Good to see IT companies atleast atttempting to catch up with efforts put in by Apple, google and Tesla. The top 5 giants have hugh warchest and they should use it develop IP like this.Singha wrote:infy ceo came in a driverless golf cart today built in their mysore office. anyone know what tech is used ?
In my KB, they pay 3 months Basic pay if they ask you to leave very next day and thats pretty much it. But if you want to leave very next day, You will have to pay 3 months full salary.Singha wrote:things that Govt could mandate:
- minimum 30 days severance pkg or upto the notice period whichever is longer.
- you can ask ppl to leave the next day but pay them for 30 days
- health insurance cover must be there for 3 months and emp has option of paying something for 3 more months. kind of a desi cobra. often aeging parents are tied to this.
- employer must give a relieving letter without coercive tactics do this, do that.
- maximum notice period 45 days.
- illegal to keep degree certificates and passports in custody
In US folks have guns, building security over there is practically nil. In the famous chip company, there was fear that some of the laid off colleagues will come back and shoot at them laterSingha wrote:A section of cos in massa send a security guy to escort out a laid off staffer.cube is packed by admin and sent later.
But that is over there. Does not look good asking person to put in papers or else termination . Implied dhamki is termination letter will set a nasty tone to spoil the entry into next job
definitely need some sort of independent 'employment verification' thing that one can use to verify employment without having to beg HR.Singha wrote: - employer must give a relieving letter without coercive tactics do this, do that.
Last weekend, I was in Pune just after the suicide of a techie who was feeling depressed as he saw a very bleak job landscape for IT professionals. During my visit, I met several people in Pune and the common talk was about the IT jobs scarcity / layoffs.
The previous week, I was in Chennai where I met a senior manager heading marketing for a software services company. Her CTC was Rs 35 lakh. She had come for a job change and when I asked her why she wants to leave her present employer, a top 10 software services company, her response was shocking.
She said in the last six months, in her department alone, she was asked to send off 6 people – 25% of her total staff. She is having sleepless nights because she does not know when the Axe will fall on her. According to her, the company has identified, a supporting service like Marketing as expendable. She is a single mother and she does not know where to go if she loses her job. The point is she is still employed, but the Axe looming over her Head is something which is very difficult to describe.
As a Headhunter, I keep meeting people across industries looking for jobs. Most of them are in the middle management level and above. The people who meet me / call me on phone are in general those who are in dire need of jobs.
These days, I find that the number of calls / people who come and meet me has increased 5 fold. The reason either they have lost jobs or the sword is hanging.
Four weeks ago, I met an engineer from IIT in a 5 star hotel in Mumbai with the added qualification of a MBA from IIMA. He was 33 years old. To his credit, he was not asked to leave. He was an entrepreneur who ran out of funds. In the last eight months, he has been living on his wife’s savings. She is pregnant and now on leave.
I could see the desperation on his face. He was willing to take up a job anywhere in India. Regarding salary, I told him that he should not negotiate and try to get a CTC matching his peers. Reason he is unemployed. The advice I gave him was, first get a job, don’t worry about location or CTC. No potential employer will underpay you. Even if they pay you less in the beginning, knowing your strength, they will increase your salary so that they don’t lose you.
The other day a Fintech COO came to my office in Bangalore. He is 46 years, engineer, MBA from a reputed organisation. He has worked in some of the top FMCG companies in India – MNC and Indian. 2 years back, the start up bug caught him. He joined a Fintech company as a COO. Unfortunately, the company ran out of funds and he had to leave.
The anecdotal incidents I have described above is something which I am witnessing for the first time in my 30 years in Executive Search in India.
For the first time, across sectors – IT / BPO / Telecom/ Retail / BFSI / Autos etc etc , companies are laying off people in large numbers.
In the IT industry alone, we expect about 100,000 to 200,000 jobs to disappear every year for the next 3 years. Beyond 3 years it is difficult to predict what will be the extent of job losses.
Recently, Tata Motors, gave a VRS for middle managers. CTS did the same some time back. Ashok Leblanc did this exercise 2 years back.
