Deals bounty for Indian IT

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.

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%.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Flat start for equities; Capital goods, IT down

”Overall technical trend remains positive as Nifty continues to make higher top higher bottom formation on the daily chart. The weekly chart is also showing good amount of strength as the MACD has inched up in the positive territory and is moving northward while RSI too continues to move up. Traders are advised to stay long with the stop loss of 5290, the low made on Thursday. On the upside, crossover of 5400 will take the benchmark to about 5470, where trend line adjoining tops of October 2009 and January 2010 presents the resistance. Industrial production data for the month of February would be the key data to watch out for today. Tech biggie Infosys is coming out with its quarterly result tomorrow. The report after Friday's close that Reliance Industries has struck a USD 1.7 bn joint venture deal with US-based Atlas Energy, a key Marcellus Shale gas producer in the US, will enthuse the stock. It would also important to see how the stock market reacts to SEBI-IRDA tussle over Ulip investments in stock market,” said Anagram Research.

National Stock Exchange’s Nifty was trading at 5356.25, down 0.1 per cent or 5.5 points lower. The index touched a high of 5382.15 and low of 5348.55 in early trade.

Bombay Stock Exchange’s Sensex was at 17,903.08, lower by 30.06 points or 0.17 per cent from its previous close. The index moved in a range of 17,995.25 and 17,874.16 in trade so far.

The broader market however fared better than the benchmarks. The BSE Midcap Index edged up 0.12 per cent and BSE Smallcap Index moved up 0.34 per cent.

iPad launch marred by technical glitches

Apple sold more than 300,000 iPads on the tablet computer’s first day in stores, the company said yesterday, but reports claimed that some users had problems connecting to wi-fi networks.

New owners posted comments on Apple forums saying that their iPad had little or no wi-fi signal, where other devices worked fine.

The initial version of the touchscreen tablet computer connects to the internet only via wi-fi. Commentators have speculated that the problem could be a weak wi-fi antenna, located behind the logo on the back of the iPad.

“Casa de Trevino” from California said: “Having same problem with wi-fi being weak and constantly fluctuating. I have to keep entering my password to regain access to my network after having lost a signal. Two iPhones and two MacBooks showing full signal with no interrupts. Certainly hope this is fixable. Too pricey of a toy for it to have this issue right out of box.”

Seagate Wins 2010 CRN Channel Champions Award for Hard Drive Technical and Support Satisfaction

SCOTTS VALLEY, Calif., Apr 05, 2010 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Seagate Technology /quotes/comstock/15*!stx/quotes/nls/stx (STX 18.29, +0.18, +0.99%) , the world's number one hard drive maker, has won the 2010 CRN Channel Champion award for Technical Satisfaction and Support Satisfaction in the SATA Hard Drives category. The CRN award is based on a survey that measures overall solution provider perceptions of vendor products and services. The survey is the largest and broadest-based technology integrator market study in the industry.

"Receiving the CRN Channel Champion award is a great signal that we are focusing our efforts in the right places," said John Vossoughi, Seagate vice president, America's Sales, Marketing and Global Channels. "Our consistent focus is on providing system integrators and resellers with the products, programs and technical support they need to thrive in an increasingly competitive marketplace. This is great news that the North American system builders have recognized Seagate for delivering the highest level of technical and support satisfaction in the industry."

285 is a strong support for NMDC: Sandeep Wagle

What is your take on NMDC?

NMDC, I maintain that 285 is a very strong support. It will have the strength to move to possibly 308 to 310 once 300 is taken out, outer side 320. I don’t have a view beyond that. 310 to 320 is the range I am looking at.

EVGA Announces GTX 480 and 470 Graphics Cards

EVGA is proud to announce the latest and fastest GPU on planet earth, the EVGA GTX 480 and the EVGA GTX 470! Experience heart-pounding cinematic visuals thanks to the combined power of DirectX 11, NVIDIA PhysX, and NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround technologies.

“EVGA is here to deliver what the community demands: the next level DirectX 11 gaming and compute accelerator. The EVGA GTX 470 and 480 cards offer the fastest Tessellation and Ray Tracing performance on the planet, indeed these are very exciting times for our customers,” said Bob Klase, VP of Sales at EVGA. “We are thrilled to be offering the best NVIDIA products and support in the industry.”

The amazing performance of these new cards do not end at just benchmarking however, with up to 1536MB of DDR5 memory, super high screen resolutions combined with high resolution textures in games are now more fluid than ever, and with full DirectX 11 support, pointy character heads are a thing of the past with full support for DirectX 11 tessellation, and when combined with NVIDIA PhysX Technology, you achieve the ultimate in interactive gaming.

