India InfoTech

[saysenthil]

ST linked to Indian wafer fab bid

Europe's largest chipmaker STMicroelectronics has been linked to Hindustan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp. (HSMC) as being part of one of two consortia in discussions with the Indian government over a proposal to set up one or more wafer fabs in India.

The most recent initiative to stimulate the start of Indian chip manufacturing was launched by the Indian government nearly two years ago. One consortium, which includes IBM, Jaypee Group and Tower Semiconductor Ltd., is known to have been involved in the process. The Indian government has reportedly said that two projects are left in the running and STMicroelectronics (Geneva Switzerland) has been linked to HSMC in a report from Indian publication LiveMint referencing sources familiar with the tender process.

A decision from the Indian government was originally expected by the end of 2012 but that was later pushed back to the end of the first quarter of 2013.

HSMC was originally formed in about 2007 with a plan to create two wafer fabs in India. It signed a memorandum of understanding with Infineon Technologies AG (Munich, Germany) to license a 130-nm CMOS digital manufacturing process as well as processes for RF and embedded flash. The plan failed to materialize and HSMC has been mainly quiescent since then.

HSMC has has offices in San Jose, Calif., and Delhi, India. It is led by chairman and CEO Devendra Verma, who has experience as a technology executive and venture capitalist. ST could be a source of manufacturing process technology for a newly-created Indian enterprise. This is an activity it has engaged in with chipmakers in Russia.

HSMC declined to comment on whether it was involved with ST in plans to create an Indian wafer fab. ST declined to comment on whether it was involved with HSMC in such plans.

[saysenthil]

TCS wins $43 million contract from Norway Post

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) and global outsourcing services firm Capgemini have been awarded contracts worth $43 million (about Rs. 233 crore) each from Norway Post to operate and manage its applications.

The 6-year deal encompasses delivery of a wide range of services across Norway Post’s core portfolio of 55 applications. It delivers over 36 million packages and 2.2 billion letters annually.

“Apart from being selected to deliver application services across core postal value chains, TCS has also been entrusted to coordinate and drive the overall transition and transformation programme across multiple vendors,” TCS said in a release.

Through this initiative, Norway Post is implementing a structured multi-sourcing model to drive efficiency and support, and integrate business strategy, it added.

Norway Post in a statement said it has chosen Capgemini and TCS to operate and manage most of its applications.

“The estimated value to each of the suppliers Capgemini and TCS during the contract period is around 250 million Norwegian Krone (KOR),” it added.

Capgemini has 103 Nordic customers and around 4,500 employees in the Nordic region.

TCS’s Nordic operations (an operating area cutting across Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark and Iceland) comprise over 5,000 professionals and offers services to leading Nordic companies such as Nokia, Ericsson, TDC, ABB, Telenor, NETS and SAS.

[Naresh]

.

INDIA : Electronics and Information Technology : Annual Report 2012-13

Export revenues (excluding hardware) are estimated to gross USD 75.8 billion in FY2013

Cheers

[saysenthil]

Tech Mahindra acquires Sweden-based lab

IT and telecom solutions provider Tech Mahindra has acquired a Sweden-based Type Approval Lab for undisclosed amount which will help it strengthen lab presence in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) regions.

The lab was part of Sony Mobile Communication’s internal test function and now will help Tech Mahindra establish its first European test lab with multi-million dollar infrastructure, Tech Mahindra said in a release on Wednesday.

The company, however, did not disclose financial details.

This acquisition will prove to be a key milestone for the European expansion plan and reinforces further company’s commitment to be a key player in this space, the release said.

This is the third acquisition the IT firm has made in the last eight months.

The company acquired 100 per cent stake in telecom BPO player Hutchison Global Services for $87 million (about Rs 470 crore) in the first week of September 2012. Three weeks later, the company said that it had picked up 51 per cent stake in Bharti Enterprises’ promoted Comviva Technologies.

“The Lund facility will now provide us a strategic Lab presence for EMEA region and for our customers looking to launch their products in EU and rest of the world,” the Chief Technical Officer of CanvasM Technology, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tech Mahindra, Sirisha Voruganti said, adding that, “We look forward to the exciting test engineering competencies and consulting abilities the lab resources will bring to Tech Mahindra’s customers.”

