Forbes has named Infosys’ Nandan Nilekani as Asia’s Businessman of the Year.

He is the second Indian national, after Ratan Tata of the Tata group, to get such recognition. Tata was Asia’s Businessman of the Year 2004 and the Fung brothers of Hong Kong’s Li & Fung were the 2005 winners.

Nandan Nilekani
Forbes described Infosys as an Indian wonder, although 98% of its business is derived from foreign countries. “Most of its customers live and work in the US where offshorers, like Infosys, tend to be viewed as faceless armies of software engineers and call-centre operators on the other side of the world, saving American money while stealing their jobs,” Forbes said.

Read More @ The Star

Dance your way out of stress — that is the new fitness mantra for thousands of young IT and BPO professionals in the country.

After intense work pressure began taking a toll on their health, an increased fitness awareness has set in, paving the way for mushrooming of dance studios which offer “shake-a-leg-to- stay fit” programmes, say industry insiders.

“Within a short span, there has been a steady rise in the number of dance studios and professionals who frequent them, says Lokesh Naik, a senior technical writer with an IT firm and a regular visitor to the Bangalore arm of dance studio network ‘Swingers’.

According to B Murali, noted film choreographer and founder of Chennai-based Swingers, 30 to 40 dance studios have come up in Chennai while around 50 in Bangalore, all within a short span.
Swingers has six branches across the country and abroad has over 1,000 students on its rolls, of which more than 50 per cent are IT or BPO professionals, he adds.

Many companies, including Microsoft, IBM and Club Mahindra had dance trainings and workshops organized by Swingers, Murali says.

Read More @ Hindu

In an independent survey report by Forrester Research, Inc., an independent research firm, Wipro Technologies, the global IT services division of Wipro Limited has been positioned as a leader in the “The Forrester Wave™: Global Delivery Infrastructure Management for Europe, Q4 2006”, Forrester Research, Inc., December 2006. Forrester evaluated the offshore infrastructure management services of leading Indian service providers on 25 criteria.

Wipro Technologies earned the highest score for Current Offering and Market presence.

Wipro’s state of the art Global Command Center (GCC) was set up in 2002 and became the World’s first centre to be BS 15000 & ISO 20000 certified. In 2005 Wipro won the NASSCOM IT innovation award for its Global Command Center.

Read More @ Business Wire

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today launched its enterprise-wide innovation programme to mark the silver jubilee of its research centre, the Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC).

With this, the company has upped its total spend on innovation to 4.5 per cent of its revenue.

K Ananthkrishnan, chief technology officer, said, “Core R&D accounts for 0.26 per cent of our overall revenues and an enterprise-wide innovation programme will account for 4.5 per cent of our overall revenues.”

Read More @ Business Standard

Source Economic Times

IBM, HP and Sun-Wipro are in race for the Rs 250-crore income tax department tender for supply of servers for its proposed national data centre.

The department is now carrying out technical evaluation of the bids submitted by these companies. The income tax department had floated the tender for supply of servers in September. These servers would form the backbone of the proposed centralised data processing system for the department. At present, the department has 36 processing stations with each having a separate server for storage of the data.

Source: Hindu Businessline

Tata Consultancy Services has won a $65-million (Rs 292.5 crore) seven-year deal from Somerfield, a UK-based small-format food retailer, to provide a range of IT services.

TCS will take over the entire IT operations, asset management and planning for Somerfield. It will provide a managed IT infrastructure and applications service within Somerfield, enabling it to meet its current and future business demands, said a statement from TCS.

“TCS would be the single point of contact for the customer since we would be responsible for and monitor the execution of contracts that the customer would have with third party vendors,” said Mr Phiroz Vandrevala, Executive Vice-President and Global Head, Corporate Services.

The company would get a certain percentage of the $100-million worth of contracts that Somerfield has with hardware and other services vendors, he added, not specifying the percentage.