I am aware of a top steel company having identified 7000 people excess on their rolls.
Some of the top industrial Groups in India have decided to deploy / redeploy people within, rather than go for outside recruitment. Obviously, specialised positions are exempt.
As a person whose future depends upon Executive Recruitment, I keep close watch on the happenings globally.
Two years back, the World Bank, predicted that in India 60% of the jobs as we know will disappear. In China, according to the same study, it will be 70%. In the western countries, the jobs which will disappear will be around 50%.
We will be soon in the area of driver less cars, robots cooking at McDonalds/Dominos.
While we can say that India is different, let us not forget that the banking industry, before our eyes, we have seen ATM’s have replaced cash tellers in banks. Further, PAYTMs are fast replacing ATMs.
We are entering an era of jobless growth globally. Robots will increasingly play more and more important roles in our life.
Yesterday I was watching Elon Musk speaking about need to control Robots. According to him, if we don’t, the Robots will rule the earth. A scary prospect indeed.
So what do we do after 10 years when jobs will become increasingly difficult to get. Some experts are talking about UBI – Universal Basic Income. Already, some of the European countries are trying this out.
To conclude, I would say that things are not as bad as painted. There are silver linings among the dark clouds.
Knowledge workers will always be in demand. Today it may be big data, Hadoop, analytics, AI etc etc. I am told that an engineer who is well qualified and experienced in self driving cars can get a salary of US$ One million in Silicon Valley today.A mind boggling figures, isn't it for a 30 year old.
Coming to India, I see that this is a great opportunity for us to overtake the western countries due to our superior intelligence and education.
Kris Lakshmikanth is a Founder Chairman & Managing Director of The Head Hunters India Pvt. Ltd. Views expressed are personal.
New Delhi: The issue of massive IT job losses resonated in Parliament on Wednesday and members in the Rajya Sabha expressed concern over rampant layoffs. In its response, the government said it will work towards providing safeguards to the employees.
During the Question Hour in Upper House, Congress member Anand Bhaskar Rapolu raised the issue and sought to know about the steps the government was taking to protect the interests of the workers who were facing rampant and “unceremonious termination” of their services.
Responding to the concerns, Labour Minister Bandaru Dattatreya said the government would work to provide safeguards to the employees.
Dattatreya said the government was trying to provide social security and over one crore new workers have been brought into the ambit of the employees provident fund net. He said that an interest rate of 8.65% was being provided this year on EPF. The government was also focusing on portfolio management, he said.
During the discussion, members raised several related concerns about efforts required by the academia and industry to match demand and supply, need to increase placements, availability of faculty, among other things.
"If a company wants to hire 1,000 people in a quarter for things like data analytics, India is the only place where you will find people available at that kind of scale, and it will remain so," Sandeep Mathur, former Oracle India managing director, said. MNCs, he said, had long stopped coming to India for cost. "They need people to address their growth challenges and even automation codes have to be written by humans."
Cloud - whether it is a fad or not, it is having serious impact on traditional software delivery models. Infrastructure is being slowly shut down in large organisations to move to cloud. I am in the M$ side of things and they are seriously pushing cloud into a wide array of company sizes and they are seeing success. The traditional programming models targeting physical resources is being gobbled up by "client side" programming and that is a major shift and disconcerting to people who have been doing years of it. The current demand is for front-end development and I believe the churn is partly because of that.CalvinH wrote:How many here works in corporate IT in leadership roles? the ones who actually decide the budgets. I will prefer hearing from them and not from disillusioned consulting/services folks..
Here is the text of the mail released by the Infosys board today:
It has come to the attention of the Board that a letter authored by Murthy, the Founder of Infosys has been released to various media houses attacking the integrity of the Board and Management of the Company alleging falling corporate governance standards in the Company. The Board takes great umbrage to the contents of the letter and places on record the following:
• Murthy's continuous assault, including this latest letter, is the primary reason that the CEO, Dr. Vishal Sikka, has resigned despite strong Board support.
