OBAMA ONLINE SUPPORTERS KEY TO PUSHING HIS AGENDA

HonoluluThe Economic Times President-elect Barack Obama's top asset in pushing his agenda will not be his Cabinet secretaries or aides, but rather his online network. Obama's political e-mail list tops 13 million names, a digital force that the incoming White House can tap to push for his legislation, tamp down critics or bolster popular support. It's also a way for Obama to reach into every state, every city, and every neighborhood. A study released today found that a quarter of Obama voters said they would continue to work online to...

NINE TRENDS FOR IT IN 2009

Chandra Ranganathan, Chennai The Economic Times By most counts, 2008 was a bad year for IT companies, mostly due to the credit-induced economic crisis in the US, their biggest technology market. As we ring in the new year, ET spoke to IT company officials, analysts and industry experts to get a sense of the trends to watch out for next year in IT services, on the demand and the supply side. 1. Geography: India offers a spring of hope While company officials and analysts say much of the business would continue to happen out of the US,...

A MIRROR TO THE PAST, A BEACON FOR THE FUTURE

MG ArunThe Financial Express Asked in an interview at the start of this decade whether the economic reforms introduced in 1991 had fundamentally changed corporate culture in India, Ratan N Tata, chairman of the $50-billion Tata Group had said, “I think the environment has become more competitive. That has made Indian industry more concerned with its customers, the quality of its products, and its brand image in the marketplace.” Nine years on, these attributes hold true for Indian companies that have made a mark on the global scene,...

HP ENTERING THE FIELD OF DATA WAREHOUSING

TexasFinancial Chronicle Shortly after taking the helm of Hewlett-Packard in early 2005, Mark Hurd realized that despite being one of the world’s leading technology suppliers, HP had an embarrassing and crippling technology problem. There was no easy way for executives to get a picture of what was happening in the entire company. Each unit of the computer giant based in Palo Alto, California, had its own systems for tracking information in crucial areas like inventory, component costs and marketing expenditures. No central system pulled...

INDIA, US COS JOIN HANDS TO ELECTRIFY BIJLEE RESEARCH

Gireesh Chandra Prasad & Soma Banerjee, New DelhiThe Economic Times Fancy owning cars painted with particles that will cool your vehicle drawing solar power and still not leave a trace of carbon in the air? Or buildings that remain cool while consuming far less energy than they do now? These and several other sustainable energy solutions for a wide variety of everyday needs could become a reality with India and the US deciding to bring together scientists in both the countries with support from corporate groups. The Ministry of Science...

STATE TO REVIEW IT PROJECTS

Jayajit Dash, Kolkata & Bhubaneswar Business Standard The Orissa Information Technology (IT) Department will review the progress of the ongoing and the upcoming IT projects of the state in a meeting scheduled for January 6. “At the meeting, we will review the status of construction work of the existing IT players and also that of projects announced by MindTree and Genpact who have announced their development centres in the state”, Pradipta K Mohapatra, the state IT secretary said. Mohapatra indicated that the IT players had deferred...

ROLTA ACQUIRES PIOCON TECH

MumbaiThe Economic Times The Hindu Business Line Mumbai-based IT firm Rolta has acquired Piocon Technologies, a Chicago-based firm that has customers in the oil and gas sector. The acquisition gives Rolta access to solutions, which address critical operational needs of refineries. Rolta shares were up 1.4 percent on Monday at Rs 111 on the BSE. ET had reported that Rolta was close to finalising the deal in its Monday edition. Currently, all of Piocon’s customers are based in the US and Rolta plans to expand this to the Middle East...

PIOCON ACQUISITION TO GIVE ROLTA A REFINED EDGE

Ranjit ShindeThe Economic Times Rolta’s acquisition of US-based Piocon Technologies couldn’t have come at a better time than this. The acquisition would strengthen Rolta’s engineering design business at a time when new capital expenditure is hard to come from refineries given slowing demand for petroleum products and global credit crunch. At the same time, at over $10 million, the deal is too tiny to significantly pull down Rolta’s financial performance for the next few quarters until it fully integrates Piocon’s operations with itself....

COMPUCOM BAGS RS 8 CRORE ORDER FROM RAJASTHAN

MumbaiBusiness Standard Compucom Software said on Monday it has bagged an order worth Rs 7.67 crore from Rajasthan government for the supply of various software packages to 2, 500 government run schools in the state. The order has been awarded by Secondary Education Department of Rajasthan, Compucom Software said in filing to the Bombay Sock Exchan...

