Information Technology Times

Bhartiya City IT SEZ update

2015-07-26T17:53:00.005-07:00

Walkthrough

Bengaluru is where business happens. It's become one of the fastest growing hubs for IT development in the past 8 years. But sustaining that requires continuous investment and infrastructure to support every need. The BCIT located in District 4 & 5 is our plan for that future. 37 lakh sq. feet of a carefully considered environment for thriving IT, financial and knowledge driven sectors. This wholly contained SEZ that follows the utmost security and infrastructure standards. And it has an ever convenient location- the international airport is 25 minutes away. If you live in a Nikoo home, even better. Thats just a 5 minute walk away.

For Availability:

http://www.bhartiyacity.com/it-park.aspx

US-based [24]7 sets up new office in Bangalore, to hire 1,000 people

2015-07-26T17:43:00.003-07:00

US-based [24]7 today said it has set up new delivery centre in Bangalore and will hire about 1,000 people to support its global growth.

[24]7 is one of the world's largest providers of chat agents, with 5,000 chat agents providing digital assistance across financial services, communications, retail, technology and travel verticals.

"While we are certainly leading the way in terms of delivering value and outcomes to our customers at over 2.5 billion times a year, the new delivery centre in Bangalore will play an important role in our future growth," [24]7 co-founder and CEO PV Kannan said.

The 4.5 lakh sq ft delivery centre will help the company better serve its customers globally and scaling to support the growth of chat services, he added.

The company has spent over Rs 300 crore on the Bangalore delivery centre that can house 7,000 people.

The company has about 5,000 people in Bangalore, and another 1,000 people in Hyderabad. [24]7 delivers customer engagement software and services to make it simple for customers to interact with companies through web, mobile, chat, social, and phone.

Headquartered in the US, the company has R&D centres in California and Bangalore. It has sales offices in the US, the UK and Australia. It also has contact centres in India, the Philippines, G .. Guatemala, and Nicaragua.

It had revenue of about USD 250 million in 2014-15 and expects it to be around USD 300 million for the year ending March 2016

Source:

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/articleshow/48224498.cms?utm_source=contentofinterest&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=cppst

Infosys sets up dedicated facility for Apple work

2012-07-19T22:21:00.000-07:00

There will be a lot more of India in Apple products soon. The $108-billion maker of iPhones and iPads is scaling up sharply the work it outsources to Infosys Technologies.

The Bangalore-based IT giant has rented a 1.40-lakh-sqft office space near its headquarters in Electronics City to house employees who would work exclusively for Apple. Sources in the real estate industry who did not want to be named said the building would have the capacity to house 1,400 people. The centre will be operational by the end of the year.

It was previously reported that Apple CIO Neil O'Connor had met the Infosys top brass in Bangalore in January, leading to speculation that Apple was looking at outsourcing more to Indian companies.

When contacted, Infosys said in an emailed response: "We are unable to participate in your story."

Apple, the maker of products like the iPod and iPad, outsources application development and maintenance work to the extent of Rs 490 crore to Indian IT services providers. It is said to account for $50 million (Rs 275 crore) of Infosys' annual revenue of $7 billion.

Assuming that the new space that Infosys is taking for Apple will house a new set of employees, it would mean that Apple would be giving an additional business of at least $65 million (Rs 357 crore) every year to Infosys, considering that each Infosys employee accounts for an average annual revenue of $47,000. Infosys has about 1.5 lakh employees.

Former employees of Infosys who had worked on the Apple account said the current work is being executed by employees across Bangalore, Mangalore, Bhubaneswar and Thiruvananthapuram. The ultra-secretive Apple does not disclose the nature of work it does with third parties. But the former Infosys employees said Infosys played a role in developing applications for iCloud — a service that allows users to access music, calendar, documents and email via the cloud and which automatically syncs with your Mac, iPad and iPhone.

Infosys has also worked on developing applications for Apple Retail Store 2.0 launched last year, where iPad displays took the place of paper placards in Apple stores. The iPad offered an interactive way to explore the features and prices of the products being advertised, and it even had a call button to summon an Apple representative to the product for assistance.

Infosys has also helped in the design of frameworks for the iOS, the operating platform for Apple devices that provides interfaces needed to write software for the platform. Many Infosys employees are trained on Cocoa, Apple's native objective-oriented application programming interface.