• Murthy’s letter contains factual inaccuracies, already-disproved rumours, and statements extracted out of context from his conversations with Board members.
• The Board assures its shareholders, employees, customers and communities that it is committed not to be distracted by this misguided campaign by Murthy and will continue to adhere to the highest international standards of corporate governance as it executes its strategy of profitable growth for the benefit of all Infosys stakeholders.
• The Board has been engaged in a dialogue with the Founder to resolve his concerns over the course of a year, trying earnestly to find feasible solutions within the boundaries of law and without compromising its independence. These dialogues have unfortunately not been successful.
• The Board declines to speculate about Murthy’s motive for carrying out this campaign, including the latest letter. The Board believes it must set the record straight on the false and misleading charges made by Murthy because his actions and demands are damaging the Company and misrepresent its commitment to good corporate governance.
FACT: Since Vishal Sikka was appointed as MD and CEO in August 2014, Infosys has delivered competitive financial performance through profitable revenue growth.
• Infosys has, under the leadership of Vishal, developed and articulated a strategy to transform itself to meet the rapidly changing needs of the marketplace in the 21st century. The Company was lagging significantly behind industry in growth rates when Vishal took over and now we are in top quartile from a performance perspective.
• Infosys has grown in revenues, from $2.13B in Q1FY15 to $2.65B this past Q1. This was done while keeping a strong focus on margins, closing this past quarter at 24.1% operating margin, beating some competitors for the first time in many years, and improving against nearly everyone in the industry.
• The revenue per employee of the Company has grown for six quarters in a row. Attrition has fallen, from 23.4% in Q1FY15 to 16.9% this past Q1, and high performer attrition is much lower than the overall Company attrition.
• The Company grew its $100M+ clients from 12 in Q1FY15, to 18 this past Q1, and increased its large deal wins from ~$1.9B in FY15 to ~$3.5B this past year. This has all been done while improving overall utilization (excluding trainees), to a 15-yr high this past quarter, and an all-time high including trainees, while improving our cash reserves, rewarding Infoscions with a new equity plan, and returning Rs. 19,000 Crores as dividend (including dividend distribution tax) over the last three years. This has all been done while improving standing with clients, to the highest ever in the 12 years with a jump of 22 points in CXO satisfaction.
FACT: Infosys has continued to maintain the highest standards of corporate governance that the Company is known for.
• The Board of Infosys is carrying out its shareholder mandate to be an independent board, working towards the best interest of the stakeholders.
• The Board has sought the counsel of some of the most respected governance experts and legal advisors in the world, which have thoroughly investigated all anonymous allegations and concluded that no wrongdoing occurred. For Murthy to imply – with no evidence whatsoever – that three well-respected international law firms, members of the Infosys Board and certain employees are engaged in some grand global conspiracy to conceal information is not tenable on its face. It is important to mention here that Murthy was interviewed as part of the investigation by Gibson Dunn & Crutcher LLP in pursuance of the investigation in the Panaya acquisition, and was invited and welcomed to provide any information or evidence he believed would support the allegations being investigated. He did not provide any evidence since none exists. However, he has not mentioned this is his media communication against the investigation.
• As previously announced by the Company on June 23, 2017, the Board thoroughly investigated each anonymous allegation with the assistance of highly respected external counsel and experts and determined that the allegations were entirely without merit. The Board will make no additional disclosure of the investigation report because further disclosure would be inconsistent with best corporate audit practices and would compromise the confidence of employees that they could report honestly, openly, and candidly to the company in any future investigation or legal matter.
• The Board also believes that any further use of resources and time on these matters would be a distraction for the Company and would enable those wishing unfairly to attack Company personnel to continue this harmful conduct. Therefore, the Board has formally closed the investigations of the anonymous allegations so that the Company can focus on strategy, performance, and the creation of shareholder value. The Board remains focused to continuing to support Infosys’s strategy, which it believes is in the best interests of the Company’s shareholders, employees, clients and communities.
FACT: Murthy’s has made repeatedly made inappropriate demands which are inconsistent with his stated desire for stronger governance.
