Mahindra Satyam to hire 18,000 employees in FY 2012

IT firm Mahindra Satyam said it plans to hire about 18,000 people during this fiscal.

'We have plans of hiring about 18,000 people this year (FY'12). Over 5,000 are from campuses and the rest are from lateral hiring or recruitment of experienced hands,' Mahindra Satyam Head Recruitment and Media Sridhar Maturi told PTI. 

At the end of the third quarter (October-December period), Mahindra Satyam's headcount stood at 28,832, an increase of 764 personnel from 28,068 employees on September 30, 2010. 

Maturi further added, 'The campus hiring will be predominantly in India and the lateral hiring is from across the world.' 

The company has its development and delivery centres in the US, Canada, Brazil, the UK, Hungary,Egypt, UAE, India, China, Malaysia, Singapore and Australia by which the company serves numerous clients, including several Fortune 500 companies. 

Mahindra Satyam, formerly Satyam Computer Services , in September last year had announced its first audited financial results for 2009-10 after its founder B Ramalinga Raju admitted to multi-crore accounting fraud in January 2009. 

Infosys on hunt for acquisitions in Europe & Japan; eyes cloud computing

Infosys Technologies Ltd , India's No. 2 software services exporter, is on the hunt for acquisitions in Europe and Japan and in industries including healthcare and public services, its chief executive said on Sunday. 

Speaking to Reuters a day after the company announced changes in its top-level management, S Gopalakrishnan said Infosys was also seeking acquisitions in new areas like cloud computing . 

'Our philosophy has always been that you plan organic growth,' said Gopalakrishnan, who is set to step down as chief executive and become co-chairman in August. 'You keep your eyes and ears open, you have a dedicated team looking at acquisitions,' he said. 

Infosys would make an acquisition when it found a target that was at the right price with the right strategic fit, he added. 

'We do not want to set a target for acquisition because we are not doing acquisition for growth. We are doing acquisitions for strategic fit and adding capability at this point of time,' he said at the company's sprawling headquarters campus on the outskirts of Bangalore, India's IT hub. 

Gopalakrishnan said by investing in new industries and geographies, Infosys was looking to build multiple engines of growth over the next 3-5 years. 

'There are multiple strategic requirements for acquisition so those are the things we are looking at. Typically a smaller acquisition rather than a large one,' he said. 

Infosys, which is also listed on Nasdaq, on Saturday announced top management changes linked to the retirement of its billionaire chairman and stuck to its practice of giving its founders a shot at running the firm

'Osama Bin Laden is dead' Facebook page goes viral

Within about two hours of reports first surfacing (and since confirmed by the President) that Osama Bin Laden had been killed, a Facebook Page titled ?Osama Bin Laden is DEAD? has already accumulated more than 150,000 'likes.'

The page appears to be adding thousands of likes by the minute with users also sharing hundreds of comments and links to stories about the news.

Interestingly, the page itself appears to have been setup well prior to tonight as a way to advocate the theory that Bin Laden had actually died long ago.

The page description reads in part: ?Osama Bin Laden has not been found and will never be found because he died a long time ago. This may be news to you because it wasn’t in the news. His death is critical to the CIA because they want you to believe in this so called 'War on terror’ which has made the world a more dangerous place. If Osama Bin Laden was alive, he would’ve been found – just like Saddam Hussein.?

Nonetheless, the page is now serving as a real-time discussion board for the historic news.

Infosys magic dwindling, Can K V Kamath revive the old magic?

Infy has lost some of that sheen, partly due to external factors like recession & partly because of its conservative approach, say experts.

 

Most Infosys employees fondly recall the year 2005 as the halcyon days of the Bangalore-based software giant. Nandan Nilekani was at the helm; offshoring was booming and New York-based author and columnist Thomas Friedman had just published The World is Flat. 'After the book, every US firm wanted to do business with Infosys,' recollects a software industry executive. ( Infosys succession: Industry experts give their take ) 

What's more, the company's premium positioning in the minds of customers ensured that it could charge higher billing rates for its services and also corner higher profit margins compared to larger peers. A lot has changed since then. Nilekani has moved on to head the UIDAI project. 

More importantly, in the last year or so, Infosys has lost some of that sheen, partly due to external factors like the recession and partly because of its own conservative approach, say industry watchers. 

Firstly, Infosys was no longer able to differentiate itself substantially—customers had become more price-sensitive after the financial meltdown— and they didn't see substantial value in what the company was doing compared to some of its peers. Its margin leadership started eroding and some say its cautious approach meant the company did not take up some contracts that other vendors were willing to. 

Secondly, analysts say Infosys' conservative DNA meant that it went slow on opportunistic acquisitions while competitors like Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) took calculated bets and acquired assets during the downturn. In that period, TCS bought Citibank's captive unit, thereby strengthening its BPO play while HCL Technologies beat Infosys to acquire Axon. HCL contends the acquisition was a game-changer. 

'Today I am able to get large Fortune 100 customers because of Axon. If you take the acquisition out, I don't have a transformation story,' HCL Technologies vice-chairman Vineet Nayar told ET in a recent interview.