India IT workForce

http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/infotech/ites/IBM-is-Indias-second-largest-pvt-sector-employer/articleshow/6327859.cms

IBM is India's second largest pvt sector employer

Some said that IBM Daksh (the BPO unit) alone employs about 50,000 people in India. IBM Global Services --- which straddles hardware (telecom, retail billing, mainframe, servers, etc) and software sales, services and support business, consulting business --- and IBM Labs are together seen to employ another 70,000 to 80,000 people.

BANGALORE: Tata Consultancy Services is the largest private sector employer in the country. It had 1,63,700 employees as on June 30. But guess who's number 2?

The honour goes to -- surprise, surprise -- IBM. That's right. Not to any Tata or Ambani company, or to Infosys or Wipro.

The fact that IBM has over one lakh people on its rolls in this country is one of India Inc's best-kept secrets. No one in US-headquartered IBM will admit that it employs such a large number of people in India -- for fear of a backlash at home. There's been rising anger in the US over the transfer of `American jobs' to lower cost havens, particularly India. Faced with an economic slowdown and a politically-damaging high employement rate, Barack Obama himself has begun to sound jingoistic. He has issued barely-veiled threats against US companies that ship out work and promised candies to those who stay patriotic.

Even as an IBM spokesperson declined comment when contacted, a source within the company said that in a couple of years, the India employee strength could cross that in the US, where it employs about 1,55,000 people, and where the pace of hiring is substantially slower than in India. IBM globally has a little over 4,00,000 employees. So, close to 1 in 3 of its employees is already an Indian.

Its staff strength is more than four times that of India's biggest private sector company, Reliance Industries, which employs about 23,000 people. It is bigger than the combined employee base of the two Tata Group's crown jewels, Tata Steel (81,000) and Tata Motors (24,000).

A cross-section of industry analysts and manpower recruitment firms TOI spoke with not only put IBM's India workforce (including that of its wholly-owned subsidiary IBM Daksh) at over one lakh, some even went to the extent of saying it might be 1.3 lakh -- well over Infosys' 1.14 lakh as on June 30. Infosys is India's second largest IT firm by revenue and third, it now transpires, by employees.

Since 2007, the company has stopped disclosing the geographic break-up of its employee numbers. The last time it provided figures was in 2007, when it said it had 73,000 employees in India. Since then, the company has maintained that it's a global company and geographic numbers do not have any meaning in that context.

IT services firms have emerged as India's biggest job generators, even as traditional manufacturing firms -- historically big employers -- have tended to cut down on numbers to control costs. Typically, this sector also generates high paying, high disposable income jobs, unlike manufacturing.

It's well known that IBM has been hiring aggressively in India. The 2007 figure of 73,000 was a near 40% increase over the 2006 figure of 53,000. Since then, big IT companies have been hiring upwards of 20,000 people a year.

"Even during the recession years of 2008/2009, it was mostly IBM, along with Accenture, that kept the lights on in the hiring market," says a headhunter. In an environment where the pressure to cut/control cost is brutal, hiring people at relatively higher salaries has become a luxury few can afford.

Citigroup completes Indian outsourcing unit sale

Wednesday December 31, 6:56 am ET
Citi says $512 million sale of Indian business process outsourcing unit to Tata is done

NEW YORK (AP) -- Citigroup Inc. said Wednesday it completed the sale of its India-based business process outsourcing unit Citigroup Global Services Ltd. to Tata Consultancy Services Ltd., India's largest software services provider.

Citigroup said it will receive $512 million in cash. It agreed to sell the business to Tata in October. At that time, the companies also signed a contract that said Tata will provide outsourcing services to Citigroup and its affiliates for the next nine and a half years.

Citigroup will pay $2.5 billion under that contract.
asr: seems Tatas get $250 mil/year , citi might have sold after it meltdown , good call for Tatas

TCS To Develop New IT Park In Adibatla, Hyderabad

Why Hyderabad is important for IT Companies in the TCS management words itself
“Hyderabad is one of the important and potential areas for TCS because of the availability of talented people. ,” he said

BPO: India far ahead of China - Forrester

BPO: India far ahead of China
- Despite significant government support and huge level of visibility on the global arena, China's offshore market has not taken off as expected and still has a long way to become a potential alternative to India, technology research firm Forrester said in a report.
- Noting that China's percentage of overall offshore resources has dropped and other countries were growing at a faster pace, Forrester said the country needs to refocus its offshore efforts. Instead of trying to compete in areas like application development and management, where India clearly dominates, China should encourage its local firms to focus on other areas like testing, data management and product development services.
- "Their education programmes ought to focus on advanced skills like project management and advanced architecture skills, while at the same time, respective governments should invest significant funds to market the country as an alternative to the offshore incumbent India," McCarthy said.