Illustratively:
• Murthy has demanded that the Board adopt certain changes in policy, else he will attack board members in the public, which threat was carried out when the Board did not acquiesce;
• He has demanded that the Board appoint specific individuals onto the Board under similar threat, without appropriate disclosure and without regard to basic determinants of appropriateness or fit of the candidate for the role as a Board member;
• He has demanded operational and management changes under the threat of media attacks;
• Notwithstanding that the remuneration package of senior management was approved overwhelmingly by shareholders (including members of the promoter group), Murthy preferred his dictat to prevail with no place or tolerance for the outcomes of shareholder democracy.
• Murthy wanted the demands to be adhered to without attribution to him.
The Board has, in its fiduciary role to consider all shareholder inputs, treated each demand from Murthy as a suggestion and only acted on suggestions which we believed was in the best interest of the company and declined to act on others. Over time the demands have intensified, which when declined by the Board resulted in the threats of media attacks being carried out.
FACT: Murthy may be in the process of engaging in discussions with certain key stakeholders of the Company to further his criticisms of the Board and Management.
We are concerned that this type of campaign runs the risk of confusing investors and undermining the Company’s management efforts.
FACT: The Board is a fully independent Board, with professionals as its members who have been appointed by a clear majority of the shareholders.
• Given the commitment of the Board to remain independent and pursue a chosen strategy, the Board currently has no intention of asking Murthy to play a formal role in the governance of the organization.
• Co- Chair of the Board, Ravi Venkatesan has repeatedly over the past few weeks publicly stated his and the Boards support for Dr. Sikka. The Company categorically rejects any speculation or allegation of discord between the Infosys Board and Sikka.
Just got my first verified WhatsApp message — a flight ticket.
chetak wrote:about time that someone asked for explanations from param poojiya narayana murty.
He considers himself the boss of infosys for all other purposes anyway, no?? especially when questioning a legally constituted board on the strength of his really tiny minority holding.
Infosys under scanner for GST glitches
Infosys under scanner for GST glitches
By NAVTAN KUMAR | New Delhi | 11 November, 2017
The role of Infosys, which was assigned the work of creating, updating and maintenance of the GST portal, is under scanner as traders are complaining about its poor performance.
The role of Infosys, which was assigned the work of creating, updating and maintenance of the GST portal, is under scanner as traders are complaining about its poor performance.
Traders have decided to raise the issue before Finance Minister Arun Jaitley. The move comes following the GST Council reducing to just 50 the number of items in the highest tax rate of 28%, at its 23rd meeting in Guwahati this week. The Council decided to reduce the tax rate on 178 of the 228 items from 28% to 18%, with effect from 15 November. It also took many decisions to simplify the return filing rules to ease compliance burden, providing much needed relief to the traders’ community.
Praveen Khandelwal, secretary general of the Confederation of All India Traders, told The Sunday Guardian: “Even after four months of GST implementation in the country, the GST portal which was supposed to function properly from 1 July, is still working like an experiment project, causing immense harassment to the traders, who are very much disgusted with the portal. It is like a nightmare for us. We will take up the issue with the Finance Minister.” Khandelwal is also a member of the Advisory Group to Law Review Committee of the GST Council.
Khandelwal even went on to say that Infosys and other companies concerned are responsible for the failure of the portal and therefore, the government should conduct a probe by the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI), as to why they failed to provide an efficient portal. “It is like betraying the nation,” he added.
The trade body has demanded a third party audit into technical and other issues related to the portal. It has also urged the government to release a White Paper on the status of the GST portal. It said there should be investigation on what conditions the work was awarded to Infosys and other companies and negligence on their party for non-performance of the contract.
“It should also be investigated whether it amounts to any scam in destabilising the GST taxation system. The poor functioning of the portal has given a bad name to a good taxation system,” Khandelwal said, adding “it is because of the malfunctioning of the portal that traders are unable to become GST compliant”.
