Microsoft launches academic program in India
Microsoft has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with Visveswaraiah Technological University, Karnataka. According to the MoU, Microsoft will provide access to .NET tools and technologies to 102 colleges affiliated with the university. This is a part of the company’s global Academic Developer Programme. The initiatives under this programme include Faculty Internship, .NET Campus Challenge, MSDN Academic Alliance and Walk the Success seminars.

Dilip Mistry, director .NET and Developer Evangelism, Microsoft India, believes that this initiative will help Indian companies move up the value chain. “Moving up the value chain isn’t just a discussion today, it is very critical if India is to retain its position as a leading provider of skilled IT manpower. This initiative is aimed at producing software engineers with a radically different skill set and is our contribution to strengthen intellectual capital,” added Mistry.

Delphi to expand its Bangalore technical centre
Delphi India is now expanding its software capabilities in automotive electronics. It plans to increase its head count of software engineers from the current base of 160 to 360 at its Bangalore technical centre in the next one or two years. It will invest $25 million during this period. Besides this, Delphi’s technical centre will add two new labs for mechanical engineering and electronics. The scope of work in the mechanical lab will be simulation and mechanical analysis.

Prakash K Kulkarni, director, Delphi Technical Centre, Bangalore, said, “Today 22 percent of a car is electronically controlled. This brings about improved fuel efficiency and also reduces pollution levels to a great extent. We need more software capabilities for creating such products, which is why we are hiring more electrical and mechanical engineers.”

The technical centre was initially focusing on the development of key embedded software for mobile multimedia systems and automotive applications like engine and brake controllers.

i-flex forays into the Australian market
i-flex solutions has announced that it would develop an end-to-end Web-enabled solution for the processing of mortgage applications for OnePort, Australia. OnePort is a Citibank-owned entity that brings together lenders and mortgage brokers across Australia. It currently distributes the mortgage products of RAMS Home Loans, Bluestone Mortgages and Citibank.

The solution will be implemented with brokers throughout Australia and will offer considerable improvements in transaction turnaround times, especially in cases such as conditional loan approvals. This will, in turn, enable the mortgage broker to offer a much higher level of service to the end-customer.

As part of the project, i-flex will also deliver simulation tools that mortgage brokers can use to help customers understand how to maximise their wealth during the mortgage duration. The OnePort win provides i-flex with an ideal launching pad to establish itself in the Australia and New Zealand markets.

HP Services on high growth trajectory in India
HP Services (HPS) has announced its four-point business strategy in an effort to drive the organisation to become the leading IT services provider in India. The strategy is expected to double the company’s revenues, and triple operating profits within the next four years. As part of the strategy the company plans to capture all merger synergies and continue focusing on its key verticals, including financial services, manufacturing and government verticals. The company will also retool its business model by becoming the lowest-cost provider of the entire range of support, consulting, and outsourcing services. HPS also announced two major customer wins worth $7 million in India. The wins include a $2 million contract from Ashok Leyland and a $5 million contract from Tata Steel.

Novell announces new software pricing programme
Novell recently launched a software-pricing programme that makes Web services more affordable by tailoring pricing to the type of end-user. In addition to traditional pricing, the company will now offer significantly discounted business-to-consumer and government-to-citizen user license pricing. Novell’s pricing programme creates two new categories of discounted user licenses to make affordable Web services available to very large user communities. While Novell’s standard user license remains the license for employees and suppliers, the business-to-consumer user license price is only 25 percent of the standard user license and the government-to-citizen user license is only 10 percent of the standard price. For all three categories, Novell charges based on the number of individual users of a software service, not the number of computing devices connected to the network.

ICICI OneSource completes integration of CustomerAsset acquisition
ICICI OneSource recently announced the successful integration of CustomerAsset, a leading contact centre that ICICI OneSource acquired earlier this year. With more than 1,350 employees serving the US