Archive for May, 2010
Mahindra Satyam Needs 2 More Years to Become Fully Functional BPO in India
Satyam Computer, which was taken over by the Mahindras a year ago and renamed Mahindra Satyam, is still facing major operational challenges, says CEO CP Gurnani. He pointed out that it will take the company two more years to rejoin the race with TCS, Infosys and Cognizant, and reach the desired level of efficiency.
“At the time of acquisition, we had presented a three-year transformation plan. The company still needs another two years to level out on some scorecards. It has been structurally reorganised to reduce the management layers between the CEO and a trainee engineer from 14 to seven. These changes have happened for transparency, collaboration among teams and for better customer centricity,” he said.
Mahindra Group VC Anand Mahindra and Tech Mahindra CEO Vineet Nayyar—along with corporate affairs minister Salman Khurshid—flew down to Hyderabad on Monday to mark the first anniversary of Satyam’s takeover by the Mahindras. The toughest challenge facing Mahindra Satyam is of course attrition, very much like that in other IT companies. It also has to grapple with bothersome issues like client concerns and account restatements.
Analysts say while the industry average attrition is 13-14 %, the company’s attrition rate could be higher at 30%. While there has been some client issues, the firm says it has been able to retain almost all customers post takeover. Mahindra Satyam is, however, hopeful of meeting the financial restatement deadline, slated for June end. “There are other aspects related to the recovery of Mahindra Satyam that we have to tackle with either our law or that of another country. Whatever could be creatively and constructively done, and in collaboration with whichever wing of the government, has been done. We are trying to ensure that things can move fast,” said Salman Khurshid.
On the other hand, Anand Mahindra is more bullish about the company’s prospects. “I don’t see any reason why we should not aim for the top… While we were working on recovering ground, people were building their companies. But we also have a secret weapon that is the mission orientation of people at Mahindra Satyam,” he said.
Aegis Starts BPO Operations in Kashmir
Aegis, a business process outsourcing (BPO) company under the Essar Group umbrella, commenced its operations in Kashmir recently.
Post-militancy, this is the first time that a venture of such magnitude has been undertaken in the Valley.
Set up at the Rangrate IT Park near Srinagar, the BPO centre boasts of the latest technology and offers world-class facilities in line with other Aegis centres across the globe, company president Sudhir Agarwal said.
He said that the company has recruited 200 employees from the Valley to fulfill its commitment of providing employment to the local youth.
Agarwal said that Aegis Srinagar has already tied up with Vodafone. “The Srinagar office will serve domestic clients, including telecom service providers and financial institutions,” said the Aegis president, who provides strategic advice and guidance to teams across centres in India, Philippines, South Africa, Australia and Sri Lanka.
He said that Aegis Srinagar will offer direct and indirect employment opportunities to over 2,000 youths from the Valley once it becomes fully operational. Lauding Aegis state president Zahoor Malik, Agarwal said that he had ensured the “seamless introduction” of Essar Group’s ventures in Jammu and Kashmir.
Malik, in turn, praised the state government for helping Essar establish the centre. “The government provided Aegis Limited with the space it required. From the foundation stone-laying by Chief Minister Omar Abdullah to helping us commence operations, the state government has always been by our side,” he said.
Noting that the state-of-the-art Aegis BPO centre was spread over an area of 22,000 sq ft, he said that local youths were recruited not only for the BPO centre but also departments pertaining to housekeeping, transport, centre development and maintenance.
Elaborating on the technical aspects of the BPO, Aegis senior vice-president Faisal Durani said that the capacity of the Srinagar centre is being enhanced from 250 to 500 seats.
Customer service executives and call centre agents are inducted into the BPO centre only after being trained extensively for a month, he added.
IT Inc Created 1.25 Lakh Jobs Last Quarter
The IT/BPO sector not only created more employment opportunities in the last three months of the previous fiscal but workers engaged in this segment also saw the maximum rise in earnings, a government survey said.
According the survey during the September-December quarter, about 5.67 lakh jobs were created in this sector while another 1.25 lakh jobs were generated in the January-March quarter this year.
