We are not apologetic about hardware

What are your new responsibilities as services director AP&J? How big is the market for Dell?

My responsibilities will continue as the country manager for Dell India but now I will have an extented role as the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) director for services sales and marketing at Dell. Primarily, it is in sync with the companys reorganization and the strong merger of Perot Systems for the services play.
Asia Pacific with Japan (APJ) poses a huge opportunity for us, with around $100 bn services market. Asia is a large fragmented market with no clear winner in the space. The larger players are not very large in share. It is very much like the India market where leading brands own around 10% each.
The core idea is to leverage on our strong relationships in the hardware business and focus on services play. We aim to grab significant market in this geography. After the merger, I am looking at applications, IT outsourcing and growing our existing relationship to the next level.

What is the plan now for Dell? What would be the key strengths of the company vis-a-vis competition?

Like I said before, Dell has a strong relationship with the enterprises. We are not apologetic about hardware. They have helped in building the $60 bn Dell where it stands today. The journey started with hardware and data centers to building the server-storage solutions. We have gradually expanded our portfolio with project based services to infrastructure management, to furthermore help desk and services.
Over the past few years, Dell worked on building a complete portfolio with a slew of mergers and acquisitions. This included our biggest acquisition of Perot Systems ($3.9 bn). Now, we are at strong position, where we have SAN, IP storage, service, networking and many more offerings.
We bought IP storage-area network vendor EqualLogic in 2007. We recently announced the acquisition of Ocarina Network, a storage optimization, de-duplication technology company and Scalent, a virtual infrastructure management company. A few other acquisitions in recent past were Silverback, KACE Networks and MessageOne. Dell is well placed in terms of offering cloud and virtualization services.
We emphasize on open solutions. And being vendors our server can sit on any network, be it a Juniper or Brocade unlike with Cisco servers or a few HP blades. Our solutions are very competitive. Our businesses achieved profits during 2009.

Despite the talks, the actual implementations on virtualization have been comparatively low. What do you believe are the key factors?

Yes, the implementation on virtualization is happening at a lower rate at present. But given the buzz about various technologies, virtualization would soon catch up with companies.
One of the key requirements in the industry is to fill the gap between a CIO and a CTO. Industry needs to have CVOs, a chief virtualization officer, who look across the infrastructure from network, server and storage.
He can ensure seamless and dynamic consolidation in a heterogeneous environment. IT managers need to upscale themselves to that level. But the challenges here are talent, training, the right tools and the mindset.
Also, the solution/service providers need to do that confidence building exercise to help the customer take the step towards virtualization.

Dell has announced that they would launch their range of smartphones in India. Could you share an idea of when and how you plan to take it forward?

We are very much working towards our smartphone. We are on schedule, but yet to decide on the launch date. We have rolled request and advertisement asking the distributors and various developers on building applications for the product. The market positioning for the products would be more into solution and application play, that would feature more than the basic email applications.

CIOL
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

 

We do not focus on just one area

Krishnakumar N, CEO, MindTree shares about MindTrees strategies and also its role as a development partner with the technology team of UIDAI

How have you positioned MindTree, as compared to first generation IT services companies from India?

We are not here to compete with anybody. Instead, we are building our capabilities on some of our core strengths. We believe that these strengths and focus will help us in achieving our goals. We have divided our business into two segmentsservices and product engineering. Currently, services business is contributing 55% of our revenues and rest comes from product engineering. So, instead of focusing on just one business segment or technology, we have identified few areas to focus on. For instance, we have infrastructure management services, testing and knowledge services under the services business. In product engineering, we work on wireless products and platforms, cloud technologies and embedded technologies. Our Aztec acquisition strengthened our position in this space since Aztec has a strong focus on software.

Which segments or verticals are you addressing under the services business?

We focus on manufacturing, travel and transportation, BFSI and government verticals. Under the government vertical, we are focusing only on India market.

Recently, MindTree got a deal from UIDAI (Aadhaar). It is said that you are looking at getting another deal from UIDAI.?

Yes, MindTree will work as the development partner to build the Aadhaar application in collaboration with the technology team of UIDAI and other stakeholders. It will also carry out the ongoing services of development and enhancement to the Aadhaar application. I have to say no to your second part of the question since there is a certain turnover which is required to participate and MindTree does not qualifies in that sense.