EU CLEARS SPANISH REGULATION ON FAST INTERNET

Madrid, December 28, 2008 The Economic Times The European Commission has cleared a Spanish draft regulation on wholesale broadband Internet access, which will allow Telefonica to limit access for rivals to parts of its new fibre-optic network. In a press release posted on the European Commission's website Dec. 24, the Commission said it had given the Spanish regulator, the CMT's, draft the green light, but added it still had concerns on certain elements of the regulation. The Commission said it believed wholesale broadband access for Telefonica's...

HOW TO MANAGE DATA CENTRES

Harsimran Singh & Deepshikha Monga, December 29, 2008The Economic Times With a focus on going green, reducing the escalating power costs and lessening downtime to zero, the challenges to managing a data centre are manifold. IT consolidation and transforming the data centre has become the imperative need for a CIO. According to an IDC study, more than 40% of data centres will be replaced within the next 10 years. Over the next five years, power failures and limits on power availability will halt data centre operations of over 90%...

TACKLING E-WASTE: A MAJOR CONCERN

Papia Lahiri & Harsimran Singh, December 29, 2008The Economic Times Conservation of environment is a major concern for nations. Initially disbanded as the task of the 'green brigade', the corporate world has woken up from its deep slumber. Embedded as an important postulate of social responsibility among most organisations across sectors, adherence to environmental sustainability has emerged as a major consideration for them. Expansive IT infrastructure is a cardinal component of most business processes and has improved productivity...

K'TAKA PLANS HARDWARE PARK IN KOLAR, TUMKUR

Chennai/Bangalore, December 29, 2008Business Standard The Karnataka government plans to set up electronics hardware parks in Kolar and Tumkur respectively. Katta Subramanya Naidu, Karnataka Minister for Information Technology and Biotechnology has promised this to industry bodies led by Manufacturers’ Association of Information Technology (MAIT), Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Kassia. He said, in addition to the land the industry bodies have asked for incentives in the form of land on a long lease of 30 years, instead of...

CORE PROJECTS MAY ACQUIRE PRINCETON’S K12 FOR RS 125 CRORE

Apurv Gupta, Mumbai, December 29, 2008The Economic Times Core Projects and Technologies is in advanced stages to acquire K12 Education Division, part of US-based Princeton Review, one of the leaders in online education. The deal size is estimated to be around $20-25 million, or about Rs 100-125 crore, according to sources close to the development. Although senior Core Projects officials declined to comment on the transaction, people close to the development said that Mumbai-based Core plans to finance the acquisition through debt. An...

REMOTE INFRASTRUCTURE MANAGEMENT: NEXT LUCRATIVE VERTICAL FOR IT

Harsimran Singh, New Delhi, December 28, 2008The Economic Times Blue, green, yellow and orange. Thousands of multicoloured wires pour down from behind tall black racks, stacked in rows, bathed in white light in a giant hall. Hundreds of tiny green bulbs blink simultaneously in servers stacked in the racks on top of a white hollow floor which circulates chilled air from beneath, creating an image, straight out of a Hollywood Sci-Fi. Trillions of megabytes of binary data circulates in the servers in India’s largest data centre at HP R&D...

POSSIBILITY OF ‘PRESCRIPTIVE’ ROUTE FOR CORPORATE GOVERNANCE

Chennai, December 28, 2008The Hindu Business Line The Satyam-Maytas deal issue has set back regulation of corporate governance as authorities are now looking at a ‘prescriptive’ route rather than self-regulation, according to R. Vasudevan, Director of Inspection and Investigation, Ministry of Corporate Affairs. Referring to the $1.6-billion deal in which Satyam Computer Services had planned to acquire Maytas Properties and Maytas Infrastructure — controlled by the sons of Satyam Computer’s chairman, B. Ramalinga Raju — but was dropped...

WIFI TOPS BEST TECHNOLOGICAL INNOVATION POLL

London The Economic Times Surfing the net has become a lot easier since wireless Internet has come into being, and now Wi-Fi has rightly topped the poll for the greatest technological advance of the last decade, according to a survey. With 35.5 percent votes, Wi-Fi has beaten Sky+, Sat Navs, iPods and Blackberries to win the poll conducted by a leading gadget magazine. In the survey by 'Stuff' magazine, the readers were asked to choose the greatest technological innovation of the past ten years. More than a third voted for Wireless...

