Posts filed under 'Software'
Bangalore, Mumbai : With the Ambanis going through a bitter split and the Bajaj group demerging, Wipro Ltd’s announcement on Monday that Azim Premji’s son will join the NYSE-listed company triggered speculation over the succession plan.
“Rishad Premji is going to join Wipro at a level commensurate with his background and experience. His joining has been approved by the board and is subject to shareholder approval. This is required statutorily because he is a relative of a director,” Wipro stated in a note.
Sources said 31-year-old Rishad will be joining the financial services practice of Wipro Technologies and would report to president Girish Paranjpe. He will join after July, since the AGM takes place that month. After getting the shareholders’ nod, the company will have to take government permission. Rishad graduated from Wesleyan University in the US and worked for a few years with General Electric before moving to Harvard. He has been working with consulting firm Bain & Co in London. He married childhood sweetheart Aditi in 2005.
Azim Premji owns nearly 84% stake in the company and, according to analysts, the move to induct his son implies a succession plan has been put in place. “Now, it is the CFO who is the second most important person in a firm and bringing Rishad to the financial services practice is basically paving the way to the throne. Eventually, he will be the chairman of the company,” one analyst predicted.
Source : Financialexpress.com
June 5th, 2007
Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) has announced that it has increased its stake from 51% to 100% in the joint venture IT services company TCS do Brasil. The company acquired group TBA’s 49% stake for a consideration of $33.4 million.
TCS do Brasil recorded a top line of $66.5 million for the year ended March 31, 2007 and has over 1700 employees.
In 2002, the Company entered the emerging high growth Brazilian market through a 51:49 joint venture with Grupo TBA. In the synergistic relationship, Grupo TBA brought local market knowledge and client relationships, while the company contributed world class methodologies, process and quality systems.
Over the last 5 years, TCS do Brasil has been extremely successful in scaling its business, achieving market penetration and enhancing delivery capabilities thereby resulting in a high level of customer satisfaction.
The company operates delivery centers in Sao Paulo and Brasilia and provides services to over 30 clients including ABN Amro, Goodyear, Equifax and Brasil Telecom, among others. It was the first company in Brazil to achieve CMMI Level 5 certification, the highest quality standard in the industry.
Grupo TBA & the company have also signed a co-operation accord by which they will continue to jointly service clients, in areas of complementary services, offering to the Brazilian market a full services capability in IT services, consulting and products.
Source : Business-standard.com
May 28th, 2007
Microsoft would be launching their latest gaming title for the Xbox 360 platform Forza Motorsport 2 in India today.
John Wendel, content developer, Forza Motorsport 2 confirmed that the gaming title would be launched in India on 24 May 2007.
It would sell for Rs 1,895 in the market. the game has been developed by Turn 10 of Microsoft Game Studios and is the sequel to the massively popular Xbox gaming title Forza Motorsport.
Wendel spoke about this game: “Forza Motorsport 2 provides gaming and car racing enthusiasts an opportunity to experience authentic next-generation car racing with the Xbox 360. With exceptional graphics and real time tracks, it displays perfect simulation as gamers drive some of the world’s best cars. With this game, we are confident of bringing out the ‘Schumacher’ in gamers and raising the bar further in terms of quality of overall game content and game play as well as consumer excitement around the title.”
Mohit Anand, country manager, entertainment and devices division, Microsoft India added: “With the launch of ‘Forza Motorsport 2′, we are geared to provide the discerning gamers in India a real-life car racing experience that will satiate their speeding fantasies. With high speed action, adrenaline pumping dangerous overtakes and thrill of driving some of world’s hottest cars, Forza Motorsport 2 is bound to take gaming to a new level of entertainment in India.”
He further said: “Our work with local gaming developers like Dhruva Interactive for Forza Motor Sport 2 development underlines our relentless commitment for enabling the growth of the local gaming ecosystem in India. This engagement also reiterates our keenness to provide compelling options to Indian developers that help them carve out a global footprint in the gaming development arena.”
Source : Games.techwhack.com
May 24th, 2007
Responding to grumbling from users about peripheral devices that won’t work with Windows Vista, Microsofts claims that its new operating system now supports 1.9 million devices.
Responding to low-level but persistent grumbling from users about peripheral devices that won’t work with Windows Vista, Microsoft Corp. claimed Wednesday that its new operating system now supports 1.9 million devices — up from 1.6 million at Vista’s launch in January.
In a keynote speech at Microsoft’s Windows Hardware Engineering Conference (WinHEC) in Los Angeles, Mike Nash, corporate vice president of Windows product management at the software vendor, blamed driver compatibility problems with about 4,000 devices for creating roughly 80 percent of the user complaints received thus far.
“It’s a relatively small number of drivers that are driving most of the complaints,” Nash said in an interview at WinHEC on Tuesday. He declined to identify which devices or vendors are most lacking in Vista support. “The key thing is that we have 95 percent coverage,” he said. “It’s good and getting better.”
Companies such as graphics processor and card maker Nvidia Corp. have been heavily criticized by gamers and other early Vista users for poor driver support. Web sites such as zetafleet.com, CompatDB.org and NTcompatible.com have chronicled device and driver problems submitted by users.