Apple, with revenues of $108 billion in 2011, is the largest publicly traded company in the world by market capitalization, thanks to the phenomenal success of the iPhone and iPad. The market cap briefly touched $600 billion in April this year and currently is around $571 billion.

In 2006, the company had moved to establish a 3,000-people strong technical support centre in Bangalore. But it withdrew within months following a massive backlash from Apple fans around the world who felt India would not be able to deliver the quality of support they expected. However, it looks like the quality of Indian IT outsourcing work has been too good to resist.

HIGH-PROFILE CLIENT

Infy has rented 1.4 lakh sqft office space to house 1,400
Apple dedicated employees
May mean an additional revenue of at least $65 million every year for Infy
Infosys already receives $50 mn in annual revenue from Apple
Infy has worked on applications for Apple's iCloud and Retail Store 2.0

Accenture to hire aggressively in India

2012-07-18T11:22:00.000-07:00

Accenture, which has nearly a third of its employee-base in India, is continuing to aggressively increase these numbers.

The $27-billion management consulting, technology services and outsourcing giant has taken additional office spaces in Pune, Chennai, Mumbai and the National Capital Region, each in the 1.5 lakh to 2 lakh sft range, said sources in the real estate industry.

A 2 lakh sqft infrastructure can seat about 2,000 people. Many of the new recruits will be laterals with expertise across ERP, CRM, SCM, EAI (enterprise application integration), application maintenance, application development, IT infrastructure, KPO/BPO, telecom application, consulting, project management, delivery management, business analysis, programme management and practice management.

Accenture started large scale campus hiring in the country a few years ago. Some 6,000 to 7,000 campus recruits will also join the company this year. India currently is the single largest employee base for Accenture, with the headcount expected to cross 80,000 by August.

In the US, it has about 40,000 employees and in the Philippines 35,000. In 2007, Accenture had 35,000 people in India, which means that in five years, the number more than doubled. Wikipedia says the company has a global headcount of 251,000, a tad higher than TCS's 243,545.

Accenture India managing director Avinash Vashistha declined to get into specific numbers, but said, "We are the most preferred choice, with our integrated offering of management consulting, technology and outsourcing, among employees and vendors today in India. So we continue to look for growth options in the country.''

The company already has a presence in Bangalore, Chennai and Hyderabad. Pune is now the city of choice for immediate expansion. Pune has emerged as a hotspot for many technology companies because of its educational ecosystem, large talent pool, good climate and proximity to Mumbai.

Accenture is one of the most global of companies. It is incorporated in Ireland, is listed in the US and currently has a Frenchman as CEO. So it may not face the kind of offshoring backlash that companies closely identified with the US or Europe currently face on account of the high unemployment rates in those continents.

India is becoming important to Accenture also as a market. In the latest (third) quarter, Accenture posted outsourcing revenues of $3.19 billion (on total revenue of $7.15 billion), an increase of 16%. Outsourcing revenues reached record-high levels in the quarter with India and the Asia Pacific regions fueling the growth. "We are exploring better insights and specific business outcomes of high value from the country,'' said Vashistha.

Accenture has been aggressively wooing business in the corporate and government verticals in the country. In the government space, the company has implemented the core biometric identification system for the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI). It is working with India Post on an IT modernization project.

Golden age of Indian IT is over for good: Value Research

2012-07-18T00:33:00.002-07:00

Thursday, July 12, must have felt a little bit like Friday the 13th for many stakeholders in India's IT services industry. Early in the morning, Infosys announced its quarterly financial results that were a huge disappointment for the investment community.

The company's US dollar revenues, which are a key metric for a business like Infosys, had shrunk by 1.1%. Late in the evening, India's largest IT services company TCS came out with its own numbers. These were a lot better than Infosys with the US dollar revenues being up by 3.4%.

The stock markets reacted to both sets of data as expected. If one were to step back and take a longer view by casting one's eye back over the decade past, then the story looks different.

In the decade or so to about 2007, the US dollar revenues of Indian IT majors were growing by anywhere between 30% and 45% a year. The first big decline came in 2009 when growth dropped to single digits. After that, there was some recovery but the original pace was never achieved again.

Now, even the rosiest predictions for growth rates barely break out above 10%. Of course, there are many reasons for this; but the fact remains that whether from the perspective of investors or insiders, the ground has moved out from beneath the IT services industry. This is of broader significance than is generally perceived. In almost every way, IT services was the original animal spirits industry that played the starring role in what we love to call the 'India Story'.

