Premji's five mantras to transform India

IT major Wipro group's chairman Azim Premji on Tuesday spelt out a five-point mantra that he said would completely transform India socially and economically.
Drawing parallels with India's knowledge industry, Premji however said his five-point strategy comprised initiatives on land reforms, energy, health, primary education and interlinking of rivers that were no short-term drivers.
These areas require a lot of sweat and labour and are worth the trouble in the long run, he said while delivering the eighth JRD Tata Memorial Lecture organised here by the Associated Chambers of Commerce and Industry of India (Assocham).

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What's Driving India's Rise as an R&D Hub?

India has long enjoyed a reputation as a destination for IT and business process outsourcing. Now, the country is fast emerging as a major center for cutting-edge research and development (R&D) projects for global multinationals such as Microsoft and Motorola as well as Indian firms. More and more companies in industries ranging from IT and telecommunications through pharmaceuticals and biotech are setting up ambitious R&D projects, in part to serve the Indian market, but also with an eye to delivering new generations of products faster to the global market.

What forces are shaping these trends? What does the future hold? To answer these questions and more, Knowledge@Wharton collaborated with The Economic Times Intelligence Group in Mumbai, India, on this special report on R&D in India. The articles below explore the factors driving global R&D toward India, the opportunities and challenges of contract research, and the human capital challenge that India faces, among several others.

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India rises, Silicon Valley drools

Promod Haque grew up in the old India, born into a lower-middle-class family, but he was lucky enough to attend a school in New Delhi for the children of wealthy dignitaries. His father was a bureaucrat; his mother took a job as a teacher elsewhere to cover his tuition. "I was very fortunate to go there," he says, "but I was an outsider."

After he graduated in engineering and started selling medical gear in India, he proudly bought his parents their first refrigerator. Two years later, in 1972, he arrived in the US for grad school at Northwestern -- and was stunned to see that every student apartment had its own fridge.

"I was amazed by all the affluence." Haque (pronounced "Hock") went four years without talking to his folks, who had no phone; they wrote letters. He never returned to live in India. In 1978 his parents joined him in Chicago.

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Internet 2.0

Bob Kagle hasn't been this busy since 1999. In the past three months the Benchmark Capital general partner has led investments in no less than four Internet companies, including an online service that connects attorneys with corporate clients and a Web-based marketplace where you can ship everything from a piano to a horse. And Kagle is just getting warmed up. "I'm looking at four more Internet deals that I just love," he says giddily. "It's getting hard to restrain myself, so I think I'll just have to do them all."

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Narayana Murthy's dream for the future

India's software giant Infosys Technologies Limited has entered its 25th year of existence. In these 25 years, the company has scaled many a peak, making the nation proud of it.
N R Narayana Murthy, Chairman, Infosys, however, has plans to turn the company into a bigger, stronger, and global player.

At an analysts' meet, held to mark the silver jubilee celebrations of Infosys in Hyderabad, Murthy spoke about his future for the company.
Here's the speech that he delivered.

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India's Software Dream Run Is Far From Over

It's a lament one often hears nowadays: Indian software programmers, those global icons of cheap brainpower, have become greedy.
With compensation costs in the Indian software industry climbing 12.5 percent annually the past two years, some investors are now concerned about how long the country can hold on to its most promising industry.

``If salaries continue to escalate,'' Promod Haque, managing partner of Palo Alto, California-based Norwest Venture Partners, recently told Bloomberg News, ``China is more attractive to us as venture capitalists, Israel is more attractive to us, and Eastern Europe is more attractive to us.''

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the next big thing

It seems that Asia, China in particular, is undergoing amazing growth through innovation. Arguably there is more innovation coming from that region of the world than anywhere else right now. How does Silicon Valley stack up in terms of innovation currently? Where will the “next big thing” come from?Keith Thesing

Bill Gurley: Keith, that is an insanely insightful question. There are many reasons why Silicon Valley is an epicentre, and there have been death-knell calls before, as far back as several decades. What you see today is real however. Asia and Europe matter in innovation and will forever. Can the US keep up? I don’t know. I worry deeply about the lack of concern over our broadband policy. We are falling each year in terms of broadband per capita, and yet some want to pass laws that say cities can’t choose to rectify this situation. We will fail to innovate if we fail to recognise the importance of the technology infrastructure. The other equally important issue is education. China graduates 600,000 engineers a year, we graduate 70,000. And we just adjusted the SAT from 50/50 math to English to 33/67. Is that the right direction? I doubt it.

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Cisco to buy Nokia??