This acquisition is in line with Tech Mahindra’s plans to lead the test space and the increased focus on Nordics region, it said.

The company along with CanvasM Technology has labs in India and the US certifying more than 800 plus devices, Tech Mahindra said.

[DeadManWalking]

Tata Tech to buy U.S. firm Cambric Corporation

Tata Technologies (TTL) has signed definitive agreements to acquire U.S.-based Cambric Corporation, an engineering services company, for $32.5 million (around Rs.177 crore).
Tata Technologies provides engineering services and manufacturing enterprise IT. “The acquisition will strengthen Tata Technologies’ global footprint and domain capabilities to provide high-end engineering services to a diverse set of existing and new clients, especially in Europe,” Patrick McGoldrick, Managing Director and CEO, Tata Technologies, told a press conference.
He said the acquisition would be completed in the next few weeks. “We have undergone the formal process for a cultural fit,” he said.
Tata Technologies focuses on the manufacturing industry. It serves clients in 25 countries through six global delivery centres in Detroit (U.S.), Coventry (U.K.), Stuttgart (Germany), Bangkok (Thailand) and Pune and Bangalore.
The largest shareholder in TTL is Tata Motors with 71 per cent of equity followed by Tata Capital 12 per cent and employees and directors 12 per cent. International Tata Group entities hold 5 per cent.
Cambric has a significant presence in Eastern Europe with three development centres in Romania. Its customers include leading global players in heavy machinery, agricultural, off-highway and automotive companies. It had revenues of $25 million in 2012 with majority revenues from construction and heavy equipment sector. The acquisition will also give Cambric access to the Asia Pacific region. Mr. McGoldrick said TTL at present had around 6,200 employees and Cambric around 450. “We have an ambitious plan to increase our headcount to 20,000 people by 2017,’’ he said, adding “now we will have to see how best to scale up in Romania”.

[DeadManWalking]

Total connectivity

Soon enough the world will just be a click away anywhere in Technopark. Park authorities have unveiled plans for an ‘Open i space and data farm’ in a bid to ensure Wi-Fi connectivity across the entire campus, apart from setting up a high speed data centre. For the uninitiated, Wi-Fi is a networking technology that allows electronic devices such as laptops, tablets, smart phones and digital cameras to exchange data wirelessly over a computer network. “The Wi-Fi plan has been in the works for a while now, in continuation of our overall plan to ensure Technopark retains its status as the premier IT destination and also in a bid to make certain Technopark maintain its standing as the greenest IT park in the country,” says M. Vasudevan, Senior Manager, Business Development at Technopark. “At present Wi-Fi is available only within individual companies [most companies on campus do have Wi-Fi connectivity, but it is only accessible to their employees]. We plan to set up 8GB connectivity outside the four walls of the companies, especially in common areas such as food courts, Park Centre, the guest house, Technopark club house… It does not require much effort on our part and hopefully it should be up and running within the next six months, may be even less,” adds Vasudevan. The techies themselves seem quite thrilled at the prospect. Nadam R. Bhadran, a network engineer with E-Team Informatica at Technopark says: “I think it’s high time for WiFi connectivity on campus. Actually, I feel that it should have been done years ago! Having Wi-Fi in an area like the food court, for example, will be very helpful. It means that if we have to deal with an urgent task, we don’t need to chuck our food and rush back to our office computers as we usually do now. With our laptops or smart phones we can simply sit wherever and finish off the work.” Techie Vineesh P., who works at IBS, agrees and adds: “Who will not want to have unlimited access to Wi-Fi? I think it will be especially beneficial to our clients who come from across the world to Technopark, most of who expect – and demand – high-speed Wi-Fi connectivity wherever they go. Right now we can only give them access to our office networks and that too on a restricted basis. Most of them would have 2G and 3G smart phones and would be connected to the net. However, working with Wi-Fi is any day better than working with a limited GPRS connection. Of course, you don’t have to pay the roaming bills too.”
As thrilled as they are about having Wi-Fi on campus, the techies are also a bit concerned about the feasibility of such a project considering the vast area that it has to cover and the fact that there are 40,000-plus potential users on campus. “It would have to have an exceptionally huge bandwidth,” says Nadam, a tad sceptically. They say that there could also be potential threats to security with unrestricted access to Wi-Fi.
“With such open connections where hundreds of people can connect on at the same time, it’s very difficult to keep track of who is viewing adult content, doing unauthorised downloads, checking out pirate software sites, and so on. It can open the door to potential hackers too,” says Rajesh G., a system administrator at Toonz, who has to monitor the company’s in-house network as a part of his daily routine.
Then they say there’s also the question of it being a productivity nightmare from a human resources perspective. “As of now social networking sites are not accessible on most office computers to ensure maximum productivity. I am sure everyone will utilise the Wi-Fi to log on to the same!” says Vineesh. Vasudevan, however, says that there is no cause for undue worry. “We will have mechanisms in place to avoid such issues. We will have active auditing, monitoring and filtering systems in place with firewalls, security codes and the like. Also we plan to restrict access to the network with passwords,” he explains. Guess it’s time to get clicking.

