Re: Indian IT Industry
Posted: 11 Oct 2015 19:39
AMZN seems to be in hiring spree. In last 2 years, 5 managers from group has moved to AMZ in Bangalore/Chennai
Consortium of Indian Defence Websites
https://forums.bharat-rakshak.com/
"We're far from convinced that Dell acquiring and/or merging with EMC is a good idea, but if it did what kind of entity would we be looking at?
The crux of the matter is just how much overlap Dell is willing to endure. And the answer may be "lots". Dell's made much in recent months of giving customers choices. Exhibit A is the company's willingness to sell customers a conventional switch or a white box switch running a variety of operating systems. Exhibit B is its vast range of servers that come in just about every shape, size and configuration (and with ARM perhaps on the way).
But it's hard to see Dell enduring the considerable overlap in products it shares with EMC."
Problem is how to get access to AMZN BLR from the US? A recruiter lady contacted me from naukri and then said she would forward my resume. Then asked if I had interviewed with them in the last year and I said yes. But not in BLR though. That was the last I heard from her. These people don't even have the courtesy to say that they cannot forward my resume for whatever reason. They just disappear. Some things in India just have not changed.Rajesh_MR wrote:AMZN seems to be in hiring spree. In last 2 years, 5 managers from group has moved to AMZ in Bangalore/Chennai
http://piie.com/publications/briefings/piieb15-3.pdfFinally, and most importantly, are the TiSA negotiations. The aim of these talks is to reduce barriers that
inhibit trade and investment in services. The United States and European Union are leading the TiSA negotia-
tions. China asked to join the agreement in 2014; the European Union supported the request but the United
States balked. At fi
rst, US offi cials argued that China might impede ongoing services negotiations like it did
for some time in the ITA2 talks. In fact, US offi cials wanted upfront commitments to services reform, given
the sparse liberalization undertaken by China in the General Agreement on Trade in Services in the WTO. As
a consequence, US offi cials did not remove their block on Chinese participation in the TiSA even after US and
Chinese officials announced a breakthrough in the ITA2 negotiations in November 2014.
In our view, the US position is counterproductive to US interests. Chinese objectives in the TiSA are mark-edly different than those in the ITA talks. In ITA, its domestic firms are divided between supporters of liberalization, especially those that import high-tech components for their increasingly sophisticated manufactures,
and industrial producers, who want to maintain existing import barriers. In TiSA, the underlying motivation
of Chinese officials is to complement and reinforce domestic reforms being implemented incrementally since
the Third Party Plenum in November 2013. In other words, China has a vested interest in the success of the
TiSA negotiations. If the United States opened the door for Chinese participation, it would put pressure on
other major developing countries to follow suit, especially India and Brazil. If these core members of the BRICs
bloc joined TiSA, the deal could then easily be extended to the entire WTO membership and substantially upgrade WTO commitments to liberalization of trade and investment in services. Given the strong competitiveness of many US service companies, successful conclusion of services trade pacts would open substantial new growth opportunities for US exports to China and the broader Asia-Pacific region.
But India is lacking… Let us start by looking at academic research. We do find pockets of excellence. There is some critical mass of machine learning researchers in IISc. They can collaborate to tackle hard and interesting problems and publish world class results. Also, in some of the IITs, such as IIT Delhi, we find some people in machine learning including those who have returned with a foreign education. IKDD CODS [11], a conference in data science with world class standards, started in India in 2013.
Objectively, we looked at the total papers in the top 13 machine learning conferences in the last 15 years (see figure 1). All put together, India produces lesser papers than a single world class university in China – the Tshingua university. We do one-third of Carnegie Mellon University of USA. Our total research papers have been 745, China is 3956 and USA is 19,000+. We rank 15th by the number of documents we produce, with a Singapore, a Spain, an Israel and a Canada bettering us (see figure 2). We have a lot to catch up and only a disruptive mission based approach can make this happen.
Let us look at industrial research, where the picture is even starker. China produces 10x more papers, with Singapore being twice and US being 50 times ahead. New companies [12] are the engine of growth and have the potential to create disruption and maximum business value. In India, we could only find 12 papers from 5 startups in the last 15 years! One of it is Aspiring Minds - our work on programming assessment and spoken English assessment at KDD. Another notable is Strand Life Sciences, with some high quality work in Bioinformatics, Infibeam in e-commerce and S&I Engineering pushing the frontiers in computer vision. Both Strand and SI are companies that came out of IISc and are great examples to emulate. Compare this to USA or China: a Linkedin has 17, Facebook 15, a Baidu 22, Alibaba 4, Tencents 3, Renren 2 followed by a long tail of companies. No wonder MIT Technology Review’s top 50 smartest companies have 7 out of the top 10 from US, 3 from China and none from India! One may note that much of the open source software and libraries for storing, handling, searching and analyzing big data has come from new companies and not universities. The same is true for recommender systems to an extent [13].