Khandelwal said that in the last three years, over Rs 1,400 crore has been spent on the portal, but the results have been far from satisfactory. “The failure of the portal could be gauged from the fact that the date for filing of GST return for July month has been extended up to 30 November, besides several other compliances. he added
An alumnus of VRCE (now VNIT)Vips wrote:The Little Known Story of How India’s First Indigenous Supercomputer Amazed the World in 1991.
In India, the name C-DAC (Centre for Development of Advanced Computing) has become synonymous with supercomputers, a term that denotes any computing environment which makes use of advanced tools, high computational speeds and efficiency to help researchers in different fields such as scientific R & D, weather forecasting, missile simulation, space science, pharmaceutical research and much more.
For the uninitiated, what really makes a Supercomputer “super” is a concept called parallel computing. Basically, parallel processing involves the breaking up of tasks into smaller tasks that can be processed in parallel. The end result is obtained by combining outputs from each processor.
Here is the story of how India’s first-ever indigenous supercomputer was made, a major milestone in modern India’s technological odyssey.
The supercomputer effort in India began in the late 1980s, when the US stopped the export of a Cray supercomputer because of continuing technology embargoes. During the 80s, USA and some other European countries had developed super computers, which were critical for developing satellites and nuclear weapons. These countries refused to transfer the knowledge of creating super computers to India, fearing the developing nation might use it to design missiles and warplanes rather than forecast the weather.
Faced with a technology-denial regime that denied its scientific community access to supercomputers, India set up Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in March 1988 with the clear mandate to develop an indigenous supercomputer to meet high-speed computational needs in solving scientific and other developmental problems where fast number crunching is a major component.
Following a specific recommendation of the Science Advisory Council to the Prime Minister (SAC-PM) to that effect, C-DAC was established as a scientific society of the then Department of Electronics (now the Department of Information Technology (DIT) under the Ministry of Communications and Information Technology).
To lead the project, PM Rajiv Gandhi turned to a man who hadn’t seen a ‘super’ all his life to build one in double-quick time. But Vijay Pandurang Bhatkar knew all about shortcuts: the country’s top number-cruncher had begun school directly in the 4th standard and still made it to the top. When Rajiv Gandhi met Bhatkar, he asked him three questions:
“Can we do it?”
Bhatkar answered, “I have not seen a supercomputer as we have no access to supercomputer, I have only seen a picture of the Cray! But, yes, we can.”
“How long will it take?”
Bhatkar promptly replied, “Less than it it will take us in trying to import Cray from US.
“How much money it would take?
Bhatkar replied, “The whole effort, including building an institution, developing the technology, commissioning and installing India’s first supercomputer will cost less than the cost of Cray.
Pleased, the Prime Minister gave the go-ahead for the project. Based in Pune, C-DAC summoned scientists from all over the country to work on one of India’s greatest technology projects.
Within three years, the extraordinary happened. With everyone involved working their socks off, C-DAC finally completed its work well within the proposed deadline. With components that could be bought off the shelves, in 1991, C-DAC rolled out India’s first indigenous supercomputer: PARAM 8000.
For the first time ever, a developing country had pulled off such a feat in advanced computer development. Needless to say, the world was shocked at this achievement. Many were doubtful about PARAM truly being a supercomputer. That’s when Bhatkar decided to take the PARAM prototype to a major international conference and exhibition of supercomputers. Here, it was demonstrated, benchmarked and formally declared a supercomputer. A US Newspapers published the news with headline, “Denied supercomputer, Angry India does it!”
A multiprocessor machine, PARAM 8000 was benchmarked at 5 Gflops, making it the second fastest supercomputer in the world at that time. It also costed a fraction of what the legendary US machine Cray did and performed just as well. So much so, that the US company which manufactured Cray had to slash prices to woo a nation it spurned just eight years ago!
PARAM 8000 also set the platform for a whole series of high-performance parallel computers, called the PARAM series. In 2002, PARAM 20000, or PARAM Padma, broke the teraflop (thousand billion flops) barrier with a peak speed of 1 Tflop. The latest machine in the series are the PARAM Ishan and the PARAM Kanchenjunga.