[DeadManWalking]

India’s requests for Web censorship increase

The Indian government nearly doubled its requests to Google for removal of content in the second half of 2012 as compared to the first six months, the seventh transparency report from the Internet giant has noted.
The report, published on April 25, noted that governments around the world are seeking censorship on the Web more than ever before. Between July and December 2012, Google had received more than 2,285 government requests to delete 24,149 pieces of information. In the first half of 2012, Google received 1,811 requests to remove 18,070 pieces of information.
The number of requests in the second half of 2012 went up by over 90 per cent compared to the first half of the year.
The Indian government was among 20 countries to request for the removal of the controversial film Innocence of Muslims from YouTube. (The video though listed is not available for streaming in India).
In its bi-annual report, Google said that during the “period of disturbance in the North-East region” last year, it received five requests from the Computer Emergency Response Team to remove content from Google+, a Blogger post, 64 YouTube videos, and 1,759 comments associated with some YouTube videos, that cited laws covering disruption of public order and ethnic offence laws.
“In response, Google removed a video for violating YouTube Community guidelines, and restricted 47 YouTube videos from local view, in addition to removing 12 YouTube comments and disabling local access to three Blogger blog posts that violated local laws,” the report said.
Google did not comply with all the requests it received. The report noted: “We received a request from a city Cyber Crime Investigation Cell to remove current depictions of disputed borders of Jammu and Kashmir in five Google Maps domains other than maps.google.co.in. We did not change our depiction of the borders in response to this request.”
The report noted that there was a spike in requests from the Brazilian and the Russian governments. In Brazil, the requests coincided with the municipal elections where the government noted that several content had to be removed because they were violating the electoral code.
In Russia, the requests for removal of content followed the enactment of a new Internet blacklist law that allowed authorities to take down content without trial.
The latest edition of the transparency report — available at www.google.com/transparencyreport — also seeks to better classify the requests for removal of data with the introduction of new and pertinent categories like “bullying”, “hate speech” and “geographic dispute”.

[DeadManWalking]

Nokia, Harvard's India alumni team up to create apps

BANGALORE: Nokia India, in collaboration with AppCampus of Finland, and the members of Harvard Business School (HBS) Alumni Angels India, has launched an initiative called Appcelerate-India that seeks to boost mobile app development on the Nokia Lumia and Windows platforms.
AppCampus, an accelerator that supports next generation mobile development in Finland, and HBS Alumni Angels will invest $500,000 in this initiative to provide grants, seed funding, mentoring and incubation resources to discover disruptive applications.