From 1998 till now, the industry has grown from 1.2% of GDP to 7.5%, its share of exports has grown from about 4% to 25%. There were less than 1 lakh people working in this industry then now there are 28 lakh. This last point is probably more important than all else. No one is claiming that there will be any absolute decline, but there's a huge difference between the downstream effect of an employment intensive industry that grows at 40% a year and one that grows at 8% or 10%.

In fact, at this growth rate, the IT industry's share of GDP will shrink because nominal GDP is definitely going to grow much faster than this. It's growth that matters, not size. The effect of this deflation will be felt far and wide, not just among the business and investing communities.

For almost a whole generation of young men and women entering the urban employment market, IT services has been the great safety valve. A high-growth industry whose growth is almost linearly related to employment generation was the best thing that could have happened to India in the last two decades.

The constantly increasing workforce, with constantly increasing pay cheques and a constant predilection to spend — it was a wonderful combination while it last-ed. However, that was then. Make no mistake, an era is over — that kind of growth is not coming back. In some ways, this is also a story of opportunities missed.

It would have been nice had India been able to develop a technology industry where there was a large eco-system of software start-ups doing technologically interesting products; but the profit streams of our big IT services firms never seemed to be able to contribute to anything venturesome.

Recently, I read an article about this year's Google's Code Jam contest, which is a sort of Olympics for programming skills. At the qualifying stage, 17% of the contestants were Indians. By the third round, as the competition intensified, Indians were down to 0.7%.

Although India began with the highest number of participants, just three Indians lasted till round three, compared to 83 Chinese, 77 Russians, 36 Japanese, 25 Americans, 21 Poles, 13 Belarusians, 11 South Koreans etc. In fact, the code Olympics look much like the sports Olympics. So much for the IT superpower.

American investors warn of IT bubble burst

2012-07-18T00:30:00.000-07:00

American investors have signalled a possible bursting of the IT bubble after the technology sector remained a favourite for global investors in the past three years, according to a survey released today.

According to the Bank of American Merrill Lynch (BofAML) survey of fund managers for July, technology has been a favourite sector for global investors for the past three years, but US investors have signalled a possible bursting of the IT bubble.

Overall, a net 22 per cent of US respondents to the regional survey are overweight on technology - a sharp fall from a net 41 per cent a month ago. Within those figures, 19 per cent of the panel are underweight IT, up from 9 per cent in June, the survey said.

Global investors have also scaled back technology holdings. A net 32 per cent was overweight on technology, down from a net 41 per cent in June.

US equities have declined in popularity as global asset allocators have cast their net around the world. A net 14 per cent of respondents are overweight on US equities, down from a net 31 per cent last month. At the same time, asset allocators have reduced their underweights in euro zone, UK and Japanese equities.

The survey said a sharp drop in expectations of corporate profit growth has weakened investor confidence.

BofA Merrill Lynch's Growth Expectations Composite has fallen to 37 in July from 43 in June and 54 in May. A severely deteriorating outlook for profits is driving the fall in confidence. A net 38 percent of investors say corporate profits will worsen in the coming 12 months - compared with a net 19 per cent a month ago, it said here.

Expectation that corporates can grow profits by 10 per cent or more is at its lowest point since April 2009. A net 69 per cent of the panel expects corporates profit growth to be less than 10 per cent in the coming year. A net 58 percent says operating margins will decrease, up from a net 41 percent in June.

Both broader macro-economic outlook and risk appetite have stabilised after two months of sharp deterioration. A net 13 per cent of the respondents said the world economy will weaken in the coming year, a drop of two percentage points after a fall of 26 points from May to June, said the survey.

BofA Merrill Lynch's Composite Indicator for risk and liquidity rose slightly month-on-month as investors reduced average cash holdings in portfolios to under 5 percent. Most investors expect further quantitative easing, but few expect this to happen in the third quarter.

Investor perception of risk in the eurozone shifted in July. The proportion of respondents who see the risk of a negative shock around Germany's economy has more than tripled to 32 percent, up from 10 per cent in June.

Concern about France has risen with a majority of investors (55 per cent) believing the French economy could present a negative surprise this year, the survey said.

