Chennai: Bangalore-based MindTree, an IT solution company, is planning to invest around $20.5 million (Rs 102 crore) towards capital expenditure this year in 2009-10. The company is also planning to set up a new facility in Bhubaneswar. Speaking to Business Standard at the Emerge Out Conclave 2008, organised by NASSCOM in Chennai on Wednesday Krishnakumar Natarajan, managing director and chief executive officer, MindTree said the proposed investment of $20.5 million is up from $11.5 million last year. The investment will be towards creating additional facilities in Chennai and Bangalore.

At Chennai, the company is setting up a facility to accommodate 3000 people at Mahindra City which will focus on software development. Similarly the company has acquired 20 acre of land in Bhubaneswar for setting up a software testing and product development facility. Investment on the new facility is in the drawing stage, he added.

Natarajan said all these facilities will be to address future requirements, so it will not accommodate all the 3000 immediately. “It’s all depend on how business is going to pick up and when the economy bounce back.”

In 2009-10, the company is planning to recruit 250 people from the campus. Currently it employs 7860 people across the globe.

For the year-ending 2009, MindTree’s consolidated revenue rose 46.1 percent to $269.1 million while net profit fell 55.5 percent to $11.4 million, it said in a statement.

For the fiscal 2009-10 the company had set a target to increase the revenue to $290-300 million (around Rs 1,450 crore to Rs 1,500 crore) and net profit to $38-39 million (Rs 190 crore to Rs 195 crore).

The company is looking at verticals including energy and independent testing in infrastructure, which would lead the growth, said Natarajan.

Source:Business Standard

NEW DELHI: Indian tech majors Infosys Technologies and Wipro are set to enter the booming domestic back-office service market, multiplying by more than one-third every year, and join a tech revolution happening in rural India.

Infosys BPO, the $316-million back-office service arm of Infosys, plans to tie up with service providers with shops in rural areas and small towns for its domestic operations, company officials said. The revenue-share model will see Infosys getting the customers and the rural operators doing the service. The $395-million Wipro BPO too will enter the domestic market soon. It already provides technology and other supports to a few rural service providers and may also explore service delivery tieups with them, company officials said.

So far, both the firms have been servicing only global clients. But, with global demand falling (Nasscom revised the growth to around 16% a year from around 25% earlier) due to the downturn in the US and other western economies, the domestic market, estimated at $1.6 billion and growing at an annual compounded rate of 38%, has gained a momentum.

Now going to remote, rural areas could be the next big shift to offer everything from native language capabilities to data entry type services.

The idea is the same as moving jobs from the US to India – to cash in on cheaper talent and office space. Amitabh Chaudhry, CEO and MD of Infosys BPO, says, “Tying up with rural service providers will keep our gross margins from domestic business similar to those from international business (22-24%).’’

The average billing rate for domestic clients is just $3-4 per hour for every employee, compared with $8-12 offered by global clients. This makes offering services to domestic clients from metros and big cities almost unviable.

Hence the move to rural areas that are some 60% cheaper. For instance, in a tier 1 city, a fresher gets about Rs 8,000, while in a tier III city it is around Rs 3,500, and even less in villages.

At present there are about a dozen rural BPO players including RuralShores, HOV Services, Sai BPO and DesiCrew in India, accounting for just a fraction of the domestic industry.

Tie-ups with the likes of Infosys and Wipro will help these small startups attract big clients in mobile phone and banking industries that are making major inroads into rural markets.

“We are talking to some big companies for partnerships,” says Murali Vullaganti, CEO of RuralShores, a 12-month-old startup that gets technical support from Wipro.

“It makes sense for rural BPOs to look at tieups as they may not be able to bag large contracts on their own,” says Chaudhry. “Besides revenue share, we will also train people in villages and tier II, III towns,” he adds.

These centres do routine tasks like data entry, processing of utility bills, native language help desk and e-mail response, says Avinash Vashistha, CEO of Bangalore-based advisory firm Tholons. They are, however, not expected to scale up dramatically. That’s because, while the manpower is cheap its availability is extremely limited. There are other limitations like lack of skilled manpower, poor broadband connectivity and frequent power blackouts.Says Ashutosh Vaidya, senior VP and head of Wipro BPO, “Rural areas will be good for some niche tasks and work well as a hub-and-spoke model, with tier II and III cities also playing a big role in the domestic space.”