Speaking at a press conference here, Gerard Rego, director of developer experience in Nokia India, said the aim was to support Indian app developers to drive path-breaking innovation on Nokia's platform. "We believe this will open up countless opportunities to shape the mobile app ecosystem here," he said.
Apps are what drive smartphone sales, and Nokia is the weakest in that space now. As of February, there were 130,000 apps on Windows 8, the platform Nokia uses for its smartphones. On the other hand, Apple and Android had about 700,000 apps each in October last year. Clearly, Nokia has a lot of catching up to do.
Ravi Gururaj, co-founder of HBS Alumni Angels India, said the Appcelerate idea was to provide small companies the four essential C's to accelerate business -- cash, coaching, customers and capital. Pekka Sivonen, head of App-Campus, said such collaboration, tailored for the Indian market, helped to reach developers and start-ups locally and "helped them evolve into the next Big Thing."

[DeadManWalking]

Delhi high court to government: Explain how minors open website accounts

NEW DELHI: How do minors in India access social networking sites and are allowed opening an account even though Indian laws don't permit it? The Delhi high court on Thursday posed this query at the central government and gave it 10 days to file an affidavit.
The HC also questioned two US-based entities — Facebook Inc and Google Inc — asking them also to respond. It was hearing a plea by former BJP ideologue K N Govindacharya seeking among others, strict guidelines to curb exposure of minors to online sexual predators.

It also seeks an order for recovery of taxes from the websites on their income from operations in India.
A bench of Justices B D Ahmed and Vibhu Bakhru asked Sumeet Pushkarna, the counsel for the Centre, to make the government's stand clear on the issue through an affidavit within 10 days and posted the matter for May 13.
"How can children below 18 years have an agreement with any of the social network sites, including Facebook? The Union of India is directed to file an affidavit on the issue within 10 days," the bench said. It added that "Both Facebook Inc and Google Inc are US-based entities and are hereby impleaded as respondents. Notices should be issued to the newly added parties."
The bench passed the order after hearing the argument of Govindacharya's counsel Veerag Gupta that minors are getting into an agreement with the social networking sites to open an account which is against the Indian Majority Act, the Indian Contract Act and also the Information and Technology Act.
Due to non-verification of users, more than eight crore Facebook users across the world were found to be "fake", which the website admitted before the US authority, Gupta told the HC blaming the Centre for failing to take any action against the foreign companies which have extensive Indian operations.
Govindacharya, at present a patron of Rashtriya Swabhimaan Aandolan, filed public interest litigation (PIL), seeking directions to Centre and the two software giants to "ensure proper accounting compliances as per RBI guidelines".
"Facebook gross revenue for previous year was $37 billion approximately but they are not paying due taxes to Indian government," the petition argued seeking a direction to ensure safety of the data of 50 million Indian users, which was transferred "to the USA and is being used for commercial gains in violation of the right to privacy".
The PIL urges the HC to "Issue a writ of Mandamus ...to ensure verification of all existing users and future new members of social networking websites with instructions not to do agreements with children below 18 years."
Arguing that lack of monitoring makes minors vulnerable the PIL further seeks creation of a national register of persons indulging in sexual offences and heinous crimes and stopping such persons from joining social networking websites.
The petition, which listed the alleged violations of various terms by the websites, also sought a direction to the Centre to ensure that government officers "do not use social networking websites through government computers" as they may pose threat to sensitive data and national computer network.

"As per telecommunication minister's statement in Parliament, the government lost $4 billion every year due to cyber crimes and approximately 90 million government websites were hacked in last three years," it pointed out.

[DeadManWalking]