Fears that Spain or Portugal could spring a negative surprise have fallen, while expectation of good news from Ireland is growing - 32 per cent of investors hope for a positive surprise from Ireland this year, up from 16 per cent in June.

Confidence in Greece has fallen, however. The proportion saying Greece will avoid exiting the euro fell to 37 per cent from 44 per cent, it added.

Infosys now only a bellwether of staff angst; 8,000 quit in June quarter

2012-07-16T06:42:00.000-07:00

SD Shibulal, Infosys' chief executive, is fond of saying that the company is running a marathon, not a sprint. But for many employees, this emphasis on endurance rather than speed is simply too much to bear. So, instead of joining their leader in running the long slog, the exit gate is presenting a tempting prospect.

Data on attrition rates-which show how many employees have left the company-as well as conversations with current and former staff show that Infosys is having trouble with its most important resource: people.

The indications are that the rank and file, unmindful of the company's past generosity or promises of a bright future, is restless and hostile because of a wage freeze and continuing underperformance.

The sour mood was exacerbated on Thursday when the company announced lower-than-forecast sales and lowered its target growth rate to about 5%, less than half as fast as the wider industry. The same day, rival and India's top software exporter Tata Consultancy Services met earnings expectations and seemed to suggest that the market was not as bad as Infosys makes it out to be.

"Why the hell is TCS doing so well and not Infosys?" asked a former employee who claims to have had a sterling appraisal.

Top Management Unconvincing

The Infosys employee, who claims to have had a sterling appraisal, felt dejected when she got to know in April that employee salaries would stay at current levels because business prospects were not too good. After four years at Infosys, she left the company a few weeks ago to join a rival IT services provider on a 40% higher salary.

Until a few years ago, an Infosys badge was the ultimate possession for those looking to make a career in the software industry. Its founding in 1981 with Rs 10,000 raised by NR Narayana Murthy by selling his wife Sudha's jewellery is the stuff of legend, making the company synonymous with an India whose fortunes and self-confidence were on the rise. For decades, while the going was good, even drivers became millionaires with their stock options and variable salary payouts were rarely lower than 100%.

For Ashish (not his real name) from Jharkhand, the Infosys story persuaded him to study hard so that he could leave a rural backwater and fulfil his ambition and his parents' dream of finding a job at the Bangalore-headquartered company. After two years at the company and the frustration of watching Infosys lose ground to competition, he is convinced that he made the wrong choice. Infosys, for him, is nothing like the company of his imagination. He thinks it is tired, and the top management unconvincing about the direction in which the company is headed.

"Everyone around talks about leaving as soon they get a better offer," he said.

On the face of it, the 14.2% attrition rate at Infosys, which employs 1.5 lakh - equivalent to the population of towns such as Almora or Sivakasi, is not alarming. But more than 8,000 staff resigned in the three months to June, which is one-third more than in the previous quarter.

The Infosys top brass have said most of them are leaving to study, normal during this time of the year, but the danger signals are unmistakable.

While discontent among the rank and file is most acute, many in senior and middle management may be sticking around only because their options are limited and they don't know how green the grass is on the other side after years at Infosys.

For delivery managers, too, job openings at rival IT services companies are few and far between; it is ecommerce and software product companies that are recruiting the most.

Even the 20,000 promotions that Infosys has rolled out have caused heartburn. Because they come with an increase only in variable pay, those who have been promoted believe they will not get any extra cash because the company is not doing well.

A bright spot has been the business process outsourcing unit, which has outpaced the parent on almost every parameter. Most of the 23,000 staff at Infosys BPO will receive a salary increase, but the organisation does not seem keen to publicise the good news.

Swami Swaminathan, the chief executive of Infosys BPO, is of the view that employee reactions can be momentary, swaying from ecstasy to despondency, but the company's mission is a long-term one.

"The fact is that these are challenging times and test the character of an organisation. Leadership has to ensure that employees feel engaged," he said.

While employee loyalties may indeed be fickle, the fact is that Infosys' reputation as an employer of choice could be in jeopardy. Already, a Bengal-based engineering institute is thinking of bumping Infosys off the coveted 'Day 1' slots, where the best talent is on offer, because of persisting bad news from the company.

At the same there are others who, like Infosys, are willing to play the long game. At RV College of Engineering in Bangalore, Principal BS Satyanarayana believes that ups and downs are a part of everyone's life, even the lives of companies. "We like Infosys. We will not succumb to the numbers game," he said.