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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
IT major, Hexaware Technologies, plans to hire 400-500 fresh engineers in the current calendar year, a top company official said.
A recent McKinsey report warns that unless IT professionals re-train themselves, they could become irrelevant.
Sixteen major contracts worth nearly $14 billion to be renewed by June 2018 but uncertainty looms large.
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.
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.
Software employees can opt for company-run programmes, online courses, boot camps to upgrade skills.
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.
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.
Silicon Valley-based billionaire and prominent venture capitalist Vinod Khosla on Friday condemned government's decision to ban internet-based taxi aggregator Uber following the alleged rape incident in Delhi recently.
Indian IT industry veterans believe lack of maturity from the political leadership may have helped people in the US to take advantages.
Nasscom president Kiran Karnik on Wednesday suggested the government should allow establishment of private higher and technical educational institutions on the lines special economic zones to provide quality education in the country.
Infosys' chief executive officer and managing director Vishal Sikka says despite a healthy guidance, he can't say if this would be 'industry leading'.
The pace of job generation has slowed as IT firms look at automation to do testing
The total duration of the visa that we get is only 15 days and this hampers a lot of work if we are talking to a client in India, says Jehan Ara, President, Pakistan Software Houses Association.
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