Internet Marketing Specialist, SEO

India’s second-largest information technology services provider, Infosys Technologies, has issued letters to its employees stating they could opt for a one-year sabbatical to engage themselves in philanthropic activities. They would continue to draw 50 per cent of their salary during the period. Infosys crossed the 100,000-employee mark in India in the quarter ended September 30, 2008.

 The company said that while the move may have coincided with the global financial turmoil and slowing growth rates of IT firms, it should be perceived as a pure voluntary act by employees who are prompted by altruistic motives and inspired by the example of its chairman and chief mentor, NR Narayana Murthy.

 The employees, an internal memo said, need to be on the company rolls for at least two consecutive years before they are eligible for the offer and a panel comprising senior members of the Infosys leadership team will decide each case. “This policy will promote volunteerism among employees and we believe that the value and benefits arising from it will have an impact on community, the employees and ultimately, the company,” it said.

 Sources said that the policy came into force only a few days ago and the company is working out the finer points like whether the employees will be given any salary or emolument during the sabbatical. However, it is understood that the company is planning to pay some amount of the salary, while the rest the employees can earn from the NGO they are working for.

 An Infosys spokesperson confirmed the development: “We introduced this policy almost two months ago, which allows employees to go on up to one year of sabbatical to engage in philanthropic activities. All employees have been communicated the policy internally.”

 When asked how much the employees will be paid during that time, the spokesperson said they will be given 50 per cent of the salary, while the other half will be given by the respective NGOs they work with.

 “It’s a part of Narayana Murthy’s desire to give back to society, which is driven by the fact that many employees quit their jobs to pursue philanthropic activities. This would give such employees an option to pursue their hobby while still continuing with the jobs, even if they will be paid a small amount by the company. The employees can go out with a cut in their salaries, even though the final details are being worked out by the company,” a source close to the development said.

 Infosys has a good deal of exposure to the sectors which have been worst hit by the current global economic meltdown such as banking and financial services, telecom and retail. In the last quarter, the company had announced that some of its clients in their sectors are coming back to re-negotiate. In a recent report, brokerage house CLSA had forecast that Infosys might miss its dollar revenue guidance for the third quarter, and may even post a sequential fall in the quarter.

 The CLSA report also acknowledged that the flow of IT deals from the BFSI segment has “worsened substantially” and that long-term deals are being offered on “very tough terms”, thus putting pricing under serious threat as customers play one vendor against the other.

SAN FRANCISCO: US District Court judge in New York ordered a newly hired Apple Inc executive to stop work immediately because he might be violatin
g an agreement with his former employer, IBM.

Federal District Judge Kenneth Karas in White Plains ordered that Mark Papermaster “immediately cease his employment with Apple Inc until further order of this court.”

Apple announced on Tuesday that Papermaster would lead the engineering teams making Apple’s highly successful iPods and iPhones and that he would report directly to Chief Executive Steve Jobs. On Friday it said he would cease work for now.

“We will comply with the court’s order but are confident that Mark Papermaster will be able to ultimately join Apple when the dust settles,” a spokesman said.

Karas said Papermaster could submit any objections to his order by Tuesday and he set another hearing for November 18.

Papermaster had worked for IBM for 25 years. IBM said in a court filing that, before Papermaster left, he agreed to avoid working for any competitor for a year.

Papermaster’s lawyers argued that forcing him “to ’sit out’ of the electronics industry for a year would be incredibly damaging to his career.”

They said that Apple was an “once-in-a-lifetime ‘dream job’” and that Papermaster would be unable to return to IBM, given the litigation.

Papermaster also argued that there were significant differences between the two companies because IBM makes big machines for big business and Apple makes little devices for consumers.

IBM disagreed.

“Electronic devices large and small are powered by the same type of intelligence, the microprocessor,” IBM argued.

While the focus of the study was to identify the top 50 emerging cities, it also listed the top global outsourcing cities.

The Top 8 Global Outsourcing Cities includes a few new members — Chennai (India), Hyderabad (India), Makati City (The Philippines) and Pune (India).

As expected, Indian cities dominate the list once again. Makati City, as part of the Philippines NCR (National Capital Region) holds its ground.

ECONOMICTIMES.COM

The Top 8 Global Outsourcing Cities includes as many as six Indian cities led by Bangalore, Chennai, Delhi National Capital Region, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Pune.

Dublin (Ireland) and Makati City (The Philippines) are the other two cities in the list, according to a study by CyberMedia’s Global Services and investment advisory firm Tholons.

India’s representation in the top 50 Emerging Global Outsourcing cities has grown to four, from last year’s three, with the addition of Jaipur to the list at No 31.

The other three cities in the list include Kolkata at No 6, Chandigarh at No 12 and Coimbatore at No 17.