Features:

• Microsoft DirectX11 Support
• NVIDIA CUDA Technology with CUDA™ C/C++, DirectCompute 5.0 and OpenCL Support
• NVIDIA PhysX Technology
• NVIDIA PureVideo HD Technology
• NVIDIA 2-way and 3-way SLI ready
• NVIDIA 3D Vision Surround Ready
• PCI Express 2.0 Support
• Two Dual-Link HDCP DVI-I Connectors
• One Mini-HDMI 1.3a connector
• OpenGL 3.2 Support

Oracle enacts 'all or nothing' hardware support policy

Oracle has adopted what amounts to an "all or nothing" hardware support policy, according to a document the vendor has posted on its Web site.

The policy, which went into effect March 16, states that "when acquiring technical support, all hardware systems must be supported (e.g., Oracle Premier Support for Systems or Oracle Premier Support for Operating Systems) or unsupported."

It includes all systems running Solaris version 10.9 or later, those running Enterprise Linux and Oracle VM, as well as "all hardware systems for which you have applied services received under a technical support contract for another hardware system (including sharing of updates, patches, fixes, security alerts, work-arounds, configuration/installation assistance or parts)."

Sarawak Mulls Mechanism To Help High-tech Sector During Downturn

arawak is working out a mechanism to help high-technology multinational companies (MNCs) operating in Sama Jaya Free Industrial Zone here minimise risks during any future economic downturn.

State's Deputy Chief Minister, Tan Sri Dr George Chan, said at the moment the state's Industrial Development Ministry was in the midst of gathering feedbacks from the MNCs.

"We are a business-friendly goverment and we mean it," he told reporters after attending a briefing by Sanmina-SCI Corp (M) Sdn Bhd's vice-president/general manager, Mark C. Gable, here Friday.

Dr Chan said the state goverment needed to pay attention to the high-tech companies in view of the jobs as well as the expertise they provided.

He said the global economic downturn has affected the high-tech industry in Sarawak but some of the companies operating here had taken pro-active steps to address the concern of their local workers by not resorting to retrenchment.

"Sanmina-SCI has not retrenched its workers during the economic downturn. It had instead offered half-pay or to review the work shifts," he said.

Dell Tech Support Stop will nothing

Janna's Dell laptop broke, but it was still under warranty. She tells Consumerist that she contacted their technical support by web chat, imagining that it would be simple and easy to get a computer under warranty repaired. Her journey through Dell's tech support began with the chat rep encouraging her to grab a screwdriver and take her computer apart herself, and somehow got even more discouraging from there. When she finally got Dell to take the laptop in for repairs, Dell somehow helpfully cracked her LCD.

On December 7, 2009 I contacted Dell's chat support, as my computer started giving the blue screen of death, randomly not booting up, and the CCFL's were visible underneath the screen when looking at it from the side. My computer is still covered under warranty, so I figured it wouldn't be much of a problem to get it repaired. Was I ever wrong.....

Chat support wasn't any help, they basically asked me to 'find a screwdriver' and take my computer apart myself. I asked them about electrostatic discharge risks, and they asked me what I meant. The language barrier was extremely frustrating. Eventually, they ended up 'accidentally disconnecting' the chat once a so-called supervisor tried to assist me, then they called me later on....at a little past midnight my time.

Then I tried writing to Michael Dell's so-called email address, which got me to some sort of escalation department, still obviously talking to someone in India. After another month or two, I was still waiting for the third-party technicians to call me. We had come to the conclusion that i likely needed a new hard drive, RAM, and bezel.

Tech MNCs don mentor hat, give start-ups low-cost tools

BANGALORE: It is not money alone that can kick-start a new venture. Access to the latest software tools, advice on how to pitch a business

India's top 10 BPOs The rise of multinational IT in India Key facts on India's IT industry Top acquisitions in BPO space

proposal and introduction to prospective customers are equally important pieces of the start-up puzzle, as scores of technology start-ups are finding out.

Until six months ago, Chennai-based information technology outfit OrangeScape would use 50-100 servers, managed round the clock by about 10 employees, to help build and host web applications for a roster of big-ticket clients. “It was a nightmare to manage over 50-100 servers, we couldn’t afford that,” said Suresh Sambandam, founder & CEO, OrangeScape, who then sought help from search giant Google to use their suite of free and open source tools. “We were able to get on Google’s cloud platform on the right time and now we don’t need any of the virtual servers,” Mr Sambandan added.

