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Seriously, its high time the government of India paid proper heed to push up the manufacturing industry in the country.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh dropped a bombshell at the meeting of the full planning commission on Tuesday when he disclosed that the US computer hardware giant Dell was looking at shifting out of China, and hinted that the company may be looking at India as its sourcing base. Dell, he quoted the company’s chairman as saying, buys $25 billion from China. China’s loss could mean a huge gain for India, he added.

The news comes on the heels of software giant Google shutting down its search engine in mainland China and redirecting Chinese language search traffic to Hong Kong.

The prime minister, in his closing remarks at the plan panel meet, said: “A very important point has been raised regarding development of the hardware sector of information technology. This morning I met the chairman of Dell Corporation. He informed me that they are buying equipment and parts worth $25 billion from China. They would like to shift to safer environment with climate conducive to enterprise with security of legal system. So I think this is an area where there are immense opportunities. I urge the Planning Commission to apply their mind about development of hardware and parts of computer industry.”

Full article here

Google picture courtesy:  Apple Investor

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It was 1997 when i first worked on this product.  It was the version 4.5 and called Lotus Notes. A few months later, it became 4.6 and the server was formally christened as Domino and the client was lotus notes.

On December 7, 2009, Lotus Notes completed 20 years.  At a time when a software or a service hardly goes beyond a few years Lotus with around 150 million licenses sold and with thousands of professionals and a big slice of Fortune 500 companies using the software, its not dead as expected by its rivals.

For years, Microsoft tried every trick in its book to not only diss the product, but also spread mis-information that Lotus Notes is dying, its clumsy, its not user friendly and lots of other accusations.  Some accusations stuck.  The lotus notes client was not user friendly till about version 7.  Thereafter, IBM has really spruced up the client part of the software.

The server as always has been robutst. Its a dream software for the administrators to administer.  To administer a complex and massive Lotus Domino setup you hardly need a few administrators, but to manage the competing Microsoft Exchange, you need an army.  For a product which has hardly has had any virus that has managed to infect the system, it itself is a testament to the robustness of Lotus Notes.  As for Exhchange, Outlook we know how many times its been affected not only by viruses but also the amount of security compromises that have happened with the software.

I downloaded the Lotus Domino 8.5 trial copy and managed to run both the server and client on my PC at home effortlessly.  My PC is a 1.5 GB RAM Opteron processor Compaq machine.  Almost 4 years old.  In spite of that, the software was hardly hogging any memory.  With the Domino server and the lotus client working in the background, i was able to browse the net on my firefox browser (20 tabs open at the same time).  That’s when i realised reading a previous article that Lotus 8.5 was much much faster than Lotus 8.  Surprising isnt it?

When it comes to Micorosoft, every new upgrade means a rip and replace.  You can never run Windows XP on a machine running Windows 98 or a Vista on a XP machine and so on.  Heck, the new version of Microsoft Exchange 2010 is an exclusive 64 bit application and you need a 64 bit hardware to even test it out.  Now beat that.

Today, we look back 20 years and see nearly 150 million licenses sold, tens of millions of applications created, and hundreds of thousands of IT professionals whose careers have involved, or continue to be involved with, the industry that has grown up around Lotus Notes and Domino.

Over these 20 years, people have come and gone.  Technologies have changed.  The market for collaboration software has, in some ways, just hit its stride.  At times criticized as difficult, ugly, or unusable, while at other times running businesses and providing solutions where nothing else could, in its first 20 years, Lotus Notes has been more than just a software product.  It has, through its use in a diverse set of organizations around the world, helped usher in the modern era of information sharing, and continues to set pace in that capacity today.  Despite bad press that has occurred frequently and regularly in that 20 years, Notes/Domino is a huge business today for IBM and 10,000 business partners worldwide — many of whom are continuing to grow their business, and others are just starting up.