How are your markets doing? Are you looking at any new region? Is Euro crisis affecting your business?

Middle-East is one of the key regions for us. IT services market is growing in this region and we are strengthening our partnerships and increasing sales force to address government and manufacturing sectors. Our US and Europe business is going as usual. Euro market has not affected our revenues since we do not have too much exposure to European markets.

What is cooking in your R&D center?

Our R&D services business unit spearheaded by Janakiraman offers technology building blocks, in the form of IP and frameworks, and helps bridge technology gaps and bring products to market faster. Around 45% of our revenues comes from this unit. We are working on next generation smartphones and wireless equipments. We would not like to launch these products under MindTree brand. These would be developed for our partners and we work like an OEM.

Could you tell about MindTrees work in assistive technology area?

We are associated with the spastic society in various ways from the inception of MindTree. We believe we have to touch and enable lives of differently abled people. In a small way, we are working towards it. We have developed some tech devices that allow children with muscular skeletal disorders to connect with computers. MindTree foundation has taken this initiative.
(MindTree has two products to help the differently abled break free of their constraints. ADITI helps people with hand or muscle coordination difficulties to interact with a computer screen. Another product is called KAVI, an interactive communication device for people with special needs used as a speech generation device via text-to-speech and picture to speech software options).

What is the role of Mr Soota and Mr Bagchi in MindTree now?

Ashok soota mainly works on strategies and future growth plans for MindTree. Subrato Bagchi has taken the role of grooming next generation leaders for MindTree

Srinivas R/CIOL
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

 

Lenovo follows a protect and attack strategy

Amar Babu, managing director at Lenovo India, talks about the companys experience, the struggle, and the road ahead

You have been the managing director for Lenovo India for three years now, how has the journey been so far?

Last couple of years have been the period of change for Lenovo. Initially, our responsibility was to build up a strong team. The recession was knocking and the market was going down. Everywhere, businesses were getting affected, and coupled with the ongoing transition at Lenovo globally, the ramifications were worse. We were losing market share and figures were going down.
But with the right team in place, we started action upon the loopholes and gaining back the lost share. Lenovo grew by 2.5% last year, being one of the fastest vendors.

How has the market changed post recession? How did you cope with the issue?

Last year was tough. Companies had stopped investing, but the budgets are coming back. A lot of demand is coming from IT.
During this time, we were closely working with the China team and replicating their approach in the market. Few major things were fixing the product gap, increasing the brand and awareness activity and re-structuring the relationship with channels. We distinguished between the partners on the basis of the type of business. Now, our rebate plans were differently customized for a retail partner and a regional distributor.
It is true that with the slowdown, the market for low-cost models grew faster than premium models. There was pressure on margins, but we looked at increasing the operational efficiency at work and innovation at products to check that.

What is the new strategy of the company?

We realized that Lenovo enjoys a distinctly high market share in China market (around 30%) and a stronghold in the enterprise business (legacy customers from IBM). Lenovo globally drafted the market strategy of Protect and Attack, wherein we protect our strengths and attack the opportunities.
As part of this strategy, we continue to keep our focus on China and enterprise business, and expand our business in consumer and SMB segments and emerging markets like India. So in India, we are heavily investing in product, brand, channel, service and infrastructure. We have around 150 exclusive stores and would continue expanding it.

How do you plan to move forward with this strategy?

Last one and half years, we have expanded in many countries. We segmented our products broadly under three categories namely Thinkpad and ThinkCenter for the enterprises, the Lenovo Band V series for the SMB and the Ideapad and IdeaCenter for the consumers. The long term plan is to achieve distinct leadership position, become numero uno in the enterprise category. We have more than 1,000 enterprise customers.
At present, we have 7.9% of market share in overall, and are targeting double digit market share in next few quarters. In SMB and consumer section, we are seeing lower single digit growth, which we plan to increase manifold. On the other hand, we are working on building channel strength with customized stores, branding supports, etc. We now have Lenovo Exclusive Stores (LES).

Lenovo launched smartphone LePhone in May? What are the India plans regarding this, and how is Lenovo positioning itself in this category?

