IBM, Accenture beef up analytics 
February 11, 2010
Source:  TNN

MUMBAI: The biggest global players in IT are adding strong analytics and consulting capabilities to their offerings out of India. It’s being driven both by the availability of such talent in the country, and the fact that such a move helps them get a larger part of the customer’s business. Customers, too, expect vendors to offer not just technology solutions, but complete business-cumtechnology solutions to the issues they face.

Rekha Menon, executive director, Accenture India, said analytics was the next space to be. “We are going to the top B-schools for this. We need people who can look at data, crunch that data and come up with good business insights that companies can use to improve their business,” she said.

IBM had announced in November the setting up of a high-end business analytics and optimisation centre in Bangalore. The company now says analytics and business transformation consulting will be a key offering from India in four of its verticals — banking, telecom, healthcare and retail.

Rajesh Nambiar, VP for global delivery in IBM India, said that in global delivery, client expectations were going up. “They don’t want a tech-centric discussion. They want deeper conversations, business centric discussions that will help them understand how their performance can improve and precisely how technology can help in this. So we should be able to have a conversation with not just the CIO, but also the CFO and others,” he said.

Jim Champy, chairman of Dell Services’ consulting practice , said analytics capabilities were available in India at very good costs. “And these are higher level sophisticated offerings, with high margins ,” he said.

Rising media, publishing IT budgets fuel sector growth
February 11, 2010
SOURCE : PTI

MUMBAI: Rising IT budgets of sectors such as media, publishing and entertainment are fuelling growth of the information technology industry, according to a top official of software development company HCL Technologies. “Basic industries that are undergoing transformation are the sectors where we are seeing increasing IT spend and that is fuelling growth. Media, publishing and entertainment is undergoing a transformation. So is it with healthcare and insurance,” HCL Technologies chief executive officer Vineet Nayar told reporters.

He said Remote Infrastructure Management (RIM) will continue to grow predominantly because it is a young industry with a greater head room for growth.

Banking, financial services and insurance sectors in the US were witnessing a shift as companies are preparing themselves to gain a larger share of new consumers, Mr Nayar said. “The BFSI segment in the US is getting ready for dealing with the new consumer. Therefore, they are making investments not just in mergers and acquisitions and integration but developing new platforms that are more web-based, providing more agile services to the consumer, more products, combining insurance and banking products and capital market products on the portal,” Mr Nayar said.

Reacting to the US President Barack Obama’s recent statement that it would slash tax-breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, Nayar said it was justified.

“I think it is a fair argument that every democracy should be concerned about jobs in their respective countries and to a certain degree job creation and unemployment is a responsibility of the local government. Therefore, rational steps forward is the right thing. You need to be hiring locally,” Nayar said.

Obama last month said his administration would “slash tax-breaks for companies that ship our jobs overseas” and instead “give those tax-breaks to companies that create jobs in the USA”, which sent shivers down the IT industry’s spine as the US accounts for 60 per cent of India’s IT export market.

Nayar said the US and the Europe will take positions that are good in their assessment and Indian software companies will have to reconfigure themselves to align with that to convert them into opportunities.

“There are fundamental changes which are happening in the IT industry, to which HCL has responded very well and we have seen growth during the recession (by hiring locally). In the last four to five quarters, I think we would have increased our total combined headcount in local hiring in the US and the Europe by about 3,000 people,” he added.

Currency fluctuation a major concern: Infosys
February 11, 2010
SOURCE: ET AGENCIES

BANGALORE: Infosys CEO and MD Krish Gopalakrishnan said that currency fluctuation is a major concern for the company presently. Infosys stocks Gopalakrishnan said that growth has been broad-based and led by US and BFSI clients. Technology majors TCS and Infosys had reported increase in dollar revenues of 6.6% and 6.8% respectively for the third quarter, beating market expectations.

"Deficit was a major worry for clients and manufacturing sector still looked weak," said Gopalakrishnan. Driving the turnaround are sectors like financial services, manufacturing, telecom and media, where global majors offshored services to cut costs.

NASSCOM last week forecast India's software and services exports will post double-digit export revenue growth of 13 to 15 percent to hit up to $57 billion in the year to March 2011. The extent of the downturn in the United States -- which is the main market for India's software giants -- is still unclear.

India's software exports growth projected for next year is still far below the blistering 28 percent export revenue rise clocked in the financial year 2006-07.

Indian software companies, whose breakneck growth has been an important driver of the country's economic modernisation, were hit by the global slump as customers put many projects on hold.

The sector accounts for 25 percent of India's overall exports.