Wipro sees revival in outsourcing business    
June 14, 2008
Source:  REUTERS

BANGALORE: Wipro Ltd, India's No. 3 software services exporter, is seeing a revival in flow of outsourcing deals as the turmoil in the global financial industry eases a bit, joint chief executives of its IT business said. Still, Wipro is cautious about its prospects in the next two quarters and expects business to accelerate towards the end of the fiscal year ending in March, Girish Paranjpe and Suresh Vaswani told Reuters in an interview on Friday. "Relative to how it was in the first quarter of this (calendar) year, there was a feeling that things are almost frozen, I think things are beginning to come back to normal," Paranjpe said. 

"The good news is that there have been no casualties after Bear Sterns. Whatever management changes had to happen has taken place in many of the big companies." India's export-driven software services companies get the bulk of their revenue from banks and financial firms, sectors which have been battered by the turmoil in global financial markets.

Infy to hire 1,000 interns in 2009     
June 14 , 2008 
SOURCE: ET Bureau

NEW DELHI: In a bid to curtail its training expenses (which rose to $170 million, this year) and shorten time to billing for new joinees, India’s second largest IT company Infosys is now hiring engineering students whilst in their third year and putting them on internship for 17 weeks. This way the company will make them billable faster by almost 3 months when they join Infosys. 

During the internship, the students get a Rs 1,000 stipend from Infosys apart from free boarding and lodging. According to Infosys Group HR head Nandita Gurjar, there is two fold benefit to the company through this program. One, it helps short circuit the billing period from December to July now. 

Two, during large business orders, there is always a compulsion to hire from outside as the employees are still not ready, as the result many expensive and experienced along with many bottom of the barrel candidates join the company, she says. The company will hire 1,000 interns in 2009. 

This program will reduce all of that.” Due to the paucity of quality talent, most top IT companies give joining letters to students while they are still in their third year. Infosys doles out job offers in month of September to October every year to candidates in the third year. For the pilot batch of interns the company had doled out job offers after September last year. 

Candidates, who join us in June or July (after the academic session is over) are ready to hit the floor only after October or November. The candidates to whom we will give offer letters in September this year will only be able to join us in 2010 (after their course is over). This program will make new joinees hit the business faster (in just one week) as compared to three months earlier,” Gurjar added. 

This year’s pilot batch was for 243 students from colleges across India. “We got excellent feedback as the students were able to mix with global interns from colleges like INSEAD, Wharton and Stanford which intern during this period,” said an Infy official. Before Infosys can induct a student as a trainee, it has to get permission on the various project he or she will be undergoing while at Infosys.

Cisco keen to be seen as hardcore tech player     
June 14, 2008 
SOURCE: Business Line

Bangalore, June 13 Cisco wants to be recognised as a leader in the technology and communication space and not just as a networking company. The company also wants to make an emotional connect with people, much beyond technology. Its latest ‘human network’ television campaign aims to convey just this — its transformation from a networking company and its expanding role in the IT business. 

Says Ms Nupur Sharma, Head of Brand Strategy and Advertising, India and SAARC, Cisco, “We no longer want to be known as a company providing just networking solutions. We want to be known as a hardcore technology player and a leader in the communication field with a wide spectrum of innovative products and applications across several verticals. Our latest television campaign emphasises the expanding role of the Cisco platform in enabling live experiences and about the people enriching our network — i.e. partners, employees and clients.”

Cisco is running two commercials created by O&M across 14 news and infotainment TV channels in the country. The first one is a global commercial which is run in the G8 markets, apart from India. It aims to convey that “distances don’t matter in business and that businesses can come together using technology.” 

The commercial has been tweaked a bit using Indian voice-over to appeal to audiences here. The other commercial is India-centric and features a wedding in London and how a village in Jaipur watches it on Cisco’s network using technology. 

Through this campaign, Cisco aims to build brand awareness and create the perception of Cisco as a technology leader.

In the next phase of the ‘human network campaign’, Cisco hopes to tap the digital media (online and mobile) to engage its audience. 

Cisco, like many other IT companies, has realised that brand positioning is becoming increasingly important in business and even technology companies cannot escape that reality. “As the company grows, we are increasingly investing in marketing and communication. We realise it is essential to have a high brand recall and we want to be recognised as a serious technology player, especially in India which is an upcoming market playing an important role in the global scheme of things,” explains Ms Sharma. 

Cisco has an R&D centre in Bangalore, apart from sales offices in Delhi, Bangalore, Hyderabad, Chennai, Kolkata, and Mumbai. It also has a globalisation centre in Bangalore. Its headcount in India is 4,000, including senior management of Cisco.