Infosys partners with IPsoft to automate IT services

BANGALORE: In a move that signals a significant step towards automation in the IT services outsourcing business, Infosys has struck a partnership with IPsoft, the New York-based company founded by Indian American Chetan Dube that provides tools that free engineers from mundane, repetitive tasks.The most fascinating and influential aspect of IPsoft's technology is that it includes the element of machine learning -- or artificial intelligence as some call it -- so that companies don't have to employ an army of people to write the complicated scripts that traditional automation tools require. The system learns from doing, thus making the process of automation itself automated.These elements have helped build 220 customers for IPsoft worldwide, including Cisco, Canon, Pepsico, British Telecom, Gap, ING, Autodesk, and Pfizer.Infosys will use the technology to automate parts of its infrastructure management and network management services - the areas that IPsoft's platform is particularly strong in. It will also work with IPsoft to adapt the technology to application maintenance and business process outsourcing services, and over time, look at adapting it to automate even parts of its application development business."What robotics did for the auto assembly line, we are now doing for the IT engineering line," said Chandrashekar Kakal, global head of Infosys's business IT services, the segment that constituted 63% of the company's $7.4 billion revenues last year. He said customers to whom the technology had been demonstrated were excited. Kakal will establish a centre of excellence at Infosys's Mysore campus to do R&D, establish proofs of concepts and train engineers on IPsoft's platform. Initially, some 200 employees will be trained and that number could go up to 4,000 before long.Speaking to TOI on the phone from New York, Chetan Dube too referred to the automotive example and said, "History repeats itself." He said the IT industry was on the precipice of a transformation unlike any before. He said complexities in networks and applications had grown so much that traditional systems were unable to handle them. "Chief information officers are under increasing pressure from business units to ensure availability of IT resources, and ensure consistency of business outcomes, without any variance. Human processes have variance built into their DNA. Our automated systems ensure absolute consistency, and are self-healing and self-governing," he said.Dube grew up in Delhi, did an electrical engineering degree from IIT-Delhi in 1989, and then moved to the US. He was an assistant professor in mathematics at New York University before he founded IPsoft in 1998. Dube called Infosys an "ideal partner" because they shared the same vision. He said IPsoft was in talks with some of the other leading Indian IT companies for similar partnerships but declined to name them. However, indications are that the others include Wipro and Cognizant.Automation possibilities are very high -- upto 80-90% -- in what are called Level 0 and Level 1 tasks, things like password resets, database failures. If a database goes down because it's full, the manual process would involve a human being expanding the capacity or purging some data to create space. IPsoft's platform will automatically do these tasks; it will also figure out why the failure happened, and prevent future failures by, say, automatically purging data that it understands to be least relevant.Higher level tasks can also be automated, but to lesser degrees. Dube said his platform reduced the average time to resolution of problems by 60%. For Infosys, such automation fits well into its new vision to grow revenues without adding employees to the same degree. This is necessary for it to sustain its high margin strategy, something it regards critical for long-term sustainability. For the industry, revenues have been till now directly correlated with the number of people employed, and Infosys, which already has over 1.56 lakh employees, feels it would be difficult to keep expanding this number for much longer, without running into an HR and talent management nightmare.But that's not the only reason why IT outsourcing companies may need partnerships with the likes of IPsoft. Offshoring of IT to countries like India began because Indian engineers were substantially cheaper than engineers in developed markets. Now, the automated systems are proving to be cheaper than Indian engineers. Writing about automation companies like IPsoft and Blue Prism, a British startup, The Economist magazine in January reported (quoting a study by research firm HfS - Horses for Sources) that Blue Prism's robots cost at most $15,000 a year, compared to an offshore IT worker who costs $30,000 and an onshore one who costs $80,000.The magazine then quotes HfS to say, "One telecoms company replaced 45 offshore employees, costing a total of $1.35m a year, with ten of Blue Prism's software robots, costing $100,000. The telecoms firm then spent its savings of $1.25m on hiring 12 new people to do more innovative work locally at its headquarters."

[DeadManWalking]

Tech freshers' pay caught in 4-year time warp

India's $108-billion IT industry is among the country's largest organised private sector employers, but the bottom of the sector's pyramid appears to have little to cheer about. While the overall wage hike in the IT sector has dropped to single digits of late, the salaries of freshers, who are typically engineering graduates and form the largest chunk of recruits, has remained stagnant in the past three to four years. Experts say this trend is likely to prolong as firms navigate a difficult business environment.

Staffing companies point out that in the current market, on average, a fresher in the software services industry draws a salary in the range of R2.75-3.5 lakh per annum when compared to R2.75-3.3 lakh offered during 2008-09. Thanks to increasing margin pressure, demand-supply imbalance, declining business volumes and rising training costs, pay packages at the entry level have not seen an upward swing in the recent past. This is at a time when prices in the country have grown by more than 8% in each of these years.

