Women expanding presence in IT sector.

Women are making a strong presence in the IT, ITES and BPO sectors. Statistics reveal that women are equally competing with their male counterparts and have become a major growth catalyst for the companies. Apart from this companies are supporting women in managing their work and meeting their family and social demands.

i-Flex Solutions has about 24 per cent of women employed across various departments. The company had 441 women employees in 2005, which is now up by 678.

"The workplace in i-Flex provides gender diversity and having women employees closes the gap between the workplace and marketplace," says Mr Sanjoy Bannerji, general manager, corporate human resources, i-Flex Solutions.

He added that "there are some male stereotypes about certain kinds of job being more suited for men and these myths are now being broken. In some of the service-oriented jobs, women tend to relate better emotionally with customers. Besides they tend to be more loyal to organisations," he added.

The biggest reason why more women are entering this sector is because of the women-employee friendly policies like flexibility to allow break in service and extra maternity leave on need-basis and policies that show zero tolerance on any sexual abuse. Companies have also launched various initiatives like maternity benefits, insurance coverage that includes cover for their parents or in-laws, Baby’s Day Out — a special facility allowing women to bring their children to the office.

According to Mr Puneet Jetli, vice-president and head, people function, MindTree Consulting, "In 2004-05, Mindtree had about 18 per cent of the workforce comprising of women. In the last 2-3 years, there has been a steady increase in the percentage of women on a planned basis. "Over the next two years, we want 25 per cent of our staff to be women," he said.

Likewise in Perot Systems, the company has developed the leadership talent among women employees. According to Ms Sheela Singh, head of HR in Perot Systems there are 23.03 per cent of women who are working in their organisation and woman participation is very high at all levels.

Employee Job Referral Programme

Employees in call centres and BPO companies are making quick moves through Employee Referral Programmes (ERP) and saving time for the recruiters. The process helps employees to earn as well as refer a friend. Employees are motivated and it makes them feel that they are a highly valued resource.

The referral process is easy. The employee needs to submit the resumé of the candidate whom he is referring along with the badge number (a unique number given to each employee). Then the person is called for an interview and if selected the amount is credited to the employee after the person referred completes six months with the organisation.

Over the past three years, employee referrals at HCL Technologies Ltd have increased at the rate of 10 to 15 per cent. The company has hired more than 30 per cent of the staff through ERP.

According to HCL Technologies Ltd RMG head B. Ravishankar, "Referral campaigns are an integral part of the recruitment drive and the programme has been well received by employees. It is evident from the huge number of referrals, which we get when we organise for the drives that are held across India every quarter."

Each HCL employee gets anything between Rs 8,000 to Rs. 30,000 for their references.

Perotsystem has a unique ERP called ARC (associate referral challenge) that has contributed to almost about 45 per cent of their recruitment. The company’s employee referrals have grown from 10 per cent to 45 per cent.

Perotsystems Business Process Solutions managing director Vardhaman Jain said, "One of the key reasons for the success of ARC scheme is that our associates can communicate the job requirements to their acquaintances and friends in a much better manner."

"Any candidate walking in for an interview and refers 10 potential candidates is given on the spot gifts," said Mr Jain.

Cognizant Technology Solution recruits approximately 50 per cent of its experienced hires through its employee referral scheme each year. In the last three years, over 8,000 professionals have been recruited through the employee referral programme. The incentives range from Rs 5,000 to Rs 50,000 depending on the level at which the candidate is referred.

Chennai emerging as animation hub!

Despite several inequities and challenges, Chennai is emerging as a seedbed for the animation industry with great success stories.

Mr Muralidharan, chief technology officer, Accel Animation Studios, says, "The current scenario is very encouraging with the incr-easing demand in domestic as well as outsourced service work from leading producers. It indicates the indu-stry is growing at a very fast pace in Chennai."

Accel Animation is currently working on 3D animated episodes for pre- school children Raju the Autorickshaw for a Canadian producer Kahani World. The company has just completed a 40 minute visual effect and 3D character animation for a Hindi feature film Friends For Ever wh-ich is expected to hit the screens by September 2007.

Mr Muralidharan added that the company is also working on a 3D animated movie South India Fables based on Thirukkural for a global audience. The first one-hour show of 12 hours will be ready for distribution by October 2007.

According to Ms Elizabeth Koshy, CEO, Animation Dimensions, who was in Chennai recently, "Chennai is seen as a serious animation hub." She has plans lined up for a training academy here and in Trivandrum, Kerala for flash animation.