Installed at IIT Guwahati, PARAM Ishan can be used in the application areas like computational chemistry, computational fluid dynamics, computational electromagnetic, civil engineering structures, nano-block self assemble, climate modeling and seismic data processing. PARAM Kanchenjunga, stationed at NIT Sikkim’s Supercomputing Centre, is expected to be used for engineering research conducted by the faculty and students at the institute as well as researchers across the state. Interestingly, Param in Sanskrit means ‘supreme’!
Based on the Param series of supercomputers, Bhatkar has also built the National Param Supercomputing Facility (NPSF). This has been now made available as a grid computing facility through Garuda grid on the National Knowledge Network (NKN), providing nationwide access to High Performance Computing (HPC) infrastructure. He also initiated moves to have supercomputing in Indian languages and succeeded in doing so.
In 2015, Bhatkar was honoured with Padma Bhushan for his immense contribution in the field of science and technology in India.
Vijay Bhatkar’s and C-DAC’s efforts in this strategically and economically important area have thus put India on the supercomputing map of the world along with select developed nations of the world. As of 2016, many PARAM systems have been deployed in the country and abroad. Today, India is designing Petascale supercomputers, next only to USA and Japan. The crowning glory of India’s advanced computing and IT capability, once achieved this computer will be a symbol of India’s undeniable position as an IT superpower.
However, while showing great promise in the field of supercomputing, it’s obvious that India needs to do better and it will. The government of India is working towards this and has initiated the Rs. 4,500-crore National Supercomputing Mission. Under the mission, the Government of India empowers an ambitious target of installing more than 70 high-performance computing facilities in the country. These computers will be connected by the National Knowledge Network. The first of these high-computing machines is being built by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) and is expected to be ready by August 2017.
Within three years, Indian scientists succeeded in creating a supercomputer known as the Param. The latest model of the Param is 28 times more powerful than the Cray that India had agreed to buy, but far less powerful than the most advanced Cray models.
Among the 14 Param buyers are universities in Canada, Britain and Germany, as well as two research institutes in Russia that were attracted by Param's relatively low cost -- $350,000 compared with the $10 million price tag on a basic Cray model.
In a shocking sting operation, The Tribune newspaper has revealed how the entire Aadhaar database – which is 1 billion Indian citizens private data, is now available for mere Rs 500, and it takes just 10 minutes to get access to it.
But the worst is not over – By paying just Rs 300 more, you can also get a software, which can print out Aadhaar card of any Indian citizen you wish.
Tribune correspondent posed as Anamika, and contacted a Whatsapp number: 7610063464 to buy Aadhaar database. The person on the other end identified himself as Anil Kumar, and asked her to create an email id, and gave her a Paytm number to send Rs 500.
Exactly after 10 minutes, the Tribune correspondent received an email: “You have been enrolled as Enrolment Agency Administrator for ‘CSC SPV’. Your Enrolment Agency Administrator ID is ‘Anamika_6677’.”
After the password arrived in a separate email, she was able to access billions of Aadhaar database, from her computer.
After she gave another Rs 300, the guy called Anil Kumar accessed her computer via Team Viewer and installed the software which can print those Aadhaar cards as well.
So much for ‘complete security of Aadhaar database’!
How Did This Breach Happen?
No, this data breach wasn’t a hack and no data was stolen. The culprits here are exploiting access rights of over 3 lakh village-level enterprise (VLE) operators.
During initial days of Aadhaar enrollment, Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (ME&IT) had hired around 3 lakh VLEs under the Common Service Centres Scheme (CSCS) for enrolling citizens into Aadhaar.
Now, in the month of April last year, such initiatives were banned, and only post offices and bank premises were allowed to be used for Aadhaar enrollment.
These lakhs of VLEs suddenly became jobless, and in order to get some additional income, they started offering ‘Aadhaar services’ to edit or modify details of others. But, some of them crossed the line and started offering full access to Aadhaar database, using their IDs and passwords. The correspondent from Tribune received the ID and password of one such VLE from Rajasthan, as the URL in the software pointed to “aadhaar.rajasthan.gov.in” for printing the Aadhaar cards.