Ananda Mukerji, MD and CEO of Firstsource Solutions, which services both international and domestic clients, agrees it makes sense to have a distributed capability to access talent and cut costs. “We are also looking at leveraging rural areas or very small towns for delivering services,” he adds. Firstsource has about 10,000 of its 22,000 people serving the domestic market.

RuralShores – which has a 160-people center in Bagepalli village, three hours from Bangalore, and another one at Ratnagiri in Vellore district of Tamil Nadu – is planning to open 500 village centres across the country over the next seven years, each with 20-30 seats.

Infosys BPO, which has 100 people for domestic business, will ramp up the number to 500 in the next six months, largely through tie-ups with rural players, Mr Chaudhry said.

He refused to discuss the revenue-sharing model or identify any firm Infosys was in talks with, but said a couple of village-based players around Bhubaneshwar and Udaipur were likely partners. While Infosys BPO, which has already won a contract from the Karnataka income tax department and another state government project, is chasing mostly state-run companies, Wipro BPO is eyeing business from top 100 customers in India. So as the business spreads to the smaller cities and villages, your call to fix the desktop or buy a new mobile phone plan may well be answered from a village back office.

Source : Economic  Times

IT firm Wipro Ltd today reported 21.26 per cent growth in consolidated net profit at Rs 1,217.4 crore for the third quarter ended December 31, 2009.

Total income, as per Indian accounting norms, rose to Rs 7,055.8 crore during the December quarter of FY’10 from Rs 6,773 crore in the same period previous fiscal, Wipro said in a filing to the Bombay Stock Exchange.

“We reported another strong quarter driven by significant uptick in volumes. We have maintained margins despite a decrease in our rate realisation and a strong appreciation of the rupee,” Wipro Executive Director and Chief Financial Officer Suresh Senapaty said.

The company’s IT services business added 31 new clients during the quarter. At the end of December, the IT business increased its headcount by 4,855, taking the total employee strength to 1,02,746.

“We have seen a positive demand environment which has driven broad-based sequential growth across all our verticals, service lines and geographies. In 2010, we expect IT budgets to be flat to marginally positive,” Wipro Chairman Azim Premji said.

During the quarter, the IT Services business reported revenues of Rs 5,164 crore, a year on year growth of 2 per cent. IT Services business accounted for 74 per cent of the revenue.

Source : Press Trust of India

New Delhi: India’s largest back-office firm Genpact on Wednesday announced the acquisition of US-based analytics and data management services provider Symphony Marketing Solutions (SMS), for an undisclosed amount.

Apart from expertise in data integration, modelling and consulting, the acquisition will see transfer of 1,200 SMS employees spread across centres in India and the US to Genpact’s payrolls. Currently, the Indian firm employs more than 37,000 people globally. Genpact shares rose 1.2% on Nasdaq, at 9.20 pm IST, post-announcement.

“SMS’ expertise across sectors will not only allow us to offer a broader range of services ranging from finance and accounting, procurement and supply chain to data management and advanced analytics solutions, but will also enhance smart enterprise processes in these verticals by leveraging strong insights,” Genpact chief executive Pramod Bhasin said.

SMS is a provider of analytics and data management services with domain expertise in the retail, pharmaceutical and consumer packaged industries. It is part of the India-based Software Technology Group of companies.

An industry expert close to the deal said that SMS will prove to be beneficial for Genpact as it comes with long term assured business from customers such as IRI.

US-based Information Resources Inc (IRI) has executed an eight-year contract, under which SMS will provide end-to-end data management and analytics services to the former. IRI is a provider of enterprise market information solutions and services and a strategic client of SMS.

In order to increase the proportion of long-term, predictable business, back office firms such as Genpact and EXL have been trying to acquire companies that bring assured revenues.

Genpact’s rival EXL had acquired a analytics firm, Inductis, last November. “However, the EXL deal did not prove to be too beneficial, as the business was mostly project based,” said an industry tracker familiar with these transactions. Both Genpact and EXL share Oak Hill as a common investor.

“We realised the need to have critical mass in terms of size, scale and client relationships to significantly accelerate growth and enable IRI and other clients to offer more value to their end-customers,” STG chairman Romesh Wadhwani said.

