry body Nasscom's chairman Pramod Bhasin said the industry faced a 'brutal year in many respects' in the last financial year and the companies and customers were passing through 'extraordinary pain'. As a result, BPO customers are undergoing restructuring, internal and management changes and change of decision-makers, he said at the Nasscom's BPO Strategy Summit 2009 in Bangalore.
The six-member board -- comprising HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh, former Nasscom president Kiran Karnik, former Sebi member C Achuthan, CII chief mentor Tarun Das, renowned chartered accountant TN Manoharan and LIC nominee Suryakant Balakrishnan -- met in Hyderabad on Thursday for the third time after it was constituted January 12.
The West Bengal government had early this month shelved the IT township project at Rajarhat in North 24 Parganas, where Wipro and Infosys were supposed to set up their units, after allegations of irregularities in allocation of land for the luxury Vedic Village resort surfaced.
US President Barack Obama's proposals to amend the US tax structure since it allegedly encourages creation of ". . . a job in Bangalore, India, (rather) than create one in Buffalo, New York", has made the IT sector in India edgy.
India Inc on Tuesday described the United States President Barack Obama's announcement to punish American firms by levying high taxes on their outsourcing business as 'protectionist' and a retrograde measure that, it said, will hurt the US companies.
Most recession-hit clients, domestic and foreign, are asking for price cuts that large Indian IT firms are unable to offer due to high overheads. However, SMEs can afford to do so, since their employee costs are low. This is the right time to enter the domestic market, which is projected to expand five-fold by 2020 to $90-100 billion, including both technology and business outsourcing, said K Purushothaman, Nasscom's regional director for Tamil Nadu and Kerala.
Can Indian youth work on solutions for cyber security?
The Nasscom-McKinsey Perspective 2020 report notes that healthcare will emerge as a very big opportunity for outsourcing services. Ananda Mukerji, managing director and chief executive officer of Firstsource, feels his company is in the right place to make its mark in the global BPO business.
IT majors like IBM, Sun Microsystems and Red Hat have shot letters to industry bodies -- Nasscom (for software) and MAIT (for hardware) -- and the department of information technology, protesting over the inclusion of clauses which allow for 'multiple standards' and 'royalty on software' versus a 'single' standard and 'free' software.
It took India's IT-BPO sector just over a decade to grow more than 12 times, from $4 billion in 1998 to a shade under $50 billion in 2009. Admittedly, the target set by the software service providers' body Nasscom was off by a year.
IT major, Hexaware Technologies, plans to hire 400-500 fresh engineers in the current calendar year, a top company official said.
Amid headwinds across global markets, US issues fresh restrictions on H-1B visas. Ayan Pramanik & Raghu Krishnan list out the many ways in which this impacts the Indian IT industry.
The estimation is in line with an earlier forecast of 4-7 per cent given by National Association of Software and Service Companies. The industry was optimistic to reach the $50 billion milestone export target in the current fiscal.
The announcement was made by Corporate Affairs Minister P C Gupta, whose ministry had earlier moved the Company Law Board to disband the erstwhile Satyam board after disclosure of fraud by company founder Ramalinga Raju
The problem, says Chandrasekaran, arises from the lack of access to services, including healthcare, education and financial services.
The government is likely to appoint more directors on the board of the crisis-ridden Satyam Computer Services soon. "More directors will be appointed within two days," a senior official of the Ministry of Corporate Affairs said.
Ayan Pramanik and Shivani Shinde Nadhe report on the uncertainties that have dragged down shares of TCS, Tech Mahindra and HCL Technologies.
Of the 3.9 million the sector employs, HR experts say at least 100,000 are likely to lose their jobs by the end of this financial year. Ayan Pramanik and Raghu Krishnan report.
Premji said, Wipro is not feeling the "effects" of the eurozone crisis.
India's celebrated IT outsourcing industry, which contributes about 25 per cent of the country's total exports, is feeling the pinch as it struggles to deal with the avalanche effects of the global financial crisis.
The growth of India's IT outsourcing sector, which contributes to about 25 per cent of the country's total exports, is expected to slow down sharply this year following a drop in demand due to the global financial crisis, India's software industry lobby predicted.
The government does not see any conflict of interest in HDFC chairman Deepak Parekh and former Nasscom President Kiran Karnik, who are directors on the board of Satyam's competitors, being on the troubled company's board.
The event will aim at drawing foreign investment in startups and push local partnerships.
Taking the first concrete step towards curtailing the rising incidents of crime against business process outsourcing (BPO) staffers, a group of 32 Pune-based BPOs and National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) have framed a 'code of conduct' to ensure their physical security.
The 30-share Sensex ended down 297 points at 27,438 and the 50-share Nifty closed 93 points lower at 8,305.
WCH Training Solutions is organising a 10-day workshop on "Voice & Accent Training Skills" for professionals in the BPO industry.
The government on Thursday said the domestic IT sector has not recovered fully and is expected to grow by 5.5 per cent in 2009-10 against a growth rate of 16.6 per cent in the previous fiscal.
Analysts say the impact on Indian entities would not be immediate
Within the IT industry, reactions to Barack Obama's historic victory have not been as pessimistic as expected. IT firms have been worried because Obama, as Senator, introduced the Patriot Employer Act of 2007 that gave tax credits for companies that maintain or increase the number of full-time workers in America relative to those outside the US.
Higher impetus on automation through higher funding of e-governance projects and rationalisation and clarity on levy of taxes would bring relief, says the computer hardware industry.
With prominent Indian IT companies such as Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), Wipro, Infosys Technologies, Zensar Technologies and Satyam Computer Services increasing their presence in Japan, the world's second largest IT services market is becoming a lucrative market for India.
The central government's view of exploring public-private partnership (PPP) in the establishment of new institutes of higher learning has a private hand, right from the first step.
Infosys Chairman Narayan Murthy equated the present economic crisis in the US to the Great Depression. "The present crisis in the US reminds me of the 1929 depression. More signals are emanating of the 1929 depression than the 70s' one. I have a suspicion that it (the present crisis) could be a longer one," he said. A recovery from the present crisis may take longer than 18 months, he said.
Indian IT companies can take a breather as the US Senate vote for imposing stringent conditions on the hiring of H-1B visa workers.
Snapdeal said it will give its users the option to defer the delivery by a few days till new currency notes become easily available.
"Till the second quarter of last fiscal, the industry was on track to achieve the $50 billion export target by 2008-09. The aspiration to reach $60 billion by fiscal 2010 is at risk since an unprecedented slowdown is expected in key markets overseas, especially the US and Europe, which account for about 80 percent of Indian software exports," Nasscom president Som Mittal said. Nasscom has now extended the target year for achieving $60 billion export revenue to 2011.