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| 05. INFOTECH |
Koratty IT park set to begin operations |
| Source : Business Standard |
 Chennai/ Kochi: Fourteen companies will begin operations this month in Kochi Infopark at Koratty. The park, coming up in Thrissur district, is the first spoke model IT park.
The companies that have set up shop are Bluelabs Technology Solutions, Braddock Infotech, Cent Technologies, Infoprism Solutions, Sahradaya Tech, Glitz IT Solutions, Sands Lab, Exar Software Research, Strands Energy Pvt Ltd, Greened Multimedia, Storybox, Igooz Technologies Pvt Ltd, Finelab Webservices Pvt Ltd and Abyss Technologies.
With this, Kochi Infopark has almost completed the allocation of 42,000 sft office space in the first phase of the Koratty IT park, a press release said. Around 500 professionals will be employed in Phase I.
Infopark has already begun the allocation process for Phase II with 10 companies. “Many MNCs are showing interest in Koratty for their future expansion because of the low operational cost, availability of good talent and ease of access through all modes of transport,” said Sidhartha Bhattacharya, Infoparks Kerala CEO. He also said the park would soon get SEZ status.
The park now houses companies that are into software development, animation and multimedia, web designing, BPOs, IT finishing schools, etc. There are also training institutes set up inside the campus to provide training to engineering graduates as well as to employees. The park has a direct employment potential of about 6,000 IT professionals at the end of its three phases.
The park is being developed on 30 acres and will have a built-up space of approximately 70,000 sft with plug-and-play facilities at the end of Phase 2. |
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Govt relaxes work visa norms for IT cos
Source : The Economic Times  New Delhi: In A major relief to the over $60-billion IT industry, the government has relaxed employment visa norms for the sector, allowing companies to hire foreign nationals as per their requirements, effectively removing the ceiling of 20 such employees per company.
The ministry of external affairs has circulated new guidelines to all missions abroad informing them of the relaxation in procedures for information technology (IT) and IT-enabled services (ITeS) companies.
“It (the relaxation in norms) addresses concerns of the country’s IT and ITeS industry related to the employment visas,” said Raju Bhatnagar, vice-president (BPO and government relations), Nasscom.
Technology companies that sponsor foreigners to work in India will need to give a declaration that the skilled worker has been hired for working in an IT or ITeS company or a software technology park of India or special economic zone dedicated to IT or an IT unit in a multi-product zone.
On the other hand, the foreign worker being sponsored will have to give a declaration to the effect that his annual salary is in excess of $25,000 per annum. The salary cap is being introduced to ensure only highly skilled workforce comes to the country, a government official said.
Last year, the labour ministry had, in consultation with the home ministry, introduced a number of changes in the visa rules after it found that there were thousands of Chinese workers, including low-skilled ones, such as cooks and masons, employed in power and steel projects being executed by Chinese contractors.
The government had fixed the limit of employment visas to 1% of the total persons employed on a project, subject to a maximum of 20 employees. For relaxation in the upper limit, companies were required to take permission from the ministry of labour.
The IT industry has found the mechanism cumbersome and said there was no clarity on the kind of references that were required to be furnished by companies.
Nasscom, the industry body, had lobbied hard against the move arguing that the industry needs foreign professionals to run their business smoothly. However, there is no change in the ceiling on the total number of foreign employees for steel and power companies, which remains at 40 per company.
“This will remove most of the hurdles that the IT/ITeS segment had faced with the earlier rules. I hope that the liberalised criteria get broad-based to cover other priority sectors such as infrastructure, energy, aviation, telecom, etc,” said Amitabh Singh, partner, Ernst & Young. A list of activities in the IT sector has also been circulated to missions abroad to make it easier for them to identify skilled workers and issue work visas. |
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Microsoft bets on India to become global competency centre for cloud services |
Source: The Hindu Business Line |
 “The cloud will create newcommercial opportunities for software developers to build and deploy applications with high-agility and low-cost…”
New Delhi: Betting big on India's ability to emerge as global competency hub for cloud services, Microsoft has announced a line up of partners who will build applications, and train professionals on its cloud-computing platform Windows Azure.