The combination of SMS’ domain expertise and capabilities in several verticals and Genpact’s scale and breadth of services and global delivery footprint creates a compelling value proposition, he added.

Recently Genpact was in news for having initiated talks with BPO firm Intelenet Global Services for a possible buyout. Genpact also acquired US’ largest drugstore Walgreen’s accounting back office in Danville as part of a 10-year outsourcing contract.

Source : The Economic Times

Indian mobile carrier Reliance Communications is considering a merger with South Africa’s MTN or roping in a strategic foreign investor to raise funds, the Economic Times reported on Thursday.

The No. 2 Indian mobile operator is ready to sell a stake in the company to raise funds to finance its foray into 3G mobile and wireless broadband access, the newspaper said, citing a person familiar with the plans.

At an MTN board meeting on Tuesday, the South African telecoms major decided it would examine the Reliance Communications’ merger proposal, the paper quoted the person as saying.

Officials at Reliance Communications and MTN could not immediately be reached by Reuters for comment.

Abu Dhabi’s Etisalat said on Wednesday it was looking to buy a stake in an Indian mobile operator, but did not disclose any names. A newspaper had reported it was in talks with cash-hungry Reliance Communications for a $3.8 billion deal.

Reliance Communications and MTN had planned a tie-up in 2008 but the deal was thwarted by issues within the Reliance family.

Source : Business Standard

The Central Electricity Regulatory Commission (CERC) has approved the state-run PowerGrid Corporation’s plan to set up nine High Capacity Power Transmission Corridors (HCPTC) costing Rs 58,061 crore. These transmission systems will evacuate power from various projects planned by independent power producers (IPPs).

The transmission corridors will evacuate power from IPPs in Orissa (to cost Rs 8,752 crore), Jharkhand (Rs 5,709 crore), Sikkim (Rs 1,304 crore), Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh (Rs 1,243 crore), Chhattisgarh (Rs 28,824 crore), Krishnapatnam area in Andhra Pradesh (Rs 2,065 crore), Srikakulam area in Andhra Pradesh (Rs 2,986 crore), Tamil Nadu (Rs 2,357 crore) and southern region (Rs 4,821 crore).

CERC, in its order, observed that development of the corridors was considered necessary for evacuation of power from the projects envisaged during the 11th Plan.

The power shortage in the country in 2009-10, according to a Central Electricity Authority report, is 10.1 per cent in energy terms and 12.7 per cent in peak demand terms.

“The Commission, based on the report furnished by PowerGrid Corporation, which is a central transmission utility (CTU) on physical progress of Generating Units of IPPs, is satisfied that these High Capacity Transmission corridors are required for evacuation of the power from these IPPs and any delay in implementation of these transmission schemes may result in bottling up of the power,” the power regulator said.

The power projects are located either in the coal belt, or in coastal areas (which would use imported coal) or in the hydro power potential areas of the North-East. “Power from these projects has to be brought to the load centres in the northern and western regions, which requires development of transmission systems,” the power regulator added.

CERC has directed PowerGrid Corporation to ensure that the proposed transmission projects for which regulatory approval has been granted are executed within the time frames matching the commissioning schedules of the IPPs so that the beneficiaries are not burdened with higher interest during construction.

Source : Economic Times

MUMBAI | NEW DELHI: Sasol, the largest producer of motor fuel made from coal, plans to spend $10 billion in India in partnership with the Tata Group on a block awarded last year, following similar investments in Indonesia and China.
The South African company plans to produce 80,000 barrels a day of motor fuel by 2018 from a coal block in Orissa, Mark Schnell, president of the company’s Indian unit, said in an interview in Mumbai. Sasol and Tata Group own equal stakes in the venture, he said. “It’s going to be a mega project of the magnitude of $10 billion by the joint venture,” Mr Schnell said. “At this stage, the focus is on understanding the resource and making sure of the economics of building a plant here.”

Rising incomes in India are driving vehicle sales, boosting fuel demand in India. The country’s energy use may more than double by 2030 to the equivalent of 833 million metric tonnes of oil from 2007, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency. “That is a tremendous amount of money and a project like that will become viable at very high crude prices,” said Victor Shum, a Singapore-based senior principal at US energy consultants Purvin & Gertz. “If the alternative of producing fuels from crude oil is cheaper, then a refinery would make more sense.” Sasol and the Tata Group were awarded the coal-to-liquids project in Orissa, Tata said in March last year. “We feel that this is a right step toward securing energy security for the country,” Tatas said.