This is a major security lapse, as UIDAI should have terminated all such VLEs access from the UIDAI database.
BENGALURU: About 196 IT deals worth more than $100 million each, and adding up to $51 billion, are coming up for renewal in 2018. Of these, some 12 are multi-billion-dollar deals, the largest of which is Siemens' $7.2-billion contract with French IT giant Atos, according to research firm Everest Group.
As in previous years, this is an opportunity for Indian IT firms that have been steadily increasing their share of global outsourcing contracts. Of the 196 deals, only four are currently led by Indian IT firms, though these firms may be present as secondary partners in some of the other deals.
Also, the opportunity for Indian IT sector is rising because many of the large deals today are being broken up into smaller contracts. Barring TCS, the others are typically not considered for billion-dollar deals, but if these same deals are broken up, the others get to pitch.
IT research firm ISG did a study in 2016 that analysed 180 deals to see what happened to incumbent vendors when a contract came up for renewal. It found that where clients choose to do competitive re-negotiations (and that's 66% of all contracts), the incumbents lost the entire contract in 47% of the cases. And in 32% of the cases, the incumbents witnessed a drop in scope with clients moving some part of the contract to new service providers.
ISG found that Indian service providers are also gaining through consortia deals that are led by large MNCs. "We found that large Indian providers managed to get around 30-35% of the share that the incumbents lost," said Rajesh Gupta, partner in ISG's India operations.
Jimit Arora, IT analyst in Everest Group, said the billion-dollar deals coming up for renewal have the following characteristics: Infrastructure transformation to cloud, government and defence contracts, integrated contracts (that combine application development & maintenance, analytics, etc), large, multiyear BPO or BPaaS (business process as a service) deals in relatively mature areas, and deals with asset/people transfer (such as the takeover of a global in-house centre of an MNC). "The vendors that will tend to continue to win will be the traditional global majors that can structure asset-intensive infrastructure deals (IBM, Atos, DXC, NTT Data). In the government and defence sector, you would not expect the Indian service providers to be as relevant. But you will likely see them succeed in categories like integrated deals, BPO/BPaas contracts or deals with huge asset or people transfer (think of TCS-Nielsen, Wipro-Atco)," Arora said.
However, the challenge for Indian IT service providers is the changing character of contracts, as clients move towards newer digital offerings where there are a number of newer players, and where some big players like Accenture are seen to have built greater expertise than the Indian providers.
London-based research firm Ovum's estimates for Indian IT's share of the global services market in 2017 suggests that there was at best a marginal growth from 2016. "A lot of the workload is being moved to cloud and that market is in the hands of vendors like AWS, Microsoft Azure, etc. The Indian providers and other systems integrators are doing the integration work and building things like analytics on top of these cloud-enabled workloads but the decline in traditional lines is eating up the double-digit growth rates they enjoyed during the last decade," said Hansa Iyengar, IT analyst with Ovum.
India’s supercomputing prowess moved up several notches Monday after it unveiled Pratyush, an array of computers that can deliver a peak power of 6.8 petaflops. One petaflop is a million billion floating point operations per second and is a reflection of the computing capacity of a system.
According to a statement by the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology (IITM), Pratyush is the fourth fastest supercomputer in the world dedicated for weather and climate research, and follows machines in Japan, USA and the United Kingdom. It will also move an Indian supercomputer from the 300s to the 30s in the Top500 list, a respected international tracker of the world’s fastest supercomputers.
The machines will be installed at two government institutes: 4.0 petaflops HPC facility at IITM, Pune; and 2.8 petaflops facility at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast, Noida.
The government had sanctioned ₹400 crore last year to put in place a 10-petaflop machine. A key function of the machine’s computing power would be monsoon forecasting using a dynamical model. This requires simulating the weather for a given month — say March — and letting a custom-built model calculate how the actual weather will play out over June, July, August and September.
With the new system, it would be possible to map regions in India at a resolution of 3 km and the globe at 12 km.