CREATING ‘INFORMAL’ IP NORMS

Shamnad BasheerMint Current intellectual property (IP) regimes are excessively formalistic in their orientation. Not too surprising, given that their creation and sustenance has largely been the preserve of lawyers trained in formal legal thought, with little input from other disciplines such as science, sociology or economics. One watches with deep anguish as such regimes take on a life of their own, forgetting the simple yet hard truth that they are not ends unto themselves, but are mere means to help serve a greater end, i.e., fostering...

FREE SOFTWARE OPERATING SYSTEM FOR ENGINEERING STUDENTS

HyderabadMint The Times of India Engineering students who are tired of installing and uninstalling various software pertaining to their course of study can now hope to breathe easy. A new “free software Operating System” developed by ‘e-Swecha´, a variant of Linux--a popular open source OS, promises to solve their problems concerning the installation and uninstallation of software for the purpose of study. Richard Stallman, the founder of the Free Software Foundation and GNU Project, will launch the e-Swecha initiative, on Wednesday,...

HP LAUNCHES THREE MODELS OF UPS

BangaloreThe Economic Times HP announced the launch of three models of the HP Uninterruptible Power Supplies (UPS) products specially designed for the growing businesses. The design and features of the models T1000V, T1500 and R3000v focus specifically on ease of use, manageability and reliability. "HP's new power protection UPS products have a strong role to play in helping businesses better handle the challenges of power management", said Rajesh Dhar, Country Manager, Industry Standard Servers, HP India. This new product line from...

INTERNET SERVICE STILL SPOTTY IN PARTS OF MIDEAST

Dubai Business Standard Spotty Internet service continued to plague the Middle East as it began its work, with service providers rerouting data detoured by severed underwater cables. Emirati provider Etisalat says service is at about 85 percent capacity yesterday -- the same as the previous day. The Abu Dhabi-based company has arranged to redirect some of its data traffic through South Asia, spokesman Saeed al-Badi says. Dubai-based Emirates Integrated Telecommunications, better known as Du, said Saturday it was rerouting data and international...

MUTHUKUMAR RAMALINGAM, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, DEXTRASYS TECHNOLOGIES SPEAKS

ChennaiThe Hindu Business Line Besides academic qualifications and cutting-edge skills, one must possess qualities such as honesty and raw intelligence. Companies do an acid test to check whether the candidate has the right attitude in the first place. Since the global economy is more connected than ever before, India is also feeling the slowdown pressures, with tightening job situation as an outcome. “However, if one possesses all these qualities, companies would not hesitate to hire that person,” Muthukumar Ramalingam, Managing Director...

LARGEST SEZ IN IT SECTOR TO COME UP IN CITY

Prakash Bhandari, Jaipur The Times of India The special economic zone (SEZ) of Rajasthan Industrial Investment Corporation (RIICO) and the Mahindra World City, located at Kalwara village off Ajmer Road, about 17 km from Jaipur city, could emerge as the country's biggest single location SEZ in IT sector. Currently Bangalore boasts of the biggest IT hub, located on 510 acres, spread over different locations of the garden city. But the Jaipur's IT SEZ would be located on a 750-acre plot, which will make it the biggest of its kind in the...

HEXAWARE REVAMPS BIZ STRUCTURE

MumbaiThe Hindu Business Line The Economic Times (Delhi edition) Business Standard City-based IT services firm Hexaware Technologies has revamped its organisational structure and strengthened its management team by appointing new heads for its business units. The mid tier software exporter will now focus on three distinct business units: banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI), travel and transportation and emerging verticals. The Emerging verticals unit will focus on seeding the manufacturing and healthcare domains and will...

4 CHIP COS READY FOR EXPORTS

Appaji Reddem, Hyderabad The Economic Times (Hyderabad edition) Even as chip maker SemIndia has shelved its plan to set up $3-billion chip manufacturing facility due to the ongoing credit crunch, four other chip makers are on course to export their products, according to government officials. Four firms — Solar Semiconductor, XL Telecom Energy, KSK Energy and TF Solar — will export their products from next month, said BP Acharya, chairman and managing director of Andhra Pradesh Industrial Infrastructure (APIIC). The combined investment...