Cisco mulls buying Nokia-paper

LONDON (Reuters) - Cisco Systems Inc. is considering buying the world's top mobile handset maker
Nokia in a bid to gain its wireless infrastructure technology, the Business newspaper reported on Sunday.

The paper, which did not reveal the source of its information, said U.S.-based Cisco had traditionally concentrated on acquisitions of niche technology players, but its Chief Executive John Chambers is believed to be interested in merging with a wireless infrastructure company.

"Nokia has been identified as the most likely target," the paper said.

Cisco, the largest maker of Internet equipment, is worth around $123 billion, while Nokia's market value is around $71 billion.

WLAN Market to Double

In a newly released report, Dell'Oro Group forecasts that enterprise Wireless LAN (WLAN) equipment, both access points as well as switch/appliances, will overwhelm the market for standalone WLAN equipment. According to the report, DSL and Cable customer premises equipment will increasingly come with embedded WLAN, significantly reducing the need for standalone WLAN devices in the SOHO or consumer market. Similarly, as WLAN becomes embedded in more client devices such as notebook computers, PDAs, and telephones, the need for add-on network interface cards will diminish.

"Despite reductions in other areas, standalone gear will continue to thrive in the enterprise," said Greg Collins, Senior Director of Wireless LAN Research at Dell'Oro Group. "Dependent access points and switch/appliance solutions will drive enterprise growth because these devices are more secure and easier to manage than WLAN networks based on independent access points."

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Bangalore to be unwired soon

BANGALORE: The Silicon Valley of India could soon be on par with cities like San Jose, Philadelphia, Westminster and Taipei. Karnataka government, in association with industry, is planning to make Bangalore a "Wi-Fi Zone", that will provide easy and seamless Internet access to individuals, households and corporates, sans cable wires, modems or dial-up devices.

Speaking to The Times of India, state IT secretary M K Shankaralinge Gowda said the project would be a joint effort between government, companies like Intel, and Internet service providers. "We are currently in the process of drafting a viable business model. And only after that we will have clarity on issues like revenue sharing, implementation and cost of the services," he said. The state is also planning to come out with a wireless policy to facilitate Wi-Fi initiatives.

The city has over 200 hot-spots (wireless Internet access points). "We'll leverage on the existing optic fibre cable network that lies around the city to run this project, thereby making Wi-Fi/WiMAX literally the last mile access," he said.

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15 mln Indians have PCs, 5 mln are online

Aiming at India's volume PC market, two vendors this week launched entry-level products that run Linux (Overview, Articles, Company) and are priced at about $230.

Backing these initiatives is the country's minister for communications and information technology, Dayanidhi Maran, whose aim is to increase PC penetration in the country.

Currently, 15 million people in India own a PC and there are 5 million Internet connections in the country, according to Maran. The aim of the Indian government is to increase the number of people owning a PC to 75 million and the number of Internet connections to 45 million by 2010. To achieve this objective, the country needs low-cost PCs, said Maran at a launch Monday in Chennai, commenting on a $230 PC from HCL Infosystems Ltd., a large PC vendor in Noida, near Delhi.

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Online Banking trends and Age

100$ Laptop

What is the $100 Laptop, really?The proposed $100 machine will be a Linux-based, full-color, full-screen laptop that will use innovative power (including wind-up) and will be able to do most everything except store huge amounts of data. These rugged laptops will be WiFi- and cell phone-enabled, and have USB ports galore. Its current specifications are: 500MHz, 1GB, 1 Megapixel. The cost of materials for each laptop is estimated to be approximately $90, which includes the display, as well as the processor and memory, and allows for $10 for contingency or profit.

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Infosys to invest $10 mn in Shanghai

Infosys Technologies Ltd on Wednesday said it will invest $10 million to set up a software development campus in Shanghai in association with Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park.
The company's Chinese subsidiary, has signed a letter of intent with Shanghai Zhangjiang Hi-Tech Park to set up a software development campus in Shanghai at an investment of $10 million in the next two years, Infosys informed the Bombay Stock Exchange.
The centre will be set up on 25,000 sq mt of land, with a seating capacity for 1,000 engineers.

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India: An Agent of Change

That's how Infosys CEO Nandan Nilekani sees the country's impact on the U.S. economy, through globalization and outsourcing

While many U.S. tech companies are stuck in the slow-demand doldrums, India's Infosys Technologies (INFY ) is soaring. Revenues were up 42% last quarter. The reason: Infosys and its Indian brethren are rewriting the rules of global competition in the software and tech-services industries with their use of highly skilled but low-cost Indian talent.