Cebu, Shanghai & Beijing tops list of global outsourcing cities

Cebu City (The Philippines), Shanghai (China) and Beijing (China) lead the list of emerging global outsourcing cities.

The ‘Top 50 Emerging Global Outsourcing Cities’ 2008 list has nine entrants - Quezon City, Toronto, Rio de Janeiro, Mexico City, Jaipur, Singapore City, Chengdu, Guadalajara and Mandaluyong City.

Six Chinese cities part of 50 global outsourcing list

Six Chinese cities are a part of the top 50 emerging cities for global outsourcing list, compared to India’s four.

These are Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, Dalian, Guangzhou and Chengdu.

Of the top 50 cities, 19 are from Asia and 13 from Central and Eastern Europe. Besides tier-1 Asian cities, outsourcing centers are being set up in many tier-2 and tier-3 cities.

Choice of city important for setting up outsourcing centres

As per CyberMedia publication Global Services, the top entries from Asia are Cebu City, Shanghai, Beijing, Ho Chi Minh City, Kolkata and Shenzhen.

The top ranking entries from Central and Eastern Europe include Krakow (Poland), Prague (Czech Republic), and Budapest (Hungary).

Low cost main agenda for setting up outsourcing centres

To set up an outsourcing center the choice of the right city has become more important than the choice of the country, the study says.

Attributes of a city like available resources (quality and type of work force, cost, available infrastructure), and its long-term potential in fulfilling demand for specific services determine its attractiveness as an outsourcing centre.

While Bangalore, Krakow, Makati City and Shanghai are the established centers for finance and accounting, Cebu City, Colombo and Pune are the emerging centers of excellence for this function.

Similarly Shanghai, Dublin and Bangalore are currently the leading centers for research and development and Beijng, Chennai and Prague have been identified as the new emerging centers for R&D services in 2008.

San Antonio & Glasgow provide high-end functions at low cost

Interestingly, there is a trade-off between cost benefit and complexity of services offered by a city. In many cases, an offshore location with lower costs, also processes less complex services and vice-versa.

For instance, offshore cities such as St Petersburg, Shanghai, Bangalore, Makati City, Ho Chi Minh City and Delhi (National Capital Region) provide high-end, complex functions but not necessarily at a lower cost.

Similarly, it is possible to get less complex work done at onshore locations such as San Antonio and Glasgow at lower price.

By Harichandan Arakali

Oct. 10 (Bloomberg) — Infosys Technologies Ltd., India’s second-largest software-services provider, cut its full-year profit forecast because of a deteriorating economic outlook and abandoned its bid to acquire Axon Group Plc.

Earnings in the year ending March 31 will probably be $2.24 a share, missing the low end of the company’s July forecast of $2.32, Bangalore-based Infosys said in an e-mailed statement today. Net income in the quarter ended Sept. 30 rose 30 percent to 14.3 billion rupees ($292 million).

The deteriorating profit outlook prompted Infosys to walk away from plans to acquire U.K.-based Axon after its 407.1 million pound ($690 million) bid was trumped by HCL Technologies Ltd. Infosys and larger Indian rival Tata Consultancy Services Ltd. are under mounting pressure to reduce prices as the credit crisis spreads beyond financial firms and forces more customers to put orders on hold.

“Margins will get squeezed,” A. K. Sridhar, who heads the Singapore unit of UTI Asset Management Co., India’s oldest money manager, said in an interview yesterday. “There will be more people willing to work at lower salaries so for Indian companies, there could be pressure for them to reduce rates.”

Infosys shares fell 5.1 percent to 1,190 rupees, headed for their lowest close since September 2005, as of 10:15 a.m. local trading.

The revision in the forecast reflects “the current economic situation and the drastic depreciation of major global currencies against the U.S. dollar,” Chief Executive Officer S. Gopalakrishnan said in an e-mailed statement.

Scrapping Axon Bid

Credit Suisse Group analysts wrote in a report on Oct. 7 that Infosys may scrap its plans to buy Axon after HCL offered 650 pence a share, or 8.3 percent higher than Infosys’s bid.

“After careful consideration, the Board of Infosys has concluded that it will not increase the price of its original offer,” Infosys said. “The company is confident that its decision will have no material impact on its strategic plans.”

Axon, which specializes in advising clients on how to run business-management software, may be less appealing after SAP AG, the biggest maker of such programs, said this month it saw a “very sudden and unexpected drop” in business activity, the Credit Suisse analysts wrote.

Goldman Sachs Group Inc. this week cut its investment ratings on Tata Consultancy, Satyam Computer Services Ltd. and Wipro as its analysts turned “cautious” on the Indian technology-services industry from “neutral,” citing reduced earnings expectations because the financial turmoil.

