There’s more evidence of Indian IT attracting big global deals. On Tuesday, some three contracts were announced, including a massive $500-million, five-year deal between HCL Technologies and MSD (also known as Merck & Co, with headquarters in the US), one of the world’s biggest pharmaceutical companies.
Symphony Services said it has bagged a seven-year, multi-million dollar deal from Aldata, a Finland-based supplier of integrated business solutions to organizations serving the retailconsumer and wholesale distribution markets. Aldata’s customer base includes 15 of the world’s 30 largest retailers.
Mahindra Satyam said it had signed a three-year offshoring deal with BASF IT Services, a wholly owned subsidiary of the global chemical company BASF.
These deals follow other big deals in recent months, including TCS’ $904-million one with UK’s Personal Accounts Delivery Authority (PADA) to administer the National Employee Savings Trust scheme for 10 years, and Infosys’ over $100 million deal with Microsoft to manage the latter’s internal technical services. “This is an indication that Indian IT’s experience and capabilities have matured. They have demonstrated a fair bit of transformation capabilities,” said Amneet Singh, VP in outsourcing consulting firm Everest Group.
Wednesday, May 5, 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010
Higher rural push likely to help co dominate market
Bharti Airtel’s better-than-expected performance in the March 2009 quarter amidst intense competition and falling tariffs reflects its commanding position in the 584-million-strong domestic wireless market. Moreover, the telco may continue to dominate the revenue share of the domestic market given its investments in rural areas that are witnessing a higher mobile penetration.
The Street had estimated that Bharti would report a near flat growth of 0.9% sequentially in revenue and a sharp 9% dropin profit for the March quarter. The pessimism was on account of fast deteriorating average revenue per user (ARPU) and minutes of usage (MoU) in the past few months.
However, a surprise jump in MoU, a first in the past seven quarters, and a marginal fall in ARPU helped Bharti post a 3% growth in revenue and a drop of 7% in profit. MoU rose sequentially by 5% to 468 minutes. ARPU fell by 4.6% to Rs 220, lower than expected fall of 9%.
It also reported a rise of 12% in network usage measured in terms of total minutes on network.Bharti’s performance regarding these user-based operational parameters raises optimism over its ability to sustain and grow despite the challenging environment.
Another way to look at Bharti’s performance amidst entry of new telcos is to consider its dominance in the domestic market. Its share of total customer base has shrunk to about 22% from 24% a year ago reflecting the impact of new incumbents. However, this has not affected its revenue share. In fact, it has grown from just over 29% to 31%.
The Street had estimated that Bharti would report a near flat growth of 0.9% sequentially in revenue and a sharp 9% dropin profit for the March quarter. The pessimism was on account of fast deteriorating average revenue per user (ARPU) and minutes of usage (MoU) in the past few months.
However, a surprise jump in MoU, a first in the past seven quarters, and a marginal fall in ARPU helped Bharti post a 3% growth in revenue and a drop of 7% in profit. MoU rose sequentially by 5% to 468 minutes. ARPU fell by 4.6% to Rs 220, lower than expected fall of 9%.
It also reported a rise of 12% in network usage measured in terms of total minutes on network.Bharti’s performance regarding these user-based operational parameters raises optimism over its ability to sustain and grow despite the challenging environment.
Another way to look at Bharti’s performance amidst entry of new telcos is to consider its dominance in the domestic market. Its share of total customer base has shrunk to about 22% from 24% a year ago reflecting the impact of new incumbents. However, this has not affected its revenue share. In fact, it has grown from just over 29% to 31%.
Friday, April 30, 2010
GADVASU, CIFT to do value addition in fresh water fishes
GADVASU is going to give the technical support to the farmers for value-added fish products along with that even a proposal to start a small project on value addition by the state government, too, is in the pipeline.