Nash defended Nvidia, saying that the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company is “working pretty hard” on supporting Vista in its products. He also said that the number of drivers ready at
Vista’s launch was much higher than with previous releases of Windows. That was in spite of the fact that
Vista added new security and administration features, such as Microsoft’s User Account Control technology, that broke the compatibility of many existing device drivers.
In addition, Nash noted that more than 9,000 devices have been submitted to Microsoft’s “Certified for Windows Vista” logo program, which requires products to be tested for compatibility withVista.
During a talk at WinHEC on Tuesday that was sponsored by Microsoft, Roger Kay, an analyst at Endpoint Technologies Associates Inc. in Wayland, Mass., said the driver problems being experienced by Vista users are about the same as they were for early adopters of Windows XP — except that now, “early adopters have a much louder megaphone in the blogosphere to air negative perceptions.”
Nonetheless, as part of his keynote, Nash exhorted Microsoft’s business partners to continue creating more device drivers. He promised that Redmond isn’t punishing laggards. “We’re not getting mad,” he said. “We’re sharing data with them to help them do a better job.”
But some vendors are “making things broadly available, and some are saying you need to upgrade to their latest product,” he added. “All are driving to some version of business satisfaction. Hopefully, they’ll make the right call.”
Source : pcworld.com
May 17th, 2007
Work permits and intra-company transfers from India to the U.S. are trade issues and should not be confused with immigration issues, India’s National Association of Software and Service Companies (NASSCOM) in Delhi said late Tuesday.
NASSCOM was reacting to letters written by U.S. Senators Chuck Grassley, an Iowa Republican, and Richard Durbin, an Illinois Democrat, to nine Indian companies asking for details on their use of the H-1B visas. The nine companies account for close to 20,000 visas, the senators said on their Web sites. The companies include India’s top outsourcers Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., Infosys Technologies Ltd. and Wipro Ltd.
More and more it appears that companies are using H-1B visas to displace qualified, U.S. workers, Grassley said in a statement Monday. “Now, as we move closer to debate on an immigration bill, I continue to hear how people want to increase the number of H-1B visas that are available to companies,” he said.
Work permits are primarily a tool to facilitate trade and allow global companies to bring key staff to the U.S. on temporary assignments, just as U.S. staff often travel across the world for temporary assignments, and this is clearly different from immigration, NASSCOM said.
Grassley and Durbin introduced legislation in April that they said aims to give priority to U.S. workers and crack down on unscrupulous employers who deprive qualified U.S. citizens of high-skill jobs.
The H-1B visa is an employer-sponsored, nonimmigrant work visa for a foreign worker coming temporarily to the U.S. in a specialty occupation.
The issue of H-1B and L-1 visas is important to India’s outsourcing industry, as it has a large proportion of staff working on-site on client’s projects in the U.S. Indian outsourcing companies, as well as U.S. technology companies, have been demanding an increase in the number of H-1B visas allowed in a year, which are currently capped at 65,000.
The Indian outsourcers Grassley and Durbin wrote to were not willing to comment on the letters.
NASSCOM on Tuesday repeated its demand for an increase in H-1B visas. Both U.S. and Indian companies have repeatedly stressed the need to raise the H-1B visa cap, which was reduced from 195,000 to 65,000 two years ago, it said. Constraining the supply when demand is high gives rise to problems for U.S. companies and Indian IT companies, the association added.
Source : pcworld.com
SANTA CLARA, Calif. (Reuters) - Microsoft Corp. sees mergers as a way to fill gaps or enter new markets, mostly via small deals, but larger deals are also “conceivable,” Chief Executive Steve Ballmer said on Wednesday.
“We have not, by default, opted for acquisitions as part of our strategy … but we don’t count them out either,” he said. “In general, though (we focus on) smaller deals, we are open to large acquisitions.
Speaking at the Software 2007 conference in Silicon Valley, Microsoft Corp.’s leader said the world’s biggest software company remains focused on organic growth and sees acquisitions typically as a way to fill holes in its business strategy.
In an onstage interview with Software 2007 conference organizer M.R. Rangaswami, Ballmer declined to comment directly on whether he was interested in acquisitions in the $40 billion to $50 billion range — a reference to a possible deal to acquire Yahoo Inc.
The question was a backhanded reference to news reports last Friday that Microsoft has once again approached Yahoo for a potential merger or partnership deal to help the companies better compete with rival Google Inc.
“Anything is conceivable,” Ballmer replied, noting that he would decline to comment specifically on any potential deal-making as a matter of policy.
“Typically we do not do large (deals) relative to our overall size,” Ballmer said. (We do deals) to fit into what we are doing or as platforms to us into whole new businesses.”
In the last 12 months, the Redmond, Washington-based company acquired 15 to 20 companies, Ballmer told an audience of several hundred business software executives. He pointed to the 2000 acquisition of Great Plains Software, which propelled Microsoft into the business planning software market, as an example of using a merger to thrust itself into a new market.
“I don’t think you should expect that most of our growth should come from buying large companies and taking costs out,” Ballmer said, adding that such cost-reduction strategies are useful in slow-growing, more mature industries, but not software.
May 10th, 2007
Bangalore, Mumbai : With the Ambanis going through a bitter split and the Bajaj group demerging, Wipro Ltd’s announcement on Monday that Azim Premji’s son will join the NYSE-listed company triggered speculation over the succession plan.