Browbeaten by recession and anxiety about mounting protectionism in key markets have led Indian information technology (IT) companies to extend their reach in the countries of Africa, the West Asia and Asia Pacific.
According to Grant Thornton's January data, IT & ITeS tracked the highest in terms of value, with the industry investing $1.2 billion in M&A over 12 deals.
India on Friday launched an aggressive campaign to showcase its IT prowess in China to woo local companies in order to bridge the trade imbalance between the two nations.
"We are looking for acquisitions," Infosys chief executive officer and managing director Kris Gopalakrishnan told reporters in Mumbai on the sidelines of the Nasscom India Leadership Forum on Thursday.
IT sector has lots of hope from the Union Budget 2014-15.
Global IT firms seeing dearth of talent in countries such as US, looking for people with such skills from countries like India
After two decades of being in the information technology business, India is still a 'toddler' with only 2 per cent of global market share, according to N R Narayana Murthy, Chairman and Chief Mentor, Infosys Technologies Ltd.
To cement India's position as a preferred global outsourcing destination, the government on Wednesday liberalised guidelines for voice-based BPOs removing the distinction between domestic and international units as well as permitting interconnectivity between all types of OSP centres. Broadly, the rules would allow global companies, say an airline, with a voice-based centre in India to now serve global and domestic customers with common telecom resources, something that required dedicated, separate infrastructure previously. Moreover, the restrictions on data interconnectivity between any BPO (business process outsourcing) centre of the same company, a group company or any unrelated company has been done away with, allowing for massive flexibility in resource management for BPO operations.
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.
Wipro, has set up a venture capital (VC) fund that will look at investing in early-to-middle stage technology start-ups globally.
Software industry body Nasscom expects the country's information technology (IT) services sector to grow 13-14 per cent in the current financial year and to touch $225 billion (Rs 13.22 lakh crore) by 2020.
In order to make it hassle-free, various start-up support groups such as TiE (The Indus Entrepreneur) and India Angel Network (IAN) are partnering with the digital NBFCs to extend debt finance to their member companies.
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.
Thanks to technological support provided by BlinkIN, a Bengaluru-based intelligent visual-assistance company, engineers in Wuhan were able to remotely install air ventilation systems in two hospitals in Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, reports Peerzada Abrar.
Some of them include Spider G, NeuroTags, Genrobotic Innovations, AI Aeronautics, Synersense, Dealshare and NanoHealth. 'Highway to a Hundred Unicorns,' the Microsoft for startups initiative, works closely with local governments to strengthen the startup ecosystem in each state.
Tepid growth in verticals like banking and finance, healthcare, retail and automotive will drag overall IT spends in the current year, reports Debasis Mohapatra.
IT major, Hexaware Technologies, plans to hire 400-500 fresh engineers in the current calendar year, a top company official said.
The problem, says Chandrasekaran, arises from the lack of access to services, including healthcare, education and financial services.
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.
A recent McKinsey report warns that unless IT professionals re-train themselves, they could become irrelevant.
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.
The company's endeavour is to get independent of this visa matter as much as possible, Vishal Sikka said.
Sixteen major contracts worth nearly $14 billion to be renewed by June 2018 but uncertainty looms large.
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.
Howard County delegates will meet Bangalore firms to explore possibilities of business expansion of Indian companies in Howard County.
From being a BSE employee, to starting Financial Technologies, to building the MCX, it has been an incredible journey for Dewang Neralla.
rediff.com brings to you a special series on India's best innovators and entrepreneurs, winners of the latest Nasscom Innovation Award 2007.
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.
Within the next two years the national capital will have its own IT hub aiming to foster industry-institute partnership in the areas of advanced technology research in the city.
Software employees can opt for company-run programmes, online courses, boot camps to upgrade skills.
Job cuts in Indian IT companies will be 1.75 -2 lakh per year in next 3 years, due to under- preparedness in adapting newer technologies, says Head Hunters MD
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The IT bellwether currently has about 28,000 employees in West Bengal in different facilities and it expects to recruit around 4,000 more in the current year.
Nadella advised the start-up community to learn from the failures
Other than Gujarat, Odisha and West Bengal, call centres would come up in Assam, Manipur, Tripura.
"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.
Indian export-oriented information technology (IT) and business process outsourcing (BPO) firms may be grappling with an appreciating rupee and clouds of doubt looming over the extension of tax sops for the sector beyond 2009. An Everest-Nasscom study points out that the domestic BPO market, with a growth rate of 50 per cent over the last five years, has grown faster than the overall Indian BPO market to reach nearly $1.6 billion (Rs 6,400 crore) by end of FY2008.
Advances in technology could render much of the Indian IT services industry obsolete.
The aerospace technology outsourcing market in India will touch $1 billion by 2009, according to Nasscom.
Appointing Neemuchwala is seen as a big shift for Wipro.
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