Full article here

Here’s wishing another 20 more years for this wonderful software.  More about IBM Lotus here

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40 years after he took over his family’s vegetable oil company and turned it into a $5 billion company selling IT services, computers, consumer care, lighting and medical equipments, Azim Premji is on the lookout for his next billions.  He sees them coming from renewable sources of energy.  Water and Eco-energy are the two areas of focus for Wipro and that is where they believe the next billions will come for the company.

For those who know Premji, it is not uncommon to see the fifth richest Indian on the Forbes List and the 63-year-old chairman of Wipro switching off the lights before leaving office. It is this commitment to avoid waste that has turned Premji’s attention to ecology and sustainability.

In October 2008, even as it warned of slowing growth in its main software outsourcing business in the backdrop of a global financial crisis, Wipro released a recruitment ad for two new businesses, Wipro Water and Wipro EcoEnergy. The company has spent the previous two years preparing for this diversification, which may turn out to be the company’s third big change. The first was when a 21-year-old Premji took charge at Wipro after his father’s sudden death; the next was when the vanaspati and soap maker transformed itself into a multi-billion dollar information technology giant in the 80s and 90s.

Chief Financial Officer Suresh Senapathy says green services and solutions will bring in up to one out of every four dollars of the company’s revenue, three years from now. In the financial year ending March 2009, Wipro had revenue of more than Rs. 25,000 crore. Even if the revenue were to stagnate, a fourth of it — Rs. 6,250 crore — from ecology is no small amount. The plan also aligns well with Premji’s desire to ease down IT’s profit contribution from 93 percent currently to 70 percent in the next few years.

The new idea was first thought up by the 41-year-old head of Wipro Infrastructure Engineering (WIN), Anurag Behar. The two new ecology businesses will be housed under WIN. In January 2007, Behar made the first formal presentation about the ecology business to Wipro’s board of directors. The board reacted positively but also advised caution: Ecology was a nascent field with rapidly evolving technology and Wipro should not get locked in a technology that ran the risk of becoming obsolete soon.

Wipro has turned its 50-acre campus at Electronic City in Bangalore into a test bed. While 25,000 software engineers write code for Fortune 500 corporations, waste food from the cafeteria turns into methane for lighting burners, harvested rainwater is used to cool air-conditioning towers, a paper pulping plant recycles waste paper into writing pads and a micro windmill lights bulbs along the perimeter of the campus. Wipro’s Sarjapur campus a few kilometres away has India’s largest LED installations — all compact fluorescent lamps have been replaced with LED lights, helping save 75 percent in electricity consumption. Since 2003, Wipro has cut water usage in its offices across India by nearly two-thirds.

Read the full article here

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After all its not all what it seems it is.  Even though Ramalinga Raju tried to put up an innocent face in the resignation drama and has tried to take all the blame himeslf, it doesnt still seem to add up.  Its always been suspected that Raju was never interested in the IT field and Satyam was just a facade for him to rake in easy money which he could funnel into his other businesses in textiles and real estate.

With earnings in dollars from the software business, it was easy for Raju to divert the money to other businesses that his family was handling.  Meanwhile, the government has ordered investigation into all the companies under the satyam umbrella.  They are

Maytas Properties
Maytas Infra
Satyam BPO
Nipuna Services
Knowledge Dynamics
Nitor Global Solutions
CA Satyam AS
Satyam Venture Engineering Services

What’s more baffling is that the Hyderabad police is still waiting for someone to lodge a FIR against Raju before they can arrest him.  Its a known fact that Ramalinga Raju has his contacts in all the top places in politics.  His closeness to Chandra Babu Naidu and the current CM of Andhra Pradesh, YS Rajasekhar Reddy is well known.  Is that the reason why the police is apprehensive about arresting Raju fully knowing that they might step on the toes of some very powerful people?

As for the most funniest news yesterday, it seems the Crime Branch – Criminal Investigative Department (CB-CID) wing of the Hyderabad police has no idea of how to investigate an economic crime.  So, they are willing to let the Central Bureau of Investigation (CBI) handle this.  The CBI has a wing that is completely dedicated to investigate such crimes. So much for law enforcement.