TV Mohandas Pai, chairman, Manipal Global Education and former director at Infosys, opined that the freshers' salary is likely to remain at the same level for some more years due to the demand-supply mismatch. "The hiring numbers by IT companies has come down due to their slowing growth but the number of graduating engineers has been increasing," he said.

The IT industry absorbs around 250,000 engineering graduates every year but the annual output is around 600,000 students, giving them lesser bargaining power in a market-driven economy.

The sector employs around three million people with close to 60% in the fresher category or well below two years of experience.

"Since the economic downturn in 2008, business cycles globally have been volatile and IT companies are still unable to get a clear visibility into the future trend. There is pressure on their top and bottom line growth. Hence, IT organisations are taking a cautious approach on salary hikes across levels. Also, entry-level talent is much commoditised and is mostly a volume-based approach. Hence, people from this segment have not been able to negotiate a premium," said E Balaji, MD and CEO at HR consultancy Randstad India, adding that companies are looking at utilising their bench strength and just-in-time hiring, which is likely to keep freshers' salaries at current levels.

[DeadManWalking]

Moving from under Microsoft’s cloud

Microsoft Office 365 is nothing like any previous Microsoft product. Office 365 is a leap into the cloud by the company that has been better known for its products that brought office work processes to personal computers. Starting June, students in engineering colleges across the country will find themselves logging on to this product — a free offering from Microsoft — courtesy an order from the All-India Council for Technical Education (AICTE) that has drawn flak from advocates of software freedom. This writer found that Office 365 runs seamlessly on web browsers running on the Windows, Mac and Linux-based operating systems. Microsoft’s bundled package of infrastructure, storage and software in Office 365 appears to be well done. However, Office 365’s emulation of services offered by Internet search giant Google indicate a desperate attempt to stay relevant in the age of the cloud. Google has been running its own online office suite of spreadsheets, documents and slideshows — Google Docs — since 2007.
What does it offer?

Microsoft Office 365 is an extension of SkyDrive, in which Microsoft offered free storage of about 7GB for registered users. SkyDrive integrated into Office 365 has a close semblance to Google Drive, which is accessible to anyone with a Google account.
The web applications for Office suite and mail access uses Microsoft’s online mail server Exchange Online, which is configured with Microsoft’s mail client, Outlook. This is obviously an attempt by Microsoft to gain ground vis-à-vis Google, which is the widely acknowledged past-master in this field. Office 365 also has even an intranet-sharing platform, Newsfeed, with an appearance that closely resembles Google Plus.
The difference is in how users get to use these services. Google allows users to register as an individual and access these services on a ‘freemium’ basis — an account with an initial capacity is free, for more capacity, users need to pay. Meanwhile, Microsoft’s package is available on a freemium basis only for a ‘beginner’s education plan’. The ‘A2’ education plan, which offers storage, mail, intranet sites and a web-based office suite, come at zero cost only for registered educational institutions.
The recent controversy about the AICTE offering about 7.5 million Office 365 accounts in Indian technical education institutions is based on the A2 plan, which Microsoft is offering free of cost. But then, what is the catch?
The catch?

While Google Drive allows users to upload, edit and download documents in both proprietary and open formats, Microsoft Office 365 allows users to upload and edit proprietary and open formats, but only allows the option of downloading the files in Microsoft’s proprietary formats — .docx for documents, .pptx for slideshows and .xlsx for spreadsheets.
In the case of the AICTE-Microsoft deal, when 7.5 million users are given an option to use a service that allows users to work online on Office 365 and to save their work only in a proprietary format for offline use, it is presumed that the offline tools to be used are Microsoft’s Office suite, which come with an annual license fee of Rs. 4,200 for the home edition.
It is obvious that the proprietary formats from Microsoft Office cannot be edited using Free software office suites such as Libre Office, without losing some formatting at the least. Also, while Office 365 runs on web browsers operating on non-Windows operating systems such as Ubuntu, offline usage would require the use of the Windows platform.
More than just mail