Jindal Steel & Power said in March last year it was allotted a coal-to-liquids block in Orissa. The project will produce 80,000 barrels of fuel a day from coal and is estimated to cost Rs 42,000 crore, including mining and a power plant. India’s production of gasoline rose 32% to the equivalent of about 422,800 barrels a day and diesel output rose 12% to about 1.4 million barrels a day in the year ended March.
Sasol is considering increasing the capacity of a similar plant in China with Shenhua Group by 13% to 90,000 barrels a day, chief executive officer Pat Davies said. The cost of the plant with Shenhua is less than $10 billion, he said.

The South African company signed a memorandum of understanding with Indonesia for the possible development of an 80,000 barrel-a-day coal-to-fuel plant in the Asian country, Sasol said. In January 2009, Bukin Daulay, head of coal and mineral research at Indonesia’s energy ministry, said Sasol could spend $10 billion on the plant. Sasol, which produces over 40% of South Africa’s motor fuel, uses technology first employed by Nazi scientists and refined by apartheid-era engineers. The company plans to build new coal-to-fuel plants in the US, China and India.

Source : Economic Times

It’s been just over a week since Microsoft has started to offer the commercial subscription of Windows Azure. As a Cloud enthusiast, I quickly signed up for the Introductory Special subscription and downloaded the required tools to deploy my first app to the Cloud. I had access to Windows Azure since PDC08 and I deployed quite a few apps to test the functionality and features of the platform. As an independent Cloud Computing Strategist, I also explore Amazon Web Services and Google App Engine. Having worked on a few mature Cloud Computing platforms and tools, I had certain expectations from Windows Azure particularly after it has gone past the beta phase. Honestly, there is no significant difference (except the pricing part) that I could notice in the development and deployment experience on Windows Azure.
Here is a list of top 5 things that I feel Microsoft should fix immediately.

5) Metering and Billing Model – Microsoft would start charging the moment you deploy your app even if it is not running and not consuming any resources. Refer to the FAQ on pricing for more details. I personally find this as a huge entry barrier. Ideally, I wouldn’t want to get charged when my app is in ‘Suspended’ mode and not in ‘Run’ mode. Technically speaking, what resources would my app consume when it is not running? It would only be a few megabytes of storage to keep the package and the configuration files. Amazon doesn’t charge me VM hours for inactive AMIs. They only charge me for the nominal storage cost of storing the AMI on S3. Charging VM hours for an idle application is just not convincing enough. I find it to be counterproductive and a barrier for developers to embrace this platform.

4) Simpler Pricing and Subscription Plans – Microsoft is at it again! After confusing the consumers with half-a-dozen flavors of Windows Vista and recently with Windows 7, they are doing it to their Online Services subscribers. There are at least 4 types of subscription to choose from – Introductory Special, Development Accelerator Core, Development Accelerator Extended and ‘Pay As You Go’ Consumption. This bouquet of subscription offers is confusing and not a straightforward model. This reflects the classic Microsoft way of packaging and licensing products in the form of Express, Standard, Professional and Enterprise. This doesn’t gel with the online services model. I personally prefer the Amazon way of pricing and the sign up process. Simple and straightforward!

3) Agile Deployment and Faster Change Management – On the commercial version of Windows Azure, it takes more than 7 minutes for the application to be available and accessible. And, I am not talking of an Azure application built to assist NASA launch the Mars Rover. This is a plain and simple Hello World ASP.NET app that doesn’t even have a single line of server side code. Add a Worker Role, few lines of dynamic code and storage access code, it will take a good 10 minutes for your application to take off. Again, comparing this with Google App Engine and Amazon EC2, they are almost instant. Each Linux EC2 AMI takes about 2 min. to boot and I am at the root prompt in no time. Windows Azure is a PaaS offering and I cannot afford to wait for few minutes every time I make a trivial change to my HTML file. I can understand if Amazon forces me to go through this as I may have to bundle the AMI with every change that I make. With EBS now supporting booting AMIs, I need not even worry about bundling the AMI. Windows Azure might also be doing the job of spinning the new VMs for every change that I make to the app or the configuration. But I don’t care and cannot wait for 10 minutes for the simple changes to reflect. This needs to be fixed!