The entire market is split into two major categoriesPCs and mobile Internet devices. There is a proliferation of devices. We now see new entrants like Ipad, slate and smartphones.
LePhone is part of our increasing focus on Internet devices, especially the smartphone category. We are studying the market and would launch it in the country accordingly. Infact, Lenovo is also working on a smartbook. During one of the technology exhibitions, we had showcased our smartbook, on Qualcomm Snapdragon architecture. At that time, we used our in-house Linux based platform, but now we are working on Android.
Lenovo has clearly stated to work on Intel/AMD for traditional computing and Android would be our partners for the Internet devices.

Akanksha Prasad/CIOL
maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in

NIIT Technologies Appoints Pratibha Advani as CFO

NIIT Technologies appointed Pratibha K Advani as the chief financial officer. Advani joins NIIT Technologies from Barclays Shared Services (a subsidiary of Barclays Bank) where she was the chief financial officer. Her previous experience includes working as the vice president, finance and CFO at GE-SBI Cards. She was also the sourcing and productivity leader at GE Money, India. Advani started her finance career with ITC and spent fifteen years with their hotel business.

Patni Appoints Mehta as EVP

Patni appointed Manish Mehta as EVP and chief delivery officer, applications services. Mehta will be part of the executive leadership team and will be responsible for application development and maintenance, enterprise software, and system integration functions. In a twenty-nine years long career graph, Mehta has worked for companies like Mahindra Satyam and TCS.

Alcatel-Lucent Appoints Seth as Country Head

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) announced that it has appointed Munish Seth as the country head for its Indian business. Seth takes over from Vivek Mohan, who now heads Alcatel-Lucents global services business. Seth has twenty years of expertise and experience in the telecom industry and has been in charge of customer solutions and support for Alcatel-Lucents Asia-Pacific region before.

SpectraSoft Apponts Bhargava as CEO

SpectraSoft Technologies appointed Nagaraj Bhargava as chief executive officer. He will be responsible for providing the vision and leadership to grow the companys business across multiple revenue streams, expand the companys geographical spread and increase market share. Bhargava was part of the leadership team at SAP India for eight years and played a significant role in the growth and success of SAP in India.

Microsoft Appoints New MD

Microsoft appointed Amit Chatterjee as the new managing director of its development center in India as Srini Koppolu, corporate vice president and managing director leaves this month after spending twenty-one years with the company. Chatterjee, who is the general manager for the visual studio test and lab management team at Microsoft India Development Center (MSIDC), has been with Microsoft for the past twenty-two years and will now expand his responsibilities to lead MSIDC. He will continue to be based out of Hyderabad and will report to S Somasegar, senior vice president, developer division, Microsoft Corporation.

WNS Appoints Ronald Strout as Chief of Staff

WNS Holdings (NYSE: WNS) appointed Ronald Strout as chief of staff and head, Americas. He will represent the group CEOs office in the Americas. Strout will accelerate WNSs renewed focus on client interactions, leadership development, creation of new offerings, market penetration of new services and driving strategic initiatives.Strout has over three decades of experience in building and transforming businesses in large and small corporate environments.

Tulip Telecom Appoints Jain as CEO

Tulip Telecom appointed Sanjay Jain as its new chief executive officer. In his new role, Jain will be driving business augmentation, operations and service excellence for the company. Jain will be spearheading the management with all function heads reporting to him. In his previous role at Tulip Telecom, Jain served as the chief financial officer for almost a year.

Oracle Names Mark Hurd as Co-president

Oracle has hired former Hewlett-Packards CEO, Mark Hurd to help lead the database software maker in a pivotal moment in Oracles thirty-three years history as it tries to muscle in on more of HPs turf. On August 6 this year, Mark Hurd unexpectedly resigned from the position of co-CEO, HP, after a sexual harassment probe found that he had a close personal relationship with a HP contractor who received improper payments.

DirectFN Names Samant as CIO

Keshav Samant has joined as the chief information officer at DirectFN. He was earlier VP and head, IT with Financial Technologies.

CIO of Reliance

Communications Becomes VP, IBM
Sumit Chowdhury, the erstwhile CIO of Reliance Communications and CEO of Reliance Tech Services has joined IBM as the vice president and partner.

Paraphora BIV Appoints Bagdadi as ED

Anwer Bagdadi has joined as CIO and executive director of Paraphora BIV. He had a six years stint with CFC India Services as the senior vice president and chief technology officer before this.