While inaugurating the facility at IITM, Pune, Union Science Minister Dr. Harsh Vardhan said Pratyush would be India’s “premier" HPC (high performance computing) and was a step up from India’s current peak capacity of 1.0 PF.
CRAYVaroon Shekhar wrote:Nice, which institute built this. I'm pretty sure it's not CDAC, and it's not imported. So did the IITM( Indian institute of tropical meterology) develop the computer. If so, very impressive, I thought the IITM was only involved in climate analysis, not in building supercomputers. So they 'beat' CDAC to the PETA level!
http://www.thehindu.com/news/national/i ... 363153.eceVaroon Shekhar wrote:I see, then it's a total import, or is there some Indian configuring involved? None of those news outlets is using the name "Cray", for whatever reason.
Report: AT&T under pressure to cut all ties with Huawei including 5G, Cricket Wireless deals
NEWSBY OLIVER CRAGG2 DAYS AGO 628
US lawmakers are reportedly encouraging AT&T to cut all commercial ties with Huawei over national security concerns.
A report citing two anonymous US congressional aides suggests any collaboration between the two for AT&T’s planned 5G network could be halted.
The sale of Huawei phones via AT&T subsidiary Cricket Wireless could also be impacted.
The bad news for Huawei keeps on rolling in. Amid allegations that its long-planned partnership with AT&T was scuppered by political pressure, a new report has now suggested that US lawmakers are pushing the US carrier to cut all commercial ties with the Chinese giant over national security concerns.
According to two congressional aides who spoke to Reuters, senators and House members are encouraging AT&T to ditch any potential plans to work with the Shenzhen-based firm on standards for its 5G network. AT&T is expected to roll out its 5G network by the end of 2018 and is competing with Verizon to become the first carrier to offer the high-speed service to US consumers.
The sale of Huawei devices via its subsidiary company, Cricket Wireless, is also mentioned as a point of contention for certain US lawmakers.
In addition, the report suggests that operator China Mobile’s FCC application for a US license, which has been pending since 2011, could be rejected amid similar fears of Chinese espionage.
The move would be another huge blow to Huawei should AT&T go through with the reported requests and would represent another hit to the firm’s public image. Huawei is no stranger to general accusations that it poses a threat to US security, but the past week has shown that those claims will be a huge barrier to the third largest smartphone manufacturer’s long-term plan to beat Apple and Samsung to the top spot.
CES 2018 was meant to herald a new beginning for the company in the US. Huawei had nailed down a deal with AT&T to launch devices in the region via a carrier for the first time, but it fell through at the last minute, forcing Huawei to announce that its latest flagship, the Mate 10 Pro, would only come to the US unlocked and without a carrier partner.
Reports began swirling that the agreement was abandoned by AT&T after Senate and House intelligence committees sent a letter to the FCC raising concerns over Huawei’s “alleged ties to the Communist Party as well as China’s intelligence and security services.”
Huawei’s CEO of consumer products division, Richard Yu, described the situation as “a big loss for consumers”, while also expressing disappointment that Huawei won’t be claiming any revenue via carrier channels – a market which amounts to 90 percent of smartphones sales in the US.
The new report also comes days after a U.S. Representative proposed a new bill that threatens to ban the U.S. government from working with any providers that use Huawei (or ZTE) equipment, again citing security concerns.
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The " highly skilled professionals " means PhD with lot of research papers, or as per their Unreasonable expectation someone who has been nominated to Nobel prize for any stem.Peregrine wrote:
The Japanese government, Maeda said, will be issuing Green Cards for highly skilled professionals, the first of its kind in the world, thereby, providing people to get permanent resident status in as short as one year. This is one of the fastest granted right of residence in the world.
As far as visa issuance is concerned, Japan has eased the rules for Indian travellers with effect from January 1, 2018.
As per the new norms, the applicants do not require to submit their employment certificate and letters of explanation for multiple-entry visas. Also, the number of documents to be submitted has been considerably reduced to three. In case if a person has travelled to Japan twice in one year, the documents will be reduced further to two only – i.e. just your passport and the visa application form.
. It's not for "highly skilled JavaScript professionals".