As a member of a group of 10 Indian business leaders, Infosys Chief Executive Nandan M. Nilekani accompanied Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh during his state visit with President George W. Bush on July 18. Those business leaders make up the Indian contingent of a 20-person CEO Forum that has been set up to promote commerce and understanding between the two countries.

Nilekani stopped at BusinessWeek's New York offices on July 26 and spoke with writers and editors, including Senior Writer Steve Hamm. Edited excerpts of the interview follow:

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A Brain Trust in Bangalore

Sarnoff and other big tech names are setting up research operations in India -- and not just because of the cheap labor

They call it the monkey incident. A couple of months ago, a handful of engineers at Sarnoff Corp.'s lab in Bangalore, India, were conference-calling with colleagues at the research-for-hire outfit's headquarters in Princeton, N.J. They were sitting around a table in a meeting room when they heard loud banging from behind an air conditioner cover on the wall. One of them lifted the cover, and a baby monkey leaped into the room and raced around underfoot.

Two of the engineers were so surprised that they jumped up on the table. Then, "We all fled the room and closed the door," says Kiran Nayak, one of the participants, who recalls the incident with a huge smile.

It all turned out well in the end. In due time, the monkey returned to its mother, out on the building's ledge, and the engineers reclaimed their conference room and resumed talking about data-compression algorithms.

Such are the oddities of global research collaboration.


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From T-shirts to T-bonds

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China and the world economy

From T-shirts to T-bonds

Jul 28th 2005
From The Economist print edition

Beijing, not Washington, increasingly takes the decisions that affect workers, companies, financial markets and economies everywhere

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GLOBAL tremors in the currency, bond and commodity markets greeted China's announcement that the yuan will no longer be pegged to the dollar. No longer is it just Washington that has the power to cause shockwaves. For many people, the tremors reflected the view that China is the root cause of America's trade deficit, and that the revaluation is a partial cure.

In fact, that view is wrong on several counts. China is not the main cause of the American trade deficit. On the other hand, China is behind almost everything else going on in the world economy. For China is beginning to drive, in a new and pervasive way, economic trends that many countries assume to be domestically determined.

Americans like to slap the “made in China” label on their huge trade deficit. Yet not only is China's forecast current-account surplus of around $100 billion this year only a fraction of America's likely deficit of $800 billion, but, as chart 1 shows, most of the increase in America's trade deficit has come from outside China. The main cause of America's trade deficit is a lack of domestic saving, not unfair Chinese competition. The deficit is thus made in America, not made in China.

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The war of the wires

Established telecoms companies are fighting an increasingly bitter battle against innovative attackers

“WE'RE not a telephone company anymore; I sort of resent that,” says Lea Ann Champion, an executive at SBC, America's second-largest “Baby Bell”. “We're a communications and entertainment company.” Well, maybe. Ms Champion is in charge of “lightspeed”, an SBC project to deliver TV, movies and other entertainment to customers via hugely enhanced broadband connections using internet protocol—a service known in short as IPTV. Lightspeed, which will cost $4 billion, has hit technological and legal snags recently that could slow its roll-out, scheduled to begin at the end of this year. But sooner or later IPTV will happen, if only because telecoms companies all over the world are betting on it. And when it does it will be controversial.

That is because IPTV forms part of a larger, and quite desperate, defensive strategy now being adopted by telecoms firms against fierce attacks on multiple fronts. On one front are cable giants, such as America's Comcast, which are luring customers with an enticing “triple-play bundle” of TV, broadband and telephony services. On a second front are mobile-phone operators, which young customers in particular are increasingly using to “cut the cord” from their fixed-line company.

But arguably most dangerous of all is the third front, where traditional telecoms firms are under attack from voice-over-internet-protocol (VOIP) providers, which use the internet to carry conversations that would previously have taken place via a conventional phone. TeleGeography, a research firm, estimates that the number of subscribers to VOIP services such as Vonage, which lets users plug their traditional phones into a gadget connected to the internet, will grow from 1.8m at the start of this year to 4m by the end of December in America alone; by 2010, it projects over 17m American subscribers. This does not count the world's largest VOIP provider, Skype, which uses a small and simple software application to let users make free calls between computers—so far, it has been downloaded 141m times.

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ndia's tech boom sparks recruitment rush

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http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20050727/tc_nm/india_jobs_dc;_ylt=AmlBu8Unfz2A_5JzuhtC0lZT.3QA;_ylu=X3oDMTBiMW04NW9mBHNlYwMlJVRPUCUl

WSJ: Huawei in US

http://www.emergic.org/archives/2005/07/30/index.html#huawei_in_us