CR Narayanan Joins Tulip Telecom as CIO

CR Narayanan has joined as CIO of Tulip Telecom. He was the senior vice president and CIO at DS Constructions prior to this.

Entertainment World Developers Appoints Singh as VP

Vishwajeet Singh has joined as vice president, IT, Entertainment World Developers. He had a eight years stint with FCm Travel Solutions as their national manager, IT before this.

Kumar Joins Adhunik Group as EVP

Sanjeev Kumar has joined as executive vice president, group CIO, Adhunik Group. His immediate past assignment was as the CIO of Polygenta. Before Polygenta, Kumar was the CIO of Philips India.

Bansal Joins Luminous Power Technology

With more than two decades of experience, Virendra Kumar Bansal has now joined as the group CIO at Luminous Power Technology. Prior to this, he was with Jubilant Organosys as vice president and chief of corporate IT.

Mandal Back in India as a CIO

Anup Mandal has joined HT Media group as the group CTO. He was the CIO of India Today group before he moved to UAE and joined the Arab Media group as a CIO.

Codan Appoints Patni to Provide Managed Services

Patni Computer Systems announced that it has secured a seven-figure contract over three years to provide managed services around some of Scandinavias core insurance platforms. The Codan Group is part of the insurance giant RSA Group and operates in Denmark, Sweden, and Norway. Codan invited five leading outsourcing companies including Patni to bid for application management contract in September 2009, shortlisted three vendors in March 2010 and made its final decision to appoint Patni in June.

Wipro to Drive UCO Banks RRB Initiative

Wipro Infotech, the IT business of Wipro in India, Middle East and Africa, announced that it has signed a seven year total outsourcing contract with five RRBs sponsored by UCO bank, a leading public sector bank. The contract is for implementing a Core Banking Solution (CBS) across 803 branches of RRBs under UCO banks sponsorship. The RRBs under the sponsorship program are Jaipur Thar Gramin Bank (JTGB), Kalinga Gramya Bank (KGB), Bihar Kshetriya Gramin Bank (BKGB), Paschim Banga Gramin Bank (PBGB) and Mahakausal Kshetriya Gramin Bank (MKGB). The scope of services includes building, hosting and managing the underlying infrastructure at the Data Centers, in addition to implementing the Finacle CBS across 5 RRBs. Wipro would also provide network management and user training across all 803 branch locations as a part of the Total Outsourcing relationship.

Samsung Unveils PX 2370 LED Monitor in India

Samsung Electronics announced the launch of its latest 70 series PX2370 LED monitor in India. With unique functions such as Magic Lux and Magic Angle, it provides the most optimized viewing experience, with nature like picture quality, auto adjustable brightness, and extended viewing angle. The product has gained recognition across the world including CES Innovation Award 2009 and International Design Excellence Award (IDEA) in 2009. The PX 2370 is the worlds first LED monitor to support RGB 100%. The Magic Lux function adjusts brightness by sensing surrounding intensity of illumination for releasing optic stress. Magic Angle offers the same picture quality from any angle and supports five mode angle management. The monitor is just 16.5 mm in thickness enabling the user to save space. When touched, power buttons come to life with a moonlight glow. In addition to this, the monitor also has a Magic Return function whereby if two monitors get disconnected owing to issues with the cable and the signal disappears, the function automatically transfers the content from the secondary screen to the original monitor, thereby avoiding loss of content. The Samsung PX2370 monitor is priced at Rs 15,300.

Zapak Games to Distribute the Title in India

A new generation of formula one games will come to high definition consoles and PC as Codemasters have announced that F1 2010 will be released on 24th September 2010 for Xbox 360 video game and entertainment system from Microsoft, PlayStation3 computer entertainment system and PC Games For Windows. Zapak games, the licensing and merchandising arm of Zapak Digital Entertainment will distribute the title in India. As the official game of the 2010 FIA Formula One World Championship, F1 2010 will include all of the official teams, drivers and circuits from the coming season. F1 2010 will feature the return of seven times Formula One Drivers World Champion Michael Schumacher, the introduction of several new teams, and the brand new Korean international circuit that will host the 2010 Formula One Korean grand prix.

Auction for 3G Spectrum

Auction for 3G services was held in all twenty-two telecom circles. The total reserve price kept for spectrum auction was Rs 14,330 crores for 3G services and Rs 5,250 crores for BWA services. Total amount raised by the government through spectrum auctions is Rs 67,718.95 crores from 3G services and Rs 38,542.11 crores from BWA services. This amount includes the share of MTNL/BSNL.