Startups need to invest in research specifically in the area of machine learning. They need to follow the examples of (and even outperform) a Facebook, a Baidu, a Tencents and an Aspiring Minds. These companies have separate data science research groups. This will let them have a sustainable business edge, be disruptive and globally competitive. Otherwise, they we will be ripped off, once again [14], by new innovations happening in other parts of the world. The speed of innovation and disruption is much faster now – we need to keep running to be at the same pace!
sum wrote:Good article on growth of China in tech domain:
How a Nation of Tech Copycats Transformed Into a Hub for Innovation
Precisely. I was just thinking of the same last night after reading the ARDE New Family Munitions tender. Looks like most of the work involved is CFD simulations which can be done on a PC. So perfect for IT/Engineering Services Co to get their feet wet. I would bid the tender even if the company stands to lose out some money. Opportunities to work on projects like that will NEVER EVER come from US/EU. I think IT-Vity companies are so used to USD-INR conversion rates that it is simply unimaginable for them to work at INR-INR prices. They rather pine at US Senate increasing H1 fee visa costs shamelessly...Singha wrote:the mentality of the typical revered tech cos is very centric toward either copying US model or serving the US/EU market(higher billing rate) than slogging for DRDO, ISRO or any govt entity here. projects rather than even a small product like a USB stick that can stand on it own feet and be sold in millions
Nope. Aviation industry is on gradual decline in US as mentioned by Manja saar several times. Mech, Aero etc. were never the mass employers for later immigrants (90s, 2000s) like IT was. There always will be handful of opportunities but it wasn't as easy as IT folks for whom any major company was willing to hire & sponsor H1 along with GC. For ex: major Auto OEMs like Ford, Toyota rarely hire foreign nationals on H1. They do make use of staffing agencies which in turn hire H1s...But for majority of desis at least, the ripe sector for an immigrant in recent times has been IT industry.I will say it again - we are at the tail end of the h1 thing. maybe in non-IT branches like mecha, aerospace, materials, chem there is still opportunity for h1 if someone does a phd/ms there but IT field is too saturated and there are enough locals including kids in the coding pipeline and another million or so stuck in the GC pipeline who are not going anywhere fast.
One has to really admire their vision & determination. Even on MIL-Aviation scene, they have J-10/JF-17/J-16/J-15/J-20/J-31/ARJ/Comac C-919 major programs going on. They are aggressively pursuing indigenous activities in all sectors. Here in desh, both Govt & Pvt. Sector have been very lethargic in that aspect.if you look at cheen they had a clear product focus to displace things and stand on their own by hook or crook.
It's the mindset problem. Senior IT wallahs in Bangalore/Hyd are from 90s or early 2000s and they lack startup mentality. India's startup revolution will be driven mostly by young engineers who graduated in the later part of the last decade. That's when I observed an increase in number of people in my social circle wanting to start their own companies and some of them were even successful. In the early 2000s startups were unheard of.Bade wrote:Why are not senior IT wallahs from the big-5 in India willing to get out from the existing IT model and do Indian projects. They must have made enough to not feel 'insecure' in case their new ventures fail as they have a fallback option. Or maybe it will take one more generation to become huge risk takers.
It ain't so trivial saar. One who has not handled this specific type of store-separation simulations might take months just to get the validation case right. Even for experienced company with decent resources readily available, it will be 8-12 months long project at least. And you will need real powerful machines to run those simulations or buy computational time on some cluster (CFD needs large number of processors with about 2GB RAM per processor).Zynda wrote: Precisely. I was just thinking of the same last night after reading the ARDE New Family Munitions tender. Looks like most of the work involved is CFD simulations which can be done on a PC. So perfect for IT/Engineering Services Co to get their feet wet. I would bid the tender even if the company stands to lose out some money.
Nilesh, thats exactly my point. Companies like TCS have the resources to build the required infra as well as to hire some key personnels who can compress or accelerate the validation process. The experience gained will be hard to put a value on.nileshjr wrote: It ain't so trivial saar. One who has not handled this specific type of store-separation simulations might take months just to get the validation case right. Even for experienced company with decent resources readily available, it will be 8-12 months long project at least. And you will need real powerful machines to run those simulations or buy computational time on some cluster (CFD needs large number of processors with about 2GB RAM per processor).
My experience with ARDE guys is they ask for moon in shoestring money. What I find funny is companies like TCS can very easily get such projects. They can afford to do it even for free as a ice-breaker. But they bid (if they bid) with very high quotes. Apparently, their logic being they have to quote premium values just to maintain reputation, or some nonsense thing like that.
They way I see it is, they do not want to dirty their hands with challenging work when they can print $$ by doing same old repetitive "bread & butter" jobs. Unless the $$ dry out, at-least the big companies will not look for such low hanging fruits. I feel there is lack of 'strategic' thinking in Indian IT/Tech industry, both as an organisation and also as an individual. (To be honest I am using very civil language here, otherwise I am very critical of our IT wallas ).Zynda wrote:
Nilesh, thats exactly my point. Companies like TCS have the resources to build the required infra as well as to hire some key personnels who can compress or accelerate the validation process. The experience gained will be hard to put a value on.