According to information, Punjab produces 76,000 tonne of fish whereas the consumption of such fish is only restricted to the igrants due to the presence of intra muscular bone in the fish and now to fetch good market both at domestic as well as export level as CIFT has developed a fish meat bone separating machine for GADVASU which separates the pin bones and one could eat the tempting fish without bones.
Giving information, Punjab Fish Farmers’ Association president Kanwaljeet Singh Sidhu, who is also ex-officio member of Fish Farmers SDevelopment Agency and board member of the university, said Punjab has a good market for fresh water fishes, but to increase the level of people’s interest and farmers’ income value addition is the need of the hour and for this a two-day workshop is being organized by the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT) in collaboration with college of fisheries GADVASU.
According to information, Punjab produces 76,000 tonne of fish whereas the consumption of such fish is only restricted to the igrants due to the presence of intra muscular bone in the fish and now to fetch good market both at domestic as well as export level as CIFT has developed a fish meat bone separating machine for GADVASU which separates the pin bones and one could eat the tempting fish without bones.
Giving information, Punjab Fish Farmers’ Association president Kanwaljeet Singh Sidhu, who is also ex-officio member of Fish Farmers SDevelopment Agency and board member of the university, said Punjab has a good market for fresh water fishes, but to increase the level of people’s interest and farmers’ income value addition is the need of the hour and for this a two-day workshop is being organized by the Central Institute of Fisheries Technology (CIFT) in collaboration with college of fisheries GADVASU.
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Hyderabad firm to work on network project
The Uttar Pradesh Police Technical Services has hired a Hyderabad-based semi-government organisation — National Institute for Smart Government (NISG) — as its technical consultant for the networking of police stations under the Crime and Criminal Tracking Network & Systems (CCTNS) project.
The project is being supervised by the National Crime Records Bureau.
The NISG, in which the Centre has a 45 per cent stake, also works as a technical consultant for the Ministry of Home Affairs and the police force of states like Karnataka, Orissa and Rajasthan.
On Wednesday, Technical Services Director General Shailendra Sagar signed the agreement with Sanjiv Mittal — CEO of NISG.
The project is being supervised by the National Crime Records Bureau.
The NISG, in which the Centre has a 45 per cent stake, also works as a technical consultant for the Ministry of Home Affairs and the police force of states like Karnataka, Orissa and Rajasthan.
On Wednesday, Technical Services Director General Shailendra Sagar signed the agreement with Sanjiv Mittal — CEO of NISG.
Monday, April 26, 2010
No place for Big 3 in first UID project
India's [ Images ] top three IT companies are understood to have been rejected by the Unique Identification Authority of India (UIDAI) for a project related to the country's biggest biometric count.
Tata Consultancy Services [ Get Quote ] (TCS), Infosys Technologies and Wipro [ Get Quote ] were eliminated from the selection process for the project on technical grounds. Another IT major, HCL Technologies [ Get Quote ], was also rejected. The size of the project is not yet known. UIDAI is working on an ambitious plan to give a unique identification number to each of India's 100 crore-plus citizens. It is headed by software entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani.
UIDAI instead shortlisted global IT services companies IBM and Accenture, and also Bangalore-based IT services and solutions provider MindTree [ Get Quote ] for the application development services (ADM) segment of the UID project. ADM is the first of the many IT projects of UIDAI that have come up for bidding until now.
A TCS spokesperson said the company does not comment on customer-specific information. Emails sent to Infosys [ Get Quote ] and Wipro remained unanswered.
"The bids were opened today and of the 10 identified companies, the UID team shortlisted only three for this project. The final bidder will be announced soon. Those companies that are out of the race have been rejected on technical grounds," said a person close to the development, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
IT firms bidding for the project had to clear a technical test, which has a cut-off of 70 per cent. Those who would clear this would then be evaluated on a commercial basis.