IBM Becomes HMELs Strategic Partner

IBM announced that HPCL-Mittal Energy (HMEL), has selected IBM as its strategic partner in the design and implementation of a state-of-the-art Manufacturing Execution System (MES) for their zero residue refinery. HMEL is investing more than $4 bn to build the green refinery, which will be able to process 1,80,000 barrels of crude oil per day.

Central Bank and Wipro Gets Together

Central Bank of India and IT major Wipro announced a five year total outsourcing agreement to provide state-of-the-art, technology driven, core banking solution for seven sponsored Regional Rural Banks (RRB). One of them, Uttar Bihar Gramin Bank is the biggest RRB in India and has a large presence in Bihar.
The engagement is of vital importance to Central Bank of India in order to achieve its objective of financial inclusion and bringing low cost and efficient banking services to the rural masses. The Centralized Core Banking Project is expected to facilitate efficient internal operations for the seven RRBs. The core banking project would integrate 2,000 sites which includes branches, extension counters, satellite offices, regional offices, head offices and back offices in a phased manner. The software will be provided by Infosys using Finacle with other standard products such as ALM, govt business, Internet, ATM, EMS, AML, etc.

AppLabs Acquires ValueMinds

AppLabs acquires ValueMinds, an award winning developer of automated testing tools. With this acquisition, AppLabs looks forward to improve the productivity of its workforce, help customers accelerate ROI on quality assurance and increase QA process efficiencies.
With the acquisition, Ashwin Palaparthi, founder/chief architect of ValueMinds will join AppLabs as the vice president, innovation and will run several key initiatives of the company such as its centers of excellence in test automation, performance testing, and security testing.

Essar Group Completed Acquisition of AGC Networks

Essar Group, a multinational conglomerate, has successfully completed acquisition of AGC Networks, including closure of the offer representing 20% of AGC Networks outstanding shares. The total deal size was $61.4 mn. The acquisition was done through Essar Capital Finance (ECF) with Essar Services Holdings (ESHL). Following the acquisition of Avayas 59.13% stake in AGC Networks and the subsequent open offer, Essars stake in AGC Networks, previously known as Avaya GlobalConnect, has now become 79.13%.
With AGC Networks under its fold, Essars IT is now a formidable player in the solutions integration space with a wide array of services portfolio and best-of-breed vendor partnerships. The business worldwide has about 2,000 employees operating out of nine countries.

GTL Infra calls off tower deal with RCom

Indias GTL Infrastructure announced that its deal with Reliance Communications to merge their telecoms tower businesses has been called off. The deal would have lowered Reliance Communications debt by $3.9 billion. In June, GTL and Reliance Comm agreed to combine their tower operations that would own more than 80,000 towers and have an enterprise value of over $11 billion.The non-binding term sheet signed by the companies expired on August 31, 2010.
Shares in GTL were down 3.65 per cent at 12.25 pm IST in a firm Mumbai market, while Reliance Comm shares slipped 1.75 per cent after gaining as much as 2.7 percent earlier.

Moser Baer Attracts Large Investment from Blackstone

Moser Baers energy business, Moser Baer Projects (MBPPL), a developer of power generation facilities with a diverse pipeline of thermal, solar and hydroelectric power projects has attracted an investment of Rs 13.5 bn (approximately $ 300 mn) from the Blackstone group. MBPPL has been founded by Deepak Puri and Ratul Puri, who earlier established Moser Baer India (MBIL), a world class technology manufacturer. MBPPL plans to commission 5,000 MW by 2016 comprising of 4,000 MW of thermal, 500 MW of solar and 500 MW of hydro capacity. Blackstones investment will enable MBPPL to emerge as a leading player in the India energy sector over the next few years.

IBM, TCS, Infosys may get $1 bn ABN deal

Nationalised Dutch bank ABN AMRO is set to renew contracts worth $1 billion with IBM and Indian outsourcers Tata Consultancy Services and Infosys. The bank will renew contracts for managing its software applications and computer hardware systems with the three firms. The earlier contract, for $2 billion, had been signed with five software firms including Accenture and Indias Patni Computer Systems.