2) Configuration Editor – After you deploy the Cloud application, you may need to change the configuration settings. This includes changing the no. of instances of Web Role / Worker Role or changing a custom configuration setting. Having a plain vanilla textbox to change the sensitive configuration setting is just not acceptable! Microsoft has every reason to put up a better frontend to manage the configuration settings that can be potentially built using Silverlight. At least that will drive more downloads of Silverlight plugin. One look at the Configuration settings textbox makes me feel that I am working on an early CTP release. I consider the EC2 Console from Amazon (and a bunch of 3rd party tools like ElasticFox) and ElasticHosts’ configuration editor to be much better. Though Microsoft may want to encourage partners like RightScale to eventually build such tools, as a paid subscriber I deserve a better tool here!


1) Windows Azure Integration with Visual Studio – This certainly deserves to be the numero uno. The biggest USP of Microsoft is its integrated platform and tools approach. Whether it is core .NET Development, Microsoft Office Development, BizTalk Adapter Development or SharePoint Development, it has always been the ‘Better Together’ story for the developers by putting Visual Studio in the center. When it comes to Azure, I had a lot of expectations from Microsoft on the Visual Studio integration. The reason for that is Azure is logically an extended development platform on the Cloud and the developers should be able to seamlessly deploy their new breed of applications. To my surprise, Windows Azure Tools for Visual Studio 2008 1.1 has little to no integration with the real Azure platform. When I right click on the Cloud Service project and select Publish, I expected Visual Studio to prompt me for my Windows Live ID to enumerate the Hosted Service project to seamlessly deploy the app onto Azure and then take me to the Development Portal to let me decide between staging and production. The approach of opening an Explorer window with the folder containing the .cspkg and .cscfg files and launching the browser with the Azure development portal appears to be so broken! Compare this with the Eclipse and the Google plugin integration. Two independent entities coming from different companies offer a better experience to the developers than Azure Tools for VS. When I click on the GAE button on Eclipse toolbar, it just does the deployment after prompting me for the Google ID and the Application ID. I am not sure if this would get fixed in Visual Studio 2010. But as of now, on the currently available Visual Studio 2008 SP1, it is not in place. I want Visual Studio to fully support me end to end during my Cloud application design, development, testing and deployment. I also expect an integrated Azure Storage tool within Visual Studio. I should be able to browse and manipulate the Tables, Blob metadata and the Queues. Today I have to rely on 3rd party tools for this which doesn’t make the developer productive. Overall, Visual Studio and Azure integration has a long way to go!

source : MSV

According to Wikipedia, an unmanned aircraft system or unmanned aerial vehicle is an aircraft that flies without human crew on board the aircraft. … a UAV is defined as a reusable, uncrewed vehicle capable of controlled , sustained, level flight and powered by a jet or reciprocating engine.
So, what is the difference between an application running in your datacenter and an application running on the Cloud? Well, it is as different as an aircraft flown by a pilot and an unmanned aircraft system. Interestingly, both the Cloud application and the UAS share the same attributes! When you are running an enterprise application hosted at the datacenter in your backyard, you have a lot of liberty in controlling it. You can monitor it closely to track the performance and it is fairly easy to fix the bottlenecks. Same is the case with an aircraft flown by a professional pilot. He can determine the right altitude and the direction based on the wind speed and the weather conditions. The pilot will take every step to make sure that the flight is as safe as possible.
Running the same enterprise application on the Cloud is no different from flying an unmanned aircraft. You never know which server, datacenter or the continent that hosts your application. For the UAS, imagine the challenges involved in accurately gauging the external factors like the wind speed, direction and the altitude. The external factors that define the smooth operation of the Cloud application are traffic, resource usage and security. You got to tweak the application to meet these demands on the fly!Whether it is the Cloud application or the unmanned aircraft system, they need a sophisticated control center for remote operations. Apart from the remote control center, the constant communication between the control center and the UAS is very critical. UAS Control CenterThough it is obvious that most of the Cloud offerings expose ‘Compute’ and ‘Storage’ services, there is another crucial service which is the ‘Management’ service. This service connects your Cloud App with the control center at your end. By consuming this service, you will be able to tweak your application to meet the external conditions.