The survey conducted by the labour bureau under the ministry of labour and employment, covered eight sectors which were affected by the global slowdown including IT/BPO.
In terms of earnings also, it said, “The maximum increase in earnings was also seen in the ITO/BPO sector where it increased by 9.3% during the January-March period.
The survey said that overall job increase in eight selected sectors was to the tune of 0.61 lakh in the January-March period.
Infosys Worried About Euro Woes
IT bellwether Infosys said the ongoing sovereign debt problem in the Eurozone region is a matter of concern for software companies.
“Clearly there are concerns with our clients about what is happening in Europe…we already have seen that the European companies have responded slower than our US clients after the recovery. I think the European crisis would continue for sometime and that is definitely a cause for concern,” Infosys chief executive and managing director Kris S Gopalakrishnan said.
Currently, Europe contributes about 25 per cent of Infosys revenues. “Our European exposure is mostly to Britain, Switzerland, Germany, France and to the Nordic countries and about 25 per cent of our revenues come from Europe,” he said.
To a query, Gopalakrishnan remained affirmative that they are well on growth track. “If you look at the results from the last two quarters we have seen sequential growth of about 5-6 per cent and we are now recruiting,” he said.
Elaborating, he said the company would offer increments in June and they are looking at overall recruitment of 30,000 in this financial year. “We are on target,” he added.
On expansion plans he said, the company is looking for additional facility in Bangalore. “Yes we are looking at additional facility in Bangalore and as soon as something is lined up we can talk about it,” he said but declined to elaborate.
Microsoft Upgrading Hotmail Email Client on Web
Microsoft Corp is trying to make Hotmail cool again.
The free Web mail service soon will be switching to a new approach that Microsoft hopes will give Hotmail an edge over rival offerings from Yahoo Inc and Google Inc
The upgrade is expected to be available by July or August and it will automatically sort incoming messages into different categories devoted to users’ key contacts and Internet social networks. It will also provide previews of incoming photos, videos and other material without having to open an attachment or click on a link.
Other tools are being added to make it less cumbersome to send photos, videos, documents and other attachments to e-mail recipients. Another tweak is supposed to make is easier to sync Hotmail on mobile phones.
It’s all part of the most extensive overhaul to Hotmail since Microsoft bought the service 12 years ago, said Chris Jones, a Microsoft executive who is overseeing the renovations.
“Our service wasn’t doing the best job that it could,” Jones said during a Monday preview of the makeover.
The new features are supposed to enable people to spend less time managing their inboxes and more time enjoying and digesting what’s in the messages.
Microsoft is hoping the added convenience will help the users overcome the perception that Hotmail was growing stale as Google and Yahoo added more bells and whistles to their free Web mail services.
Even as it made relatively few changes, Hotmail remained the world’s most used service with 360 million users, according to statistics complied by comScore Inc, Yahoo ranks second globally with about 284 million users followed by Google’s Gmail at 173 million users.
Now Microsoft thinks it might have shot of supplanting Yahoo as the top Web mail service in the US (Yahoo’s e-mail service has 95 million US users compared to 47 million for Hotmail and 43 million for Gmail, according to comScore).
Hotmail’s most significant changes will provide new ways to look at photos and videos sent through e-mail. Microsoft expects this feature to be particularly popular because it says 55 percent of Hotmail’s storage is consumed by photos sent as attachments.
The new technology will detect when an e-mail contains a photo attachment and automatically display a thumbnail of the image (or images) at the top of the message. Hotmail will provide similar previews when it detects links to photo-sharing sites Flickr and SmugMug or to video-sharing sites YouTube and Hulu.
Other changes are designed to make it easier to send photos, video and other Web content. A new insert bar will allow users to send up to 10 gigabytes — about 200 photos each containing 50 megabytes — by uploading them to Microsoft’s free online storage service Skydrive, where they can only be viewed by the recipients of the e-mail.
Videos and other Internet material can be found through a new panel that will connect Hotmail to Microsoft’s Internet search engine, Bing. The videos and other Bing-generated content can then be inserted into an e-mail with a mouse click. The e-mail recipient will then be able to see the video or other material without having to click through a Web link.