PORTABLES GIVE CLOUD THE CLOUT

Boston, December 22, 2008Deccan Chronicle (Chennai edition) Chances are the mobile phone tucked in your pocket, the lightweight laptop in your backpack, or the navigation system in your car are under a cloud. That means much of your vital data is not just at your home, at the office or in your wallet, but can easily be accessed by hooking up to the huge memory of the Internet ‘cloud’ with portable devices. “There’s a lot of buzz about this. Everybody wants to be connected to every thing everywhere,” said Laura DiDio, an analyst with...

IT-ENABLED EDUCATION IN THING, SAYS EXPERT

Pradeep Sharma, Chandigarh, December 22, 2008The Tribune With information technology (IT) making inroads into every sphere of life, the traditional system of education is on its way out paving way for the integrated IT-enabled and innovative system of education. “In fact, the chalk and talk system fails to address the inquisitiveness of today’s children brought up in a highly-digitalised audio-visual atmosphere. With that end in mind we have come up with the millennium learning system (MLS) to transform the teaching-learning process through...

NANOTECH PROMISES EXCITING FUTURE

Chennai/Bangalore, December 22, 2008Business Standard The science & technology sector in India has shown steady growth in-spite of the ongoing global recession and there are exciting opportunities ahead in the nanotechnology sector, said C N R Rao, Chairman of the Science Advisory Committee to the Prime Minister of India, while speaking at second edition of Bangalore Nano, a conclave for nanotechnology in Bangalore. Detailing the nuances of this growth he said: “Even though science is not attractive monetarily, many youngsters have...

SEZS WAIT FOR BIG BOOSTER PACKAGE FROM GOVT

Malena K Amusa & Shantanu Nandan Sharma, December 21, 2008The Economic Times Despite the much-talked about slowdown in India, developers of special economic zones embrace an optimism and say it will become tangible if the government adopts a series of incentives to save the future of these pockets of prosperity. SEZs, which were originally conceived by the earlier BJP regime, are championed by the ruling UPA government as a dream policy to spur Indian exports and achieve inclusive growth through generation of employment. Now, L B...

1,000-ACRE LAND BANK FOR INDUSTRIAL TOWNSHIP

Shimoga (Karnataka), December 22, 2008The Hindu Development of a land bank of 1,000 acres with infrastructure facilities for setting up of industries is being mooted in the district. The Department of Industries is looking out for the land for the purpose in response to the enquiries from potential investors who have expressed a desire to set up their industrial units in the district. Meanwhile it is proposed to allot two acres of land for the establishment of the Software Technology Park in the Special Economic Zone (SEZ) being developed...

IT SERVICES COMPANIES NEED TO TRANSFORM THEIR BUSINESS MODEL

Rachana Khanzode, December 22, 2008The Financial Express The impact of global economic slowdown is not limited to large IT companies but mid-caps are feeling the heat too. Industry veterans are getting ready to face the challenge. Arvind Thakur, the chief executive officer of NIIT Technologies is one among them. Being a part of NIIT since its inception, Thakur is responsible for the software and key organisational functions of the company. A graduate from IIT Kharagpur and postgraduate (industrial engineering) from NITIE, Bombay, Thakur feels...

BHASKAR SILICON TO SET UP PHOTOVOLTAIC PROJECT

New Delhi, December 22, 2008The Hindu Business Line The Government has received application from Bhaskar Silicon to set up a PV project that would encompass polysilicon, silicon wafers, cells and modules, at a proposed investment of Rs 5,900 crore. This takes the total number of proposals received by the Centre under Special Incentive Package Scheme to 17, sources said. “Bhaskar Silicon filed its application in mid-November,” they pointed out. Company officials could not be reached for comments. Meanwhile, the sources said the IT...

BUY FACEBOOK DATA FOR RS 60

LondonThe Economic Times A probe by security experts has revealed that cyber criminals tend to work up a fortune by selling stolen Facebook profiles for an amount as low as 89p. According to Trend Micro specialists, hackers break into social networking accounts to steal personal information of users to sell them off to criminal groups who then use the details to send "spam" messages to million others. The wrongdoers tend to send an invitation to account holders to view videos or pictures of family and friends, which on being clicked...