“India will not only see a surge in consumption of cloud services, driving growth in domestic IT usage but companies all over the world will look to India to support their transition to cloud computing,” the Microsoft Chief Executive Officer, Mr Steve Ballmer, said.
Shared resources
Simply put, cloud computing refers to Internet-based computing model whereby shared resources and software are provided on-demand, and consumers pay only for resources they use. Hence cloud computing customers do not need to own the entire physical tech infrastructure and can rent the usage from third-party players – proponents of cloud computing say this can lead to significant savings (30-40 per cent).
According to Zinnov study, the global cloud computing market is estimated to touch over $ 70 billion by 2015. While the overall offshorable piece would be roughly $18-20 billion, Indian IT companies are well placed to grab 30 per cent market share by building applications that ride on the cloud platform, doing support work, or product engineering among others. Further, cloud-based services are estimated to create over 3 lakh jobs in India in the next five years.
“The cloud will create new commercial opportunities for software developers to build and deploy applications with high-agility and low-cost and sell it and service it globally…,” said Mr Ballmer, who is on a two-day visit to India.
Ties up with NIIT Microsoft has partnered with IT training firm NIIT, which will train over one lakh students on Windows Azure in the next three years. IT major Cognizant, on the other hand, will develop solutions based on Azure to help its clients implement, migrate and manage their applications on the cloud.
Another partner CDC Software – an enterprise software and services applications provider – has announced the global roll out of its flagship product ‘CDC Respond' (a complaint and feedback management application for banking and government sectors) on the Windows Azure platform.
The announcements today are in addition to over 4,000 applications that have already been built on the Windows Azure platform by India. Companies such as Wipro, Infosys, TCS, HCL Technologies and Mahindra Satyam have been developing applications and solutions across verticals such as healthcare, banking and manufacturing, for local and global markets.
“India has been developing very nicely, in terms of consumption of PCs and smartphones, and IP protection,” Mr Ballmer pointed out. |
SAP acquires Sybase for $5.8bn |
Source : The Times of India |
Bangalore: SAP's $5.8-billion acquisition of Sybase is designed primarily to enable the former to offer its business applications for people on the move. Sybase brings a powerful mobile platform that is widely used to deliver applications on smart phones and other mobile devices.
With India becoming the second largest base of mobile handset devices shipped annually, "SAP may see great opportunities in the India market," said Pari Natrajan, CEO of R&D and IT consulting firm Zinnov. And since the mobile services are being delivered via the internet, this could be a key growth driver for SaaS (software-as-a-service) enabled application sales, he said.
Bill McDermott, co-CEO of SAP, has been quoted as saying that with this transaction, "SAP will dramatically expand its addressable market by making available its market-leading solutions to hundreds of millions of mobile users, combining the world's best business software with the world's most powerful mobile infrastructure platform."
Sybase's database management strength brings to SAP a whole new capability, which the latter can now offer along with its ERP solutions. That poses a challenge to Oracle, IBM and Microsoft that today dominate the database management market globally, as also in India. Sybase also brings business analytics strengths, but this is something that SAP too has following its acquisition of Business Objects in 2007. This could mean redundancies, but the extent of that is not clear.
Both SAP and Sybase have strong R&D presence in India. SAP Labs has as many as 4,200 people, most of that in Bangalore. Sybase has over 300 people in its R&D centre in Pune. This centre works on Sybase's flagship data management, analytics and enterprise mobility solutions. Given that SAP is most interested in Sybase's mobility solutions, that part of the work would most likely be strengthened.
Though Sybase is expected to remain a separate company, it is likely that SAP will want to bring together at least some of the teams doing similar R&D work in the two organizations. |
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