IT Services impact on India

IT Services impact on India
- The study also found that 53% of the science and engineering workforce in the valley is foreign-born, and that one-quarter of immigrant-founded engineering and scientific companies set up in the United States during the past decade were by Indians.
- These companies rang up 52 billion dollars in sales and created 450,000 jobs. No wonder, notes the paper, some business and policy leaders are sounding alarm bells about American competitiveness in general and Silicon Valley's future as a technology leader in particular.

- The Mercury News says there isn't a single major information-technology company in the United States that hasn't set up operations in India.
-IT companies are attracted by low-cost, highly skilled workforce; 3.5 million white-collar US jobs, along with 151 billion dollars in wages, are expected to be outsourced by 2015, with India the top outsourcing destination, the paper says quoting a report by Forrester Research.
-But these companies also see a market of potentially epic proportions, the paper says. Half of India's 1.2 billion people are younger than 25. That's 600 million people coming into their peak consuming years in an economy fueled primarily by
exploding retail growth.

India - Govt. IT initiatives

NISG is being shaped as an institution of excellence in the area of e-Governance with focus on Strategic Planning, developing appropriate architectures and standards, providing high-level consultancy services and capacity building at the national level.
Dept. of Information Technology

Infy, Wipro, TCS to be in world's top 10 soon

Infy, Wipro, TCS to be in world's top 10 soon: Premji November 28, 2006

- Currently, Infosys, TCS and Wipro come in the top 16-17 companies globally in terms of market capitalisation," he said.

We are growing three times faster than our foreign counterparts, so in the next 2-3 years, the difference will be very less, we will be in the league of top 10 companies, he added.

Earlier in September this year, global financial services major Morgan Stanley ranked the three Indian companies in top five firms in global IT services space.

Infosys was ranked even above US-based IT major Accenture, while all three Indian tech giants were placed above US-based EDS and Computer Sciences Corporation as well as European giants like Cap Gemini and Logica Plc in the market cap league.The three majors are continuing their leading positions in the global IT services space on the basis of their current market values.

Infosys and Wipro have a market cap of $29 billion and $22 billion respectively based on their ADR prices.

While TCS has a market cap of around 25 billiion dollars based on its share price on the Bombay Stock Exchange, the most valued non-Indian IT services firm Accenture has a market cap of $27.4 billion, which is below that of Infosys.

However, in terms of turnover Accenture is far bigger than Infosys and other Indian companies, while US firms' lower market cap is also due to slower price-to-earnings ratio, analysts said.This could be also attributed to Accenture's lower profitability and growth rates compared to the Indian companies, they added.

In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

In Spite of the Gods: The Strange Rise of Modern India

- India graduates over 1 million engineers every year, as opposed to the US and Europe who graduate about 200,000 between the two of them.

- India now ranks third in scientific capacity behind Japan and the US. Yet India's literacy rate is only 65%, whereas China's is 90%. This is explained, according to Luce, by the fact that India remains a very poor and rural country. About 750 million people live in some 680 thousand villages, and about 300 million of them in extreme poverty. There are chronic shortages of land and water making subsistence a daily struggle - under these circumstances education is not even a consideration.

- In another comparison to China, Luce notes that India only has 7 million people involved in manufacturing, whereas China has 100 million. Labor laws in India - some remnants of Nehru-Gandhi socialism - make it difficult for employers to lay-off workers. Therefore many factory owners have invested heavily in high-tech, minimizing the need for manual labor. If anything good can be said about the Communist party in China it is that they have done away with such laws making hiring and firing much easier. This may sound unjust to some but it employs an additonal 93 million workers.

- Luce also points out that India has basically bypassed the industrial revolution, going directly from agriculture to high-tech services. This shows that they invested heavily in higher education for the elite while neglecting the poor. The result is having a middle class about the size of France or Germany and at the same time having an underclass of about 900 million. That there is not enough money for universal education is not surprising since only about 35 million in a population of 1.1 billion pay taxes.

- In 2006, India completed a 3,000 mile interstate highway called the "Golden Quadrilateral" running from New Dehli to Mumbai to Chennai to Kolkata and back to New Delhi. It was a remarkable feat since many of the politicians sitting in the ruling coalition would try to prevent its completion because the highway disrupted many of their constituents' communities. All of it was settled, however, through bribes and the legal system. In China this kind of development is done by decree. In many ways the Chinese system is more efficient but no one would vote for its authoritarian tactics.

- India like China still has many serious problems to tackle, among them energy, environment, poverty, and public health. The fact that they have a democracy is a plus in a country divided by many languages, religion, and caste. On the downside they have a huge bureaucracy that is corrupt and resistant to change. Yet India seems to work, moving slowly toward economic development and great power status inspite of the gods.