Key Services Exposed by Cloud
Amazon Web Services offer a mature API to take control of the infrastructure that runs your application. Microsoft Windows Azure Platform has a Service Management API that lets the developers programmatically control the Cloud application’s parameters.

source : Janakiram (Microsoft)

SalesForce.com and VMware jointly announced a new PaaS offering called VMforce. This is a huge announcement that has a very strong impact on the Cloud ecosystem. Let’s see what it means to us.

The enterprise application development platform is dominated by two obvious platforms – .NET and Java. I qualified my statement with the ‘enterprise’ keyword because other platforms like LAMP, Ruby on Rails, Python are great for consumer web apps and they are not the first choice for building the Line of Business (LoB) applications. So, when the enterprise wants to seriously look at the Cloud, they want a platform exposing either .NET or Java as a service. The application platform on the Cloud is technically called as the Platform as a Service (PaaS). Till date, PaaS is typically associated with Microsoft’s Windows Azure Platform, Google App Engine and Force.com. Windows Azure is the preferred platform for all the .NET developers. In the last one year, Microsoft’s continuous investments in Azure made it comprehensive and mature for the businesses to go live on the Cloud. Java developers had to settle for the limited capabilities offered by Google App Engine. Right from the day of announcement of Java runtime on App Engine, Google did very little to entice the Java community. Moving an enterprise Java app to GAE is not really straight forward. GAE doesn’t support all the capabilities of Java EE. Even for the web applications, there are quite a few constraints that force the developers to re-factor the application to run on GAE. Moving an app back and forth from the local datacenter and GAE is not easy. So, there has been no comparable PaaS offering to Azure for Java developers. In one of my articles, I covered how Sun lost the opportunity of delivering the Java PaaS to the community. This gap is now being filled by VMforce. They want to make VMforce the defacto Cloud platform for Java developers. VMforce for Java developers would be what Azure is for .NET developers. VMforce PaaS Offering

But why did VMware join hands with SalesForce.com? VMware has a proven stack for the Cloud in the form of vSphere and vCloud. They never wanted to compete directly with the IaaS providers like AWS or GoGrid. Instead, VMware wants to capture the Private Cloud market by aggressively competing with Microsoft and others. On the other hand, SalesForce.com has been in Cloud services business for a while and has become synonymous with SaaS. They also started to expose the middle tier that powers their CRM through the force.com PaaS offering. SalesForce.com has the right level of infrastructure that is ready to scale. But just virtualization combined with the right infrastructure doesn’t offer an exciting platform for the developers. VMware made two strategic investments last year. They acquired a Java framework and tools company called SpringSource and a Message-Oriented-Middleware (MOM) company called RabbitMQ. This investment made VMware ready for a complete platform offering. Just like VMware brings an abstraction layer between the real hardware and the OS, SpringSource adds a layer between Java runtime and enterprise applications. Java developers targeting SpringSource can easily move apps across multiple environments. Message Queuing is very important for enterprise application scalability. The combo of SpringSource and RabbitMQ offer a powerful and scalable enterprise Java environment. Now, when we look at the equation, it becomes pretty interesting. VMware offering the SpringSource framework for the on-premise servers and the Private Cloud that can be further extended to the Public Cloud hosted on SalesForce.com. Add the LoB components, the multi-tenant capability, enterprise database and the UI widgets that are already a part of force.com, they have a pretty solid PaaS in the making. Deployment Scenarios

Who should be worried about this announcement? It is Google! They have a serious contender in VMforce. As a developer, I prefer setting up SpringSource environment on my local machine and use Eclipse to seamlessly deploy across my local server, Private Cloud or on the VMforce Public Cloud. I need not heavily re-factor my applications for the Cloud anymore. Relying on a proven Java framework like Spring gives the developers the confidence to standardize their apps across multiple deployment environments. But, should Microsoft be worried about this announcement? Yes. But not as much as Google! Microsoft did the right thing by bringing .NET to the Cloud early and helping the developers make a smooth transition. For any Microsoft shop, the first choice is Azure and Microsoft will continue to lead in that space.

source : Janakiram (Microsoft)