Here’s the catch: A 3% margin — which is what Raju said Satyam had actually made — is ridiculously low in the IT industry. Forget Infosys, which made 33% in the same quarter, all IT firms of similar or even smaller size make between 20% and 30%. There’s no way Satyam, which services 185 Fortune 500 firms, could have such a low profit margin, said every analyst we spoke to. What’s more, even people in Satyam dont believe Raju. TOI, in its Thursday edition, quoted a Satyam staffer saying, “His letter implies that we worked at a margin of 3%. That’s pure unadulterated crap.”

So, if Satyam was operating on a much higher margin, why would Raju choose to say it was actually much lower? The implication is that more money was coming into the company in the form of higher profit, but it was being siphoned out.

It’s a crime to show money in the books where none existed, which is what Raju said he did. But it’s a worse crime to take out money that actually did exist. There’s speculation that Raju was doing so in order to invest in other businesses such as real estate, and did intend to put it back in Satyam at some point of time, but possibly got into such a jam that he couldnt replenish the company’s coffers.

The 3% margin question was put to the interim CEO Ram Mynampati at a press conference in Hyderabad on Thursday. He side-stepped the question.

Read the rest of the article here that indicates that Raju might not have been only responsible for inflating the cash in the books, but was in fact stealing the money made by Satyam and funnelling them into other businesses headed by members of his family.

If the above mentioned accusation can be proved by the law enforcement agencies, Ramalinga Raju is in for some serious trouble.  But like with every other offence that has occurred in our country, iam very pessimistic about Raju getting his just desserts. He might just walk off the hook and the lakhs of shareholders will be left clutching at the straws.  As for the supposedly 53,000 employees in Satyam, is it true that they really have so many employees?  Or was it another spin of the great crook called Ramalinga Raju?

Who knows?

Above cartoon from : Twenty22

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The Satyam mountain of lies crumble in face of evidence.  As per Ramalinga Raju, a big 4 consulting company had advised the management on the Satyam-Maytas deal.  All the top 4 consulting firms (Pricewaterhouse Coopers, Deloitte, Ernst & Young and KPMG) have now denied being a part of the deal.

Satyam’s valuation of unlisted Maytas Properties is turning out to be a whodunit. The big four audit firms have denied any role in the
generous valuation of the private company owned by the Raju family. Satyam’s abortive attempt last week to acquire Maytas has turned into a blazing corporate governance controversy.

Satyam had said that one of the big four audit firms was the advisor to the board. And, based on this report, the board had proceeded with the acquisition of privately-owned real estate company of the Rajus for $1.3 billion (about Rs 6,240 crore).

In an email to ET, an E&Y spokesperson said, “I would like to reiterate that Ernst & Young was not involved with the Satyam-Maytas transaction.” ET received similar responses from PwC, Deloitte and KPMG. ET interacted with the spokespersons of PwC and Deloitte, while the KPMG spokesperson responded through an SMS.

Then, who valued Maytas? Satyam did not reply to an email asking the basis on which the land bank of Maytas Properties was valued at Rs 6,400 crore or Rs 1 crore per acre.

Real estate brokers said the valuation was done when the prices of land on the outskirts of Hyderabad was below Rs 10 lakh an acre due to the slump in real estate prices.

“Maytas Properties has three upcoming SEZs in Hyderabad and most are in the development phase. The firm also has properties in Nagpur, Chennai and cities in Andhra Pradesh such as Vizag. Putting these properties together, the maximum valuation could be Rs 3,500 crore.

Considering current market conditions, even this valuation may be a little extreme. But a valuation of Rs 6,240 crore is completely over the top,” a senior official with a leading property consultancy firm said.

An independent Satyam director had earlier told ET that the board relied on E&Y’s advice, something that has been denied by the audit firm. Satyam had to reverse its decision within 12 hours following protests by its investors across the world. Despite the cancellation of the Maytas transaction, the shares of Satyam crashed 33% to end at Rs 163 on the Bombay Stock Exchange on Friday.

Above news from: Economictimes

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