Tata Consultancy Services [ Get Quote ] (TCS), Infosys Technologies and Wipro [ Get Quote ] were eliminated from the selection process for the project on technical grounds. Another IT major, HCL Technologies [ Get Quote ], was also rejected. The size of the project is not yet known. UIDAI is working on an ambitious plan to give a unique identification number to each of India's 100 crore-plus citizens. It is headed by software entrepreneur Nandan Nilekani.
UIDAI instead shortlisted global IT services companies IBM and Accenture, and also Bangalore-based IT services and solutions provider MindTree [ Get Quote ] for the application development services (ADM) segment of the UID project. ADM is the first of the many IT projects of UIDAI that have come up for bidding until now.
A TCS spokesperson said the company does not comment on customer-specific information. Emails sent to Infosys [ Get Quote ] and Wipro remained unanswered.
"The bids were opened today and of the 10 identified companies, the UID team shortlisted only three for this project. The final bidder will be announced soon. Those companies that are out of the race have been rejected on technical grounds," said a person close to the development, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
IT firms bidding for the project had to clear a technical test, which has a cut-off of 70 per cent. Those who would clear this would then be evaluated on a commercial basis.
Saturday, April 24, 2010
McAfee Apologizes for Update Fiasco
McAfee on Thursday issued an apology for the faulty update that shut down users' computers and prompted a continuous reboot cycle.
"McAfee team members have been working around the clock to fix the problem and work with impacted customers," Barry McPherson, executive vice president of worldwide technical support and customer service for McAfee, wrote in a blog post. "We estimate that the majority of the affected systems are back up and running at this time and more systems are coming back online quickly."
The faulty signature update DAT file, which went out on Wednesday, affected the svchost.exe file on "a subset of systems" using McAfee VirusScan Enterprise on Windows XP service pack 3. Users with VirusScan Enterprise 8.7 were hit a bit harder than those running version 8.5, McAfee said, "because of the different implementation of memory scanning within the products."
Other versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 were not affected, the company said.
The problem resulted in blue screens, loss of network connectivity, inability to use USB, and continuous reboots, McAfee said.
"McAfee team members have been working around the clock to fix the problem and work with impacted customers," Barry McPherson, executive vice president of worldwide technical support and customer service for McAfee, wrote in a blog post. "We estimate that the majority of the affected systems are back up and running at this time and more systems are coming back online quickly."
The faulty signature update DAT file, which went out on Wednesday, affected the svchost.exe file on "a subset of systems" using McAfee VirusScan Enterprise on Windows XP service pack 3. Users with VirusScan Enterprise 8.7 were hit a bit harder than those running version 8.5, McAfee said, "because of the different implementation of memory scanning within the products."
Other versions of XP, Vista, and Windows 7 were not affected, the company said.
The problem resulted in blue screens, loss of network connectivity, inability to use USB, and continuous reboots, McAfee said.
Monday, April 19, 2010
Aviation stocks unable to hold on support levels
Over years, all these stocks like Jet 514, Kingfisher 48, Spice 57. Overall there are three sectors which have been doing very badly. One is sugar, second is telecom and third is aviation.
These have completely underperformed the market even around a run up previously eight-nine weeks. So for these stocks also, they just bounced back from the lower levels, again start getting hammered.
All these stocks are not able to hold on to their supports also now. They will start cracking more. Jet, it can go down maybe up to 480 levels. For Kingfisher, maybe we can see another slide coming down. It can go up to 46 levels. Spicejet, it can go down to 55-54 levels. So aviation stocks particularly are looking very badly. They are not holding on the supports also.
These have completely underperformed the market even around a run up previously eight-nine weeks. So for these stocks also, they just bounced back from the lower levels, again start getting hammered.
All these stocks are not able to hold on to their supports also now. They will start cracking more. Jet, it can go down maybe up to 480 levels. For Kingfisher, maybe we can see another slide coming down. It can go up to 46 levels. Spicejet, it can go down to 55-54 levels. So aviation stocks particularly are looking very badly. They are not holding on the supports also.
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