Honestly, like KJo had mentioned, many folks (outside of TCS) do not have a good opinion about them. All these reputation is a false excuse. In fact they can build up their reputation by taking on such projects. TCS Aerospace as well as Infy are sitting on their bumbs twiddling thumbs currently with no projects in the pipeline.
I think this is exactly the problem. Think like a shareholder of xyz ITvity company, and (if you apply this thinking to the direction of the company) the company will continue on current path for years/decades to come- desi ITivty is two decades old and counting, and there are no signs that US outsourcing will reduce long-term (so no incentive to change direction from current path). In fact, think like a shareholder of any company and one will probably not look beyond 1-2 years out (or, one quarter- if you are an analyst tracking 'company performance for Wall St'; or 1 week, if you are into buying-selling shares; or one day if you are a day-trader).mahadevbhu wrote:^^^
Guys, please think like a shareholder of TCS, which I am sure a lot of you are already.
Do not disagree with some other things you wrote but the original post made by zynda (?) was about some sort of simulations and this should probably should not be conflated with capital investment related to MatSci.I was earlier in MatSci and used to be a lab grunt in the US. But when I saw that the amount of fixed asset investment into facilities was going to be very large for me to make a dent in any startup type of a setup , I moved fields and got into IT.
Good question. In addition to what has been written by nilesh, maybe Dileep would have some perspective on this. Now that the 'thought-leaders' Elon Musk and Bezos have made splashes in non-ITvity areas (SpaceX and Blue Origin), let's see if traditional engineering becomes the new paradigm-shift.Bade wrote:Why are not senior IT wallahs from the big-5 in India willing to get out from the existing IT model and do Indian projects. They must have made enough to not feel 'insecure' in case their new ventures fail as they have a fallback option. Or maybe it will take one more generation to become huge risk takers.
..but..but.. dont you know? He answered the question himself in the speech...wait for it..... 'The Global Delivery Model' and 'The 24-hour workday'. And before the came up with these gems, he had proceeded to list 10 technologies that came out of MIT that changed the world (things like GPS, bionic prosthesis, microchip, RSA encryption etc.) as if in comparison.nileshjr wrote:Some time ago Narayan Murthy criticized IITs/IISc etc for not having any Earth-shaking innovation in 60 years. Question arose in my mind, did Infosys churn out any innovation which at least shook Bangalore if not the whole damn Earth?? Atleast I have seen none.
SriKumar: You and Zynda are underestimating the capital intensive nature of the CFD simulation and validation. What if the quote calls for wind tunnel validation of a model? Several (a score or a dozen) models - this after reducing the design space through hundreds or even thousands of simulations to reduce the design space (using steepest descent or conjugate gradient or newton iterations - one has to prove continuity for convergence and if possible convexity so that simple steepest descent like schemes work - with material non-linearities, temp induced stresses, fluid structure interactions, and multiphysics - varying scales of material properties - thrown in) need to be built, mind you physically not some computer simulation stuff, and tested in a wind tunnel with real life loading and accurate measurements and validate.SriKumar wrote:Do not disagree with some other things you wrote but the original post made by zynda (?) was about some sort of simulations and this should probably should not be conflated with capital investment related to MatSci.
I always thought, with all the n number of codes and the technical expertise we have in our R&D establishment (which is quite impressive), we should have had a national mandate for consolidating this CFD/FEM/CAD capabilities into a good user friendly software package which then can be given out to Indian nationals as freeware or at nominal fees. Either a govt organisation with mandate (a la CDAC/CDOT) or a private company which will develop the package with the help of the Scientist/Researcher community can do this task. Initial few years GoI can fund the development and later it can sustain on license fees (large number of licenses at smaller fee).vayu tuvan wrote:
If you want to license CFD codes from the usual suspects - Star/CD, Fluent (part of ANSYS), MSC, Hyperworks - they eat you up with not only per seat but per processor yearly licenses. Their monopoly can be broken. There are some efforts afoot in the US and India to do that. If you wait for a couple of years, I think it will be rewarded with a pleasant surprise.
Well..... a couple of things. 'Capital intensive' is a relative term. There is a context to my response. Please read my response to mahadevbhu carefully. I merely said that using MatSci equipment as an analogy to demonstrate capital intensive nature for performing simulations is an incorrect analogy. Even a carpenter might consider acquiring his tools of trade as being capital-intensive- power saw, jack-plane , chisels of various kinds, drill bits...well you know the drill...vayu tuvan wrote:SriKumar: You and Zynda are underestimating the capital intensive nature ....SriKumar wrote:Do not disagree with some other things you wrote but the original post made by zynda (?) was about some sort of simulations and this should probably should not be conflated with capital investment related to MatSci.