Microsoft to hire more staff at Indian facility
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Microsoft will hire hundreds of new staff for its operations in Hyderabad, south India over the next 12 months. The company&#39;s chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer said the hiring of more staff for its software
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By Tri-City Herald, Kennewick, Wash.  Feb. 14--QUINCY -- The recent hiring of 15 technicians at Microsoft's data center here is the first wave of what officials say could be a job boom for skilled workers.
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Financial news and information giant Reuters announced it would shift 50 percent of its data operations to India and add 860 workers by the end of next year.
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The announcement came as Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer opened the group&#39;s new Indian headquarters in the city of Hyderabad.
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Microsoft has tapped a former executive at Walt Disney to fill its CIO position, a move that shows the company continuing to fill top executive positions from outside the company.Tony Scott, who most recently was CIO at Walt Disney, will take over that same role at Microsoft in February, reporting to Chief Operating Officer Kevin Turner. Scott, who also will be a corporate vice president at Microsoft, replaces Stuart Scott, who&#160;departed the company in November. The two are not related.Scott will manage Microsoft&#39;s 4,000-person IT organization, which is responsible for all of the technology systems supporting the company&#39;s worldwide sales, marketing, and services operations, as well as the enterprise systems and applications for all corporate processes.At Disney, where he was senior vice president in addition to CIO, Scott was the first CIO to manage the entire company&#39;s IT systems, according to Microsoft. Prior to Disney, Scott was CTO at General Motors and vice president of operations at Bristol-Meyers Squibb.There are a lot of new faces in the ranks of upper management at Microsoft, with a rash of them signing on to the company in the last six months. Just last week Microsoft revealed that company veteran Jeff Raikes, president of its Business Division, will&#160;leave the company in September. The company tapped an outside executive -- former Juniper Networks, Macromedia, and Adobe executive Stephen Elop -- to fill that role.Other new hires to the company since last July include: Dan Reed, Microsoft Research director of scalable and multicore computing in November; Robert Youngjohns, president of North American sales and marketing and corporate vice president in November; Brian McAndrews, senior vice president, Advertiser and Publisher Solutions Group in August; and Don Mattick, senior vice president, Interactive Entertainment Business in July.There is likely more new blood to come as Microsoft also confirmed last week several other executive departures: Bruce Jaffe, corporate vice president of corporate development; Charles Fitzgerald, Microsoft&#39;s general manager of platform strategy; and&#160;Rob Short, corporate vice president of the Windows Core Technology group.Apart from CEO Steve Ballmer and Robbie Bach, president of Microsoft&#39;s entertainment and devices division, many of the company&#39;s other top executives have joined the company in the past three years. They include the man widely seen as Gates&#39; successor, Chief Architect Ray Ozzie, who joined Microsoft in 2005. Kevin Turner, Microsoft&#39;s chief operating officer, and Steve Berkowitz, senior vice president of Microsoft&#39;s Online Services Group, also joined the company that year.
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Microsoft on Monday formally opened a new software development campus in India that is Microsoft&#39;s largest campus after its Redmond, Wash.
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(InfoWorld) - Indian chief information officers (CIOs) are finding it harder to recruit staff because of large-scale hiring by the countryâs outsourcing industry, a Gartner researcher said Monday. Indiaâs top IT services providers, focused on the global market, are regarded as the best employers, and get the best IT staff in the country, said Partha Iyengar, research vice president at Gartner, in a conference call. Indian user organizations are hence finding it very difficult to attract and retain technical staff, particular in the middle management, Iyengar said. A large number of Indian and multinational services companies have set up services delivery operations in India, and hire staff by the thousands each quarter. The problem for user organizations may only get worse as outsourcing companies start hiring business line managers as well to build their vertical industry expertise, Iyengar added. As large Indian outsourcers grow in revenue by 30 to 40 percent each year, they will hire business managers from the banking, manufacturing, and retail industries, bringing business knowledge that can be integrated into their services offerings, he added. This movement of business managers from the user industry to outsourcers will make it more difficult for CIOs to complete projects, as companies will have fewer business staff available to participate in the project, according to Gartner. India is fastÂ emerging as a key marketÂ in the Asia-Pacific region for outsourcing contracts, according to outsourcing consultancy firm, Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) in Houston, Texas. Of the total value of contracts awarded in the region last year, Indian customers accounted for 24.8 percent, TPI said. That puts the country ahead of China with a 4.4 percent share, but still behind Australia at 32.4 percent and Japan at 26.8 percent, Peter Allan, a partner at TPI said Monday. Faced with shortage of staff, Indian user organizations are looking to outsourcing IT functions. But Indian outsourcing companies have not shown great interest in this business, as they are more focused on more lucrative business abroad, Gartnerâs Iyengar said. Multinational service providers like IBM andÂ AccentureÂ have bagged some of the larger contracts, but that still leaves a large number of Indian companies with smaller outsourcing contracts, who canât find a good service provider, Iyengar added. Indian IT spending is growing at a five-year compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 14.8 percent, the highest in the Asia-Pacific region, to over $36 billion by 2009, Gartner said. This increase comes from rising expectations from businesses for IT to play a larger role in growth, efficiency and competitive advantage, it added.
