Reuters to Make Bangalore Biggest Information Hub
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Financial news and information provider Reuters Group Plc said on Thursday it plans to make Bangalore its biggest information-gathering hub, employing up to 1,500 people, or 10 percent of its total workforce.
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(InfoWorld) - Chinese cities are expected to unseat Bangalore, Mumbai, and Delhi in India, and Manila of the Philippines, as favored offshore delivery centers by 2011, according to IDC. The market researcher has introduced a new Global Delivery Index (GDI), which compares 35 cities in the Asia-Pacific as potential offshore delivery centers, based on criteria such as cost of labor, cost of rent, language skills, government policies, infrastructure, and staff turnover rates. Bangalore currently tops the list, followed by Manila, Delhi, and Mumbai. The Chinese cities that figure in the 2007 list include Dalian, Shanghai, and Beijing, at numbers five, six, and seven. Indian cities have inherent challenges such asÂ cost of staff and pressure on infrastructure, said Conrad Chang, a research manager at IDCâs Asia Pacific operations, in a telephone interview on Thursday. While India has focused on the U.S. and European markets, China has large opportunities in the Japanese and Korean markets, Chang added. Chinese cities will overtake Indian cities by 2011 because of massive investments made in infrastructure, English language, Internet connections, and technical skills, which are favorable towards offshoring, IDC said Tuesday. Forrester Research,Â however, takes a less optimistic view about China as an offshore destination. Nearly two years ago, the country was widely viewed as a key challenger to India as an offshore services delivery location, however Forresterâs research shows that the market has not taken off as expected, the research firm said in a recent report. China primarily attracts business from Korean and Japanese companies, but most of them have preferred to set up their own operations in China rather than outsource, because there are not many large service providers in China, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners InternationalÂ (TPI) in Houston, on Thursday. Many U.S. and European companies, that set up offshore services operations in India, may also have an operation in China, Pai said. â But the Indian operation will typically be the larger,â he added. China has still not overcome customersâ concerns about English language skills, intellectual property (IP) protection, and attrition in the country, Forrester said. In contrast, India has a sophisticated and time-tested legal environment built around Western common law, Pai said. Even if China invests heavily in education, the population cannot get in four to five years as fluent in English as Indians, he said. â Indians have been speaking English for over a hundred years,â he added. Indiaâs demographics also favor its continuation as a key offshore services location. On account of Chinaâs one-child-per-family policy, the countryâs population is aging. The country has about half as many people under 30 than India, Pai said. The IT industry primarily employs younger staff, he added. The IDC GDI rates the potential of cities as offshore destinations, said Chang. The actual business decision by companies to offshore to these cities will depend on a host of other factors, he added. The GDI is a moving index, reviewed every six months. âThis is not about India versus China,â Chang said. IDC expects both countriesâ offshore business to grow, he added.
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New Lenovo marketing communications hub in Bangalore now handles creative development worldwide.
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Google Finance has added some major changes, especially to its home page, which result in a new chocked full of information financial hub which may be perfect for daily traders and major investors, but a little too busy for basic users. Like the former Google Finance, Google News takes center stage as news on specific public [...]
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(InfoWorld) - Operations of IT services companies in Bangalore face potential disruptions as the city protests a tribunal decision on the sharing of river waters between two states. The order covers Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, and the neighboring Tamil Nadu state. Besides Indian outsourcers like Infosys and Wipro, a number of multinational companies, including Dell, IBM, and Accenture have global services operations in Bangalore. The tribunal, set up to arbitrate the dispute, delivered a verdict on Monday that has angered the people of Karnataka, who want a larger share of the waters of the Cauvery river. Disputes over sharing the waters of the Cauvery have in the past led to violence in Karnataka. A verdict over sharing of Cauvery water by another panel, in 1991, sparked off anti-Tamil violence in Karnataka, which left about 18 people dead. Karnataka has a significant number of settlers from Tamil Nadu. A few Bangalore IT companies closed operations early on Monday and asked their staff to work from home as they were worried that news of the order would trigger off violence in the city. Most others however ran their operations normally. "It is business as usual as extra police have been deployed, and everything seems under control," said a spokeswoman for Infosys of Bangalore. Infosys, which is Indiaâs second largest outsourcer, is in touch with the government and is evaluating the situation round-the-clock, she added. Accenture, which also has a large operation in Bangalore, is working normally, said a spokesman for the company. The company has staff working on both day and night shifts. So far, there have been reports of only sporadic protests in Bangalore and surrounding districts. The government of Karnataka deployed about 18,000 police in the city ahead of the tribunal's verdict. If violence erupts or if there are calls for strikes, IT companies may have to temporarily scale down their Bangalore operations as it will become difficult for staff to get to work. Most IT companies like Infosys and Wipro have business continuity plans in place to move work to their facilities in other locations in India.