She is currently working on four animated film projects to be released over the next five years. These films include a feature film called Aiyyaiyyo Balle Balle and Mighty Babies, for the Indian market slated for 2008 and 2009 release. The other two films Bombay Dogs and The Sea Prince are targeted for the international audience. The movie projects will cost in the range of four to eight million dollars.

Land prices push IT firms to tier-II cities

Real estate prices in metros have skyrocketed and IT and BPO companies are scouting for tier II and tier III cities to expand their business hub. They feel that there is lot more that can be navigated beyond the Silicon Valley.

Aptara BPO has recently set up a facility in Dehradun. "The key reason to head towards tier II and tier three III from Metros is primarily related to high cost and people attrition. There are so many opportunities for people in the metros today that are contributing to increased costs and slowly diminishing the offshore advantage of India with the western countries. We have no other choice but to move to low cost alternatives," said Mr Devashish Ghosh, vice-president, Glo-bal Operations, Aptara.

He added that with the technology infrastructure spreading to tier II and tier III cities and availability of talent the two key ingredients for doing business exists, that is, talent and Internet bandwidth. The next key aspects being good infrastructure, easy logistics to reach the city from an international port of entry, power and local government support and importance given to this industry.

According to Mr R. Chandrasekaran, president and managing director, Cognizant, "A rich talent pool is the primary reason for Cognizant to enter tier II cities such as Coimbatore and Cochin."

"Spread of IT & ITES organisations to cities like Madurai, Coimbatore, Cochin etc will not only help the organisations by reducing operating costs, but will boost the local economies neglected for many years," says, Mr Hanuman Tripathi, managing director Infrasoft Technologies Limited.

Rupee appreciation a threat to IT industry

The rupee appreciation against the dollar during the last three months has sent alarm bells ringing in the information technology industry. Every one per cent increase in the rupee is affecting the industry’s profit margin by 40 to 50 points.

"We are being negatively impacted by the appreciation of the rupee. During the March quarter, the average rate for the rupee was 44, a two per cent appreciation compared to the average rate in the December quarter. Assuming that the average rate of the rupee for the June quarter is approximately 41, we will see a seven per cent rise in the average rate for the March-June quarter," said Mr Gordon Coburn, chief financial and operating officer, Cognizant Technology Solutions.

He conceded that every one per cent movement in the rupee results in a 20 basis point impact on Cognizant’s operating margins. "However, if the rupee hovers around 41, the impact for the June quarter would be an approximately 140 basis point reduction in our operating margin," he said.

Ms Subha Kumar, CFO, Congruent Solutions, says, "Since we have not passed on the benefit of the rupee going down against the dollar to the end clients during the last few years, there is no way we can expect the clients to pay higher dollars now." She pointed out that the ever escalating salary levels because of better profitability of the firms cannot be lowered suddenly.

"Just to put it in numbers, if a company was making net profit of 20 per cent of their dollar revenues six months ago, the profits will be shaved by half to just 10 per cent post the rupee getting stronger," she said.

Banking on the Net......

Wireless banking is common but having wireless banking within a bank branch is a unique set up

YES BANK has deployed wireless technology to successfully implement its business strategy. The Bank aims to provide a product platform that would deliver solutions that take into account present and future needs of the customers. In an Interview with Deccan Herald H Srikrishnan, Executive Director, YES BANK said the launch of Wi-fi has been instrumental in driving customer satisfaction and Intel provided the technology assistance to YES BANK to fine tune its requirements.Excerpts from the interview:

How many of your branches are using Wi-fi currently? And how many will go Wi-fi in future?
YES BANK currently has 18 branches that are Wi-fi deployed, and in total, we will have 21 branches that will be Wi-fi enabled in Phase 1.

How secure is the Wi-fi environment? What about hackers?
There are multiple layers of security that has been deployed as part of the Wi-fi solution - Service Set Identifier (SSID) broadcast has been disabled to ensure that unauthorised devices scanning for Wi-fi networks are not aware of the YBL Corp network. Mac address filtering has been deployed to ensure that devices with authorised Mac address only can initiate session with Wi-fi . Users connecting to YBL's Wi-fi network are authenticating against Active Directory. To ensure data confidentiality, data is encrypted using Wi-fi protected access (WPA) and Temporal Key Integrity Protocol (TKIP), to provide an enhanced encryption of data packets.

Has efficiency and productivity increased because of wi-fi environment?
Employees are now serving the customer more efficiently and in a comfortable environment, without being confined to the fixed workspace within the branch. This has achieved greater level of productivity and customer satisfaction.

What about the less tech savy are they comfortable with this environment?
There have been no changes in the banking business process within the Wi-Fi environment.
W-ifi network provides full-service banking environments , that is, all services which are provisioned over the traditional LAN are available. Physical contact with the teller is required to collect/deposit cash. WiFi environment is providing 'better flexibility' and 'the ability to conduct business in a comfortable environment'. Clients have generally appreciated the convenience and the experience of a superior personal banking made available by use of Wi-fi.