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BANGALORE, INDIA -- Microsoft Corp. is hiring hundreds of new staff for its operations in Hyderabad over the next 12 months, the company's chief executive officer, Steve Ballmer told reporters Monday in Bangalore, India.
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Microsoft today dramatically increased its presence in India, opening a major new campus on the subcontinent and unveiling a key joint venture in the world&#39;s leading region for outsourcing.
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Software maker plans to move leaders in its Windows, Windows Live, and Windows Mobile units. Executives leaving the company include two prominent outside hires.
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Microsoft has tapped a former executive at Walt Disney to fill its CIO position, a move that shows the company continuing to fill top executive positions from outside the company.
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Microsoft Corp. is further expanding its presence in India with plans to open a research center in Bangalore.
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Microsoft Corp. MSFT.O said on Monday  it would expand its Redmond, Washington, headquarters to  accommodate the hiring of more than 10,000 new employees over  next 10 to 20 years.
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Microsoft Research will open a laboratory in Bangalore, India, the company&#39;s third research installation overseas and a sign of India&#39;s increasing importance in tech.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft will open a software development office in Vancouver, Canada, later this year, in part as a way to retain talented workers who can't stay in the U.S. because of immigration laws. Software developers from around the world will staff the center, which will allow Microsoft to keep skilled workers who are affected by U.S. immigration issues, the company said in a statement Thursday. Microsoft, along with other high-tech companies, has been a vocal supporter of legislation that would increase the number of foreign workers allowed to stay in the U.S. Proposed amendments to the current foreign worker regulations were part of a larger controversial immigration bill that stalled in the U.S. Congress last week. Without new regulations, companies across the country are competing for 65,000 H-1B visas issued each year. "This is especially a problem for Microsoft because it's so big and doing so much hiring," said Susannah Malarkey, executive director of the Washington Technology Alliance, an association of companies promoting education and an entrepreneurial environment in the state. "If you can't use visas to bring people in, you have to take the jobs to where the people are," she noted. Companies like Microsoft can "either create a worksite in the country of origin of these people or lose out on them altogether," she said. In addition to its Redmond headquarters, Microsoft already has development centers in Ireland, Denmark, Israel, and North Carolina. The Vancouver location is in part attractive because of its proximity to Redmond, Microsoft said. Microsoft did not reveal the Vancouver facility's size or precise location.
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IBM plans to continue hiring global services delivery staff in India by the thousands, adding to the 73,000 it already has in its global services and other operations in the country.A large number of Indian outsourcers and multinational services companies have set up services delivery operations from India. Their competition for the best staff is&#160;driving up salaries. Companies are however introducing quality systems that enable them to weed out low performers. IBM, for example, sacked about 200 staff earlier this month, after a staff appraisal. Indian outsourcer Tata Consultancy Services said a day later it had terminated 500 staff after a similar staff appraisal.Staff attrition in IBM&#39;s global services delivery operation in India is within 0.2 percent from the attrition rate at IBM&#39;s global services operations in the U.S., said Diane Gherson, vice president of human resources (HR) for IBM&#39;s Global Business Services.&quot;Our business model is based on that range of attrition, and we don&#39;t mind some attrition because it helps us get fresh talent, and offer growth to people in the organization,&quot; she said Wednesday.Although staff salaries are rising in India higher than in most other countries, IBM has been able to recover the increased cost from clients by offering staff with higher skills, Gherson said. Salary increases will however eventually become a problem for India if the amount staff are charging cannot be recovered from clients, she added.Even as some research firms have warned of&#160;reduced growth in IT budgets&#160;in the U.S. this year, IBM is not feeling the impact yet in its services business. &quot;They will talk themselves into a recession if they are not careful,&quot; Gherson said. Besides, over 65 per cent of IBM&#39;s revenue comes from outside the U.S., she added.Forrester, for example, forecast on Monday&#160;slowing growth this year for purchases of IT products and services&#160;in the U.S., based on the assumption that a mild recession will hit the U.S. economy in the second or third quarter.IBM&#39;s services delivery strategy has been to set up delivery operations in a large number of countries to tap talent in these countries, and also to deliver to the customer a variety of skills and services, including language skills, and services delivered in the same time zone as the customer, said Rajesh Nambiar, Head of IBM&#39;s global delivery business in India.India is IBM&#39;s second largest location outside the U.S. for global services delivery, and will likely hold this position at least for the next five years, Gherson said. India is also an important market for IBM, Nambiar said. The company earned revenue of about $1 billion from the Indian market last year.
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Software service provider Cognizant Technology Solutions plans to build a new center in India that will employ nearly 4,000 engineers.