The pressing need for Indian institutions is not mail and cloud storage access, but to implement online college management systems and tools to enable online learning.
One such project, cited worldwide as an example of successful implementation of a school management system, is Sampoorna.
About 15,000 schools, 7 million students and three lakh teachers in Kerala are part of the Sampoorna school management network, which is powered by Free and Open Source software, Fedena. “Cumbersome processes such as preparation of transfer certificates, copying of admission registers, generating reports related to students, parents, teachers and non-teaching staff, preparation of scholarship lists, progress reports, examination databases, promotion list and timetable-preparation have all been made easy using this software,” claims the page on the Fedena website.
Apart from using a tool like Fedena for institution management, there are many other cloud-based services that can be offered using Free and Open Source software, to improve the use of information technology in teaching and learning.
Modular Object Oriented Learning Environment or MOODLE is a learning management system that is Free software, and can help institutions implement online courses, conduct online quizzes, and provide forums for students to discuss and share ideas.
In India, many institutions, including many in Bangalore, have implemented MOODLE-based cloud solutions, which has resulted in the reduction of paper work. It has also enabled institutions to implement better usage of IT tools in their pedagogy.
Apparently, the AICTE failed to take this broader view when settling for Office 365 as its chosen platform for use in Indian institutions.
To be fair, Indian free software activists too have jumped the gun while assessing Microsoft Office 365. Some of their comments have been way over the top; AICTE, rather than Microsoft, ought to have been the object of their ire.

[karkal]

IT slowdown & consumption: Fewer jobs and smaller pay hikes force techies to cut back spends

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/...w/19959128.cms

[cncity]

BANGALORE: Pune has surpassed Bangalore as a hub for high-end engineering design and product development work done out of MNC firms' R&D outposts.

Some 12% of product teams based in Pune are doing highvalue product development work compared to 8% in Bangalore , said IT advisory firm Zinnov in its Maturity Benchamarking Study that surveyed 220 product teams across 30 MNC R&D firms in the country.

Product teams based out of Pune no longer play second fiddle to their global teams, supporting them with coding, testing and quality assurance. They have moved up the maturity curve managing the product pipeline, customer interface and channel partnerships.

This has resulted in greater mindshare at the headquarters and hence, they are able to drive high-value work from India. With over 350 MNC R&D centres, Bangalore remains a hotbed of activity in the country . But Pune has emerged as an attractive destination for product development leveraging on its skilled workforce in executing product design and engineering capabilities.

"R&D centres set up in the last 3-5 years have brought products at higher maturity as they see India as a destination for core product development. Bangalore had a headstart in engineering support while Pune has leveraged on its talent pool to recalibrate its strengths towards product capabilities early on," said Preeti Anand, engagement manager in Zinnov . Currently, Pune has over 110 MNC R&D centres employing 24,000 people.

Shantanu Ghosh, MD of Indian product operations in software security firm Symantec, said Pune had the positives of Bangalore in terms of the ecosystems and talent pool. "But there is a shift in the mindset to component ownership rather than offering support R&D services ," he added.

Take medical devices manufacturer Varian Medical Systems for instance. It entered India through the acquisition of Pune-based Cedera in 2007, to initially provide customer support to its global centres in Palo Alto, Helsinki and Switzerland . It later went on do complex work like asset tracking for software application and remote deployment of software for managing cancer clinics, radiotherapy centers, and medical oncology practices. It also provides tubes and digital detectors for X-ray imaging used in medical, scientific, and industrial applications. "Each R&D team has a mission statement and value proposition in areas like business intelligence , technology and infrastructure connectivity," said Niraj Kumar, engineering manager in Varian.
In the recent past, a lot of companies have set up their R&D centres in Pune. Nasdaq-listed product company PTC's R&D centre in Pune contributes to its core product development . Software firm Pitney Bowes opened a second R&D centre in the country in Pune to do work on its digital mailbox solution Volly. Global manufacturing & technology company Emerson set up its export engineering center in the city for software design. Other firms like Allscripts, Faurecia, Tomtom , Fiat and Fairchild Semiconductor too have flocked to the city recently.

http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/t...w/19982809.cms