Was Wi-fi successful in a banking environment?
With the help of this initiative, customers get attended to almost immediately, reducing waiting time and creating an informal environment. This allows the Bank's financial advisors to work with customers when and where they want in the branch, thus providing the customers with a sense of comfort and ensures maximum customer satisfaction.

Will Wi-max replace Wi-fi soon?
Wi-fi is limited to an office environment only, while Wi-Max is equivalent to a City-wide Wi-fi service, therefore, it will not be a good comparison in this particular case. Wi-max is expected to be widely available in India in the next 1-2 years. Wi-max will be the preferred mode of connectivity once available and will replace Wi-fi in most cases.

Mainframe Revolution

Used mainly by large organisations for critical applications, mainframes as a technology is here to stay. Sangeetha Kandavel finds out the trends in mainframe and its future.

The year 2006 was a great year for the Mainframe Industry. Mainframe revenue has grown 25 per cent in the third and the last quarter of 2006 and it is hitting the markets again, says Sreenath Chary, Business Unit Executive-Systemz, IBM, India. In an Interview with Deccan Herald Sreenath shared his views about mainframe, here is a quick FAQ on the issue.

The prevalence of mainframe today in the context of the current technologies?
Sreenath: The major sector that depends on mainframe is the banking sector. Transaction volumes in banks are high and can't afford downtime, 300-400 million dollars will be lost in seconds during downtime.
The Reserve Bank of India depends on mainframe for all their transactions. The airlines and securities depository are some of the major players who use mainframe.Mainframe can support thousands Virtual Linux servers in a single mainframe and the first 64-bit Linux platform for the SAP application server was a mainframe.

Is there resurgence in mainframe usage? What is the demand like?
With the introduction of the Offload engines (zIIP & zAAP &IFL) for database accesses, Java and Linux respectively, the TCO of a mainframe is superior to any other platform. Given the robustness of the zOS platform, z Hardware, most companies are finding the mainframe as a hub in a Services oriented Architecture (SOA) environment to be the best. Hence there is a major resurgence in mainframe usage around the world. Mainframe has become one of the most open platforms capable of running Linux, zOS & zVM and all at the same time in different partitions using the virtualisation engine, which is absolutely key to server consolidation.
Typically most UNIX servers are utilised at around 5-15 per cent. A mainframe can be utilised at 100 per cent without any issues, as it is capable of scaling up and out. This can reduce tremendous cost for any organisation. Mainframe enjoyed 14 per cent growth rate in the 250K server segment over the last 5 years.

What are the world trends in mainframe?
SOA is using mainframe as a hub, by converting legacy CICS/IMS (Customer Information Management System/Information Management System) applications into services and linking them into Java based presentation front ends, thus getting the best from technology by flexible business processes, investment protection, future proofing, without compromising on scalability, availability, security and lower TCO. If an organisation wants to implement best practices, it would mean, creation of a enterprise service bus to carry all the data and messages for the organisation on a common bus with common standards, and secondly a central location for data, and lastly one repository for all business rules/processing logic to allow reuse across an enterprise.

What if competing hardware technologies, such as a cluster of web servers (not from IBM) could well serve the same purpose?
Cluster technology is nothing new, they are provided by everybody, including IBM. However, beyond a certain number of individual machines that are clustered, the costs of managing the cluster (the network, cabling, connections, data replications, power consumption, people costs of managing the various servers etc) all become very high. If clusters run at low utilisation, then the problem is huge and given the reliability of UNIX/Intel boxes.

UNIX servers are used only 5-15 % of the time? In that context how mainframe can be fully utilised?
The reliability of UNIX/INTEL boxes is not very high. Most organisations don't increase load on any particular box in fear of losing precious data or face a major outage if the box fails. The moment the organisation realises that the machine is processing more transactions or data and is going beyond 30 per cent utilisation, they add one more server to spread the load to a new machine and get the utilisation back to a low level.
The analogy is like the link in a chain that is carrying load, beyond a certain load; you can add a second link and a third link to ensure that even if one link fails, the second link stays on instead of ensuring a better link the first instance. This results in typically very low utilisation percentages.
Whereas the mainframe's reliability is measured in decades. MTBF for a processing chip on the mainframe is about 70 years!
So mainframes are typically run at 90-100 per cent utilisation continuously. The Toronto Dominion Bank recently celebrated their 10th consecutive year of running continuously with zero down time. That is how the name system z came up (z for zero downtime)