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Royal &amp; Sun Alliance (RSA) has become the latest company to move jobs to India. The insurance company has announced its plans to move 1,200 jobs to Bangalore during the next two years.
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Reuters, the British news and financial information provider, will eventually employ up to 10 percent of its workforce in India, it was reported.
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Publishers and webmasters will be able to specify through a site map the articles they want Google News to index.
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India's Reliance Infocomm plans to triple the size of its mobile phone network to span most of the subcontinent by the end of this year. The expansion is aimed at supporting a forecast 20m subscribers by March 2006.
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Financial types don't like teenage girls, apparently Newswire and financial data service Reuters is to dip another finger in Web 2.0 waters by setting up its own version of MySpace. But the Reuters site will be targeted at City traders rather than US teenagers.â¦
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The search giant will index and tag local stories for 176 publications, while the papers will use Yahoo to power their classified listings, ad sales and local search. In Monkey Bites.
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The Karnataka state government is trying to slow growth in Bangalore by encouraging new investors to set up their facilities in new townships.The concept of satellite towns is not new to Bangalore. While companies moved to these satellite towns because of the relatively cheap real estate, they did not provide housing there. As a result, employees had to commute from their homes in Bangalore to townships like Electronic City.Karnataka will now insist that companies establishing facilities in the new townships should also provide housing for their employees, said M.N. Vidyashankar, secretary for information technology in the state government. The township at Bidadi will be self-contained with schools, malls, and a direct link to an international airport under construction, he added.Besides the new townships, the government is also trying to reduce migration from the hinterland into Bangalore by trying to route new investments in IT, call centers, and business process outsourcing (BPO) facilities to other towns in Karnataka like Belgaum, Hubli, Bellary, and Mysore. The government has acquired land in some of these towns to be developed in partnership with the private sector.To get access to new staff pools, as well as to cut costs, Indian outsourcers are looking at smaller towns where they can set up their new facilities, said Siddharth Pai, a partner at outsourcing consultancy firm Technology Partners International Inc. (TPI) in Houston. Some outsourcing companies like Infosys already have operations in towns around Bangalore, like Mysore and Mangalore.Some of these small towns are centers for education, and hence good places to hire staff, Pai said. The only drawback so far has been poor connectivity by road and air, which the government should try to solve, he addedWith a population of over 6.5 million, the Indian city of Bangalore is reeling from too much growth at too fast a pace. The city houses the services delivery centers of top Indian outsourcers like Infosys Technologies and Wipro, and multinational companies like IBM, Dell, and Oracle.The traffic jams, high cost of housing, and shortage of staff in the city has not, however, slowed down new entrants to the city. In August, the state of Karnataka, of which Bangalore is the capital, cleared 52 new investments in the area of IT, said Vidyashankar.IT, call center, and BPO facilities in Bangalore employ 480,000 direct staff, apart from providing indirect employment to over 3 million other people, according to Vidyashankar. These sectors contribute to 36 percent of the state&#39;s GDP (gross domestic product), which is expected to increase to 50 percent of GDP by 2011, he added.
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Infosys Technologies, India's second-largest software firm, has said it will be included on the Nasdaq-100 index, putting it among the biggest listed tech companies in the world.
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BANGALORE, INDIA - MicrosoftÂ is setting up a research lab in Bangalore, India, that will focus on areas including computing technologies for emerging markets, according to a company executive.
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reporter&#39;s notebook HOLLYWOOD, Calif.--The nation&#39;s leading Internet journalists wrapped up an annual meeting here on Sunday, confident that the World Wide Web is creating a new world order in a business that is dominated by a handful of large corporations
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This is the first in a series of business features by  Reuters focusing on some of the world's biggest brands and most  innovative companies.
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By S. SRINIVASAN     BANGALORE, India  -- Google Inc...