Elsewhere in Bangalore, Gradatim IT Ventures, a start-up that provides technology tools to clients in the financial sector, also received a welcome boost when they signed onto the Microsoft BizSpark network that allowed them to access licensed software free of cost. “Typically, such licensing would have cost us $200,000 that I can now instead use to build my business,” said CV Prakash, founder & CEO, Gradatim.

Rogue antivirus program comes with tech support

In an effort to boost sales, sellers of a fake antivirus product known as Live PC Care are offering their victims live technical support.

According to researchers at Symantec Corp., once users have installed the program, they see a screen, falsely informing them that their PC is infected with several types of malware. That's typical of this type of program. What's unusual, however, is the fact that the free trial version of Live PC Care includes a big yellow "online support" button.

Clicking on the button connects the victim with an agent, who will answer questions about the product via instant message.

Symantec says the agent is no automated script, but in fact a live person. This lends an "air of legitimacy" to the program, said Marc Fossi, a manager of development with Symantec Security Response. "Obviously if they've got live tech support, it must be real," he joked.

The tech support doesn't help much, though. According to Symantec, the support staff simply try to convince victims to shell out between US$30 and $100 for the product.

This isn't the first time a fake security product has been spotted offering tech support. Another company called Innovative Marketing operated a call center to support its security products, including a program called WinFixer. According to security experts, Innovative Marketing's tech support technicians acted in the same way as Live PC Care's, trying to reassure victims that they were buying a legitimate product.

These so-called rogue antivirus products can sometimes lower security settings on a victim's computer. At best, they offer a false sense of security because the products never protect computers from the latest security threats.

Rogue antivirus has been a major headache for users over the past year. It is often installed via annoying pop-up ads that try to convince the victim that something is wrong with their PC. Symantec tracked 43 million rogue AV installation attempts between July 2008 and July 2009.

Xirrus Resolves Growing Demand for Web Self Help with iSolve

Softlib Software, a provider of Solution Identification software for Web Self-Help, technical support centers and helpdesk teams, recently announced that Xirrus, Inc., aWiFi ( News - Alert) Switching provider, picked Softlib iSolve software for its online customer and partner support.

Softlibs software helps customers reduce costs considerably while enhancing service to end users as well as customers. Softlibs customers include financial institutions, telecom companies, technology vendors and government agencies. Softlib products are widely used on thousands of computers across the world.

Presently iSolve powers support.xirrus.com which allows Xirrus customers and partners to find the information required quickly and easily they need without having to call up and consulting an expert. This allows Xirrus to provide enhanced as well as 24x7 service by leveraging the Web as a scalable Support channel. The content is delivered actively based on intelligent free text search and user credential level.

Xirrus is the only WiFi “Power-Play” that manufactures the Wi-Fi Array architecture that replaces both overlay WiFi offerings and switched Ethernet to the desktop, according to the company. Being a rapidly growing technology company with a passion to provide premier service to its customers and partners, Xirrus was on the look out for technology which could accurately provide solutions to issues put forward and optimizing home grown content automatically while smoothly integrating with existing systems like their Service Desk system. The technology which they would choose also needed to provide the content through natural language search and not depend on FAQs or pre-authored content in order to lower the cost of ownership and provide knowledge to end users faster.

Xirrus decided to chose iSolve due to its capabilities like Intelligent natural language search; Unique solutions grouping for simplified presentation; Seamless integration with existing information sources and applications and Deployment in days.

http://www.techsupportleaders.com/

Rogue Antivirus Program Comes With Tech Support

According to researchers at Symantec, once users have installed the program, they see a screen, falsely informing them that their PC is infected with several types of malware. That's typical of this type of program. What's unusual, however, is the fact that the free trial version of Live PC Care includes a big yellow "online support" button.

Clicking on the button connects the victim with an agent, who will answer questions about the product via instant message.

Symantec says the agent is no automated script, but in fact a live person. This lends an "air of legitimacy" to the program, said Marc Fossi, a manager of development with Symantec Security Response. "Obviously if they've got live tech support, it must be real," he joked.

The tech support doesn't help much, though. According to Symantec, the support staff simply try to convince victims to shell out between US$30 and $100 for the product.

This isn't the first time a fake security product has been spotted offering tech support. Another company called Innovative Marketing operated a call center to support its security products, including a program called WinFixer. According to security experts, Innovative Marketing's tech support technicians acted in the same way as Live PC Care's, trying to reassure victims that they were buying a legitimate product.