Order Delays

Gopalakrishnan said in a Sept. 10 interview he saw delays in orders and customers seeking to renegotiate prices. Since then, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy, escalating a financial crisis that’s forced central banks worldwide to cut interest rates and wiped out more than $5 trillion of global stock markets in the past month.

The International Monetary Fund said this week the global economy is headed for a recession next year and that losses related to U.S. debt may bloat to $1.4 trillion.

Infosys maintains computer networks and runs call centers providing back-office services to clients including BT Group Plc and Citigroup Inc. Tata Consultancy and Wipro Ltd., the third- largest software services provider, will report their results on October 22.

To contact the reporters on this story: Harichandan Arakali in Bangalore at harakali@bloomberg.net.

Infosys Technologies posted a 10 per cent jump in net profit at Rs 1,432 crore (Rs 14.32 billion) for the second quarter of FY09 as against Rs 1,302 crore (Rs 13.02 billion) in previous quarter.

Its revenues went up by 11.6 per cent to Rs 5,418 crore (RS 54.18 billion) from Rs 4,854 crore (Rs 48.54 billion), (QoQ).

HYDERABAD: Satyam Computers, which has just started giving pink slips to its employees, could potentially downsize its workforce by a whopping 4,500 employees. This translates to a little less than 9% of the 51,000 employees that the company employs …

Original post by the times of India

At Share conference, IBM executive cites impending growth, energy issues for datacenter management

Virtualization, SOA, and cloud computing are keys to accommodating the anticipated growth of datacenters in an energy-conscious environment, an IBM official stressed Monday. 

In a keynote presentation and subsequent interview at the Share conference in San Jose, Calif., Helene Armitage, vice president of systems software development in the IBM systems and technology group, emphasized substantial growth projections for datacenters. She also noted concerns about whether the power grid can handle this growth. Industries such as medical imaging and financial services are experiencing rapid growth, Armitage said.

“Thirty percent of the world’s storage in the next two years is going to be these medical images,” she said. Meanwhile, there are 5 billion messages occurring in the financial trading realm each day with the number projected to grow to the 130 billion per day in the next two years, she said.

Adding to the situation, storage capacity in datacenters is doubling every 18 months.

Datacenters will be spending as much on energy as they do on hardware, said Armitage. Based on the current trajectory, 10 new power plants would be needed in the United States in the next few years to accommodate growth, she said.

[ For more tips on conserving energy in the datacenter, see "The three principles of datacenter energy efficiency." ]

A conference attendee said the presentation was on the mark in terms of global energy initiatives. “I was rather surprised in terms of some of the numbers that datacenters were using in terms of energy,” said the attendee, Mark Potter, vice president of corporate information security at Wachovia Small Business Capital.

IT users next year will spend $200 billion on systems such as interconnects, networking, SANs, fabrics, switches, and enterprise routers, up from $30 billion a few years ago, said Armitage. “All of this requires us to take a new approach,” she said.

Datacenters were not designed to handle current growth levels, she said. “I really think where we are headed is to create true architectures for our datacenters,” Armitage said.

She advocated virtualization coupled with SOA, citing IBM’s experience. Cloud computing also factors into IBM’s strategy.

“We’ve been virtualizing on the mainframe for 35 years. We’re just talking about bringing that out into all the other environments as well,” she said.

IBM has reduced downtime at Japan Airlines, for example, by using virtualization, said Armitage. Nationwide Insurance is on track to save more than $15 million during a three-year period with virtualization, she added. The company was moved from 250 individual Linux servers to two IBM z/9 mainframes. Volkswagen went from 76 individual Linux servers down to six, according to Armitage.

“Virtualization changes everything,” she said. But it does bring additional complexity, said Armitage.

“It’s not like there’s a silver bullet. The issue in implementing virtualization is doing the end-to-end architectural thinking around SOA,” she said. Virtualization can involve taking many small operations and consolidating them on a mainframe or taking small operations and making them work together as a single operation, sharing capabilities such as I/O and storage, Armitage said.

Cloud computing, in which user sites leverage the capacity of a third party’s computers, offers a way to acquire IT capacity on a pay-as-you-go basis, Armitage said. Benefits also include cost savings, resource scalability, and flexibility.

Armitage also cited energy savings redistributing of heat and cooling around the datacenter. This can save 20 percent in energy use, she said.

Also at the Share event, CA announced a plan to release a range of enhancements to its mainframe management software for the z/OS, z/VSE, and z/VM platforms. The products introduced include CA SymDump Batch r8, to bolster z/OS management; CA Spool r11.5, offering IPv6 support and remote printing support for z/OS; CA Datacom r11 SP4, for near-real-time replication of data for z/OS; and CA Dynam for z/VSE 7.1, for simplified z/VSE tape management.

Also unveiled were CA ACF2 r12 and CA Top Secret r12 SP2, for additional security attribute sharing and compliance reporting for z/OS.