Mainframe has never been hacked, why? Mainframe is a proprietary to IBM as Windows is to Microsoft. How come MS Windows has been such a big target for hackers but not mainframe?
Windows is an operating system started off as being meant for one user only, and they could run only one program at a time, and it was written to manage real devices in the PC, that is, it was limited to what the PC had ( eg.,640K).
When it was realised that this approach meant that programs which required more hardware capacity (like memory) could not be written, special routines that virtualised hardware had to be written. However, the underlying operating system files etc were all open to anyone who wanted to install software, that is, any programmer could overwrite system software causing malicious or unintended damage.
The operating system grew organically and tries to mimic multi- user environment, virtualisation and allowing multiple programs at the same time etc, but this has been developed as additions and not designed from ground up. Hence the stability issues and issues of hacking because the entire system software etc was open for anybody to overwrite with their own code. Mainframe OZ (zOS) on the other hand was written ground up to be virtual, multi user system, multi program system. The hardware was always virtualised and programmers do not deal with physical limitations of the system.
Next, Operating system files and production code always was protected by the creation of a strict discipline and the creation of special libraries from which they could be run. This is controlled by system programmers.
Application programs never replace operating system files unlike in Windows or UNIX (to a lesser extent). This created this environment never to be hacked to date.

Future of mainframe?
Mainframe is the key competency with excellent growth potential for technical professionals and the IT industry. Around about 20,000 people are required to work on this platform by 2010. There is a huge demand for system programmers, database administrators and technical solution managers.
Mainframe should be made open and we should make people understand that Java can be done through mainframe. IBM is creating the mainframe community and is working with academia to start this sooner. Mainframe is coming into picture and is not going to disappear.

It’s monkey menace now!

While the stray dogs have been the focus of civic attention in much of the City, it seems like people in JP Nagar 6th Phase have a “monkey business” to contend with. “I was returning from office and I thought a dog was chasing me, then I realised it was a monkey. These monkeys chase people, take away food items. And they don’t even spare your clothes”, said Ashwini Shetty of Technodreams, a resident. Another harassed resident noted, “You throw a stone and the dog runs away, but what do we do with monkeys? They sit on coconut trees and damage all the cable wires here.”
First, the canines. Now, the simians. What next?

Adverse factors affecting fireworks industry

Prices rise 10 per cent compared with the last two years

Despite price rise, the industry is optimistic about robust sales. A good monsoon means high rural incomes and more sales of fireworks.


The fireworks industry is readying to face a cracker of a season. Despite combination of adverse factors — environmental issues, labour shortage, increase in raw materials costs and higher transport charges — the industry's production is expanding. But prices of fireworks are, however, up 10 per cent this year as compared with the last two years.

Industry representatives attribute the price rise to increase in the cost of raw materials.
Cost of cellophane paper used to wrap crackers was Rs 950 per ream in the year 2005 and now it is Rs 1,300 per ream (open market prices are occasionally higher).

"In India only one company based in Kolkata is making cellophane paper. The company was locked-out for seven months which lead to higher prices," explained Mr A.P. Selvarajan, President, Tamil Nadu Fireworks and Amorces Manufacturers' Association. Firecracker manufacturers have now moved to tissue and craft paper because of the high cost of cellophane paper.

"We can import cellophane paper from China, Germany or Indonesia but Octroi charges are high," said Mr Selvarajan. In addition, he said, increase in metal prices worldwide will affect profit margin.
The price of aluminum powder that was Rs 139.25 per kg in 2005 is now quoted at Rs 176.05 a kg.

The price of gum (potato paste) is also up over two times to Rs 800.
Due to safety regulations firecrackers are no longer sent by rail. Goods trains accept only five wagons on one rake and it takes 45-60 days for the consignment to reach its destination. So, producers have opted for lorry services (originating from Namakkal), which take only 5-6 days, he added.

Labour shortage is another concern due to spinning mills mushrooming in and around Sivakasi. Women, in particular, choose to work in spinning mills than in fireworks. So machines are used to complete the work. No wonder, paper tubes that were handmade are now done by machines.
Mixing of chemicals is done manually. But even here machines are being introduced. "We have a mixing plant on trial and if it proves to be successful it will continue to use it," Mr Selvarajan asserted.

With improved technology, there is no room for child labour anymore. The Department of Explosives and Labour department make inspection visits to plants. "This year we have made crackers in such a way where the noise level is within the stipulated decibel," he said
Despite price rise, the industry is optimistic about robust sales. A good monsoon means high rural incomes and more sales of fireworks because of improved purchasing power. The industry is hopeful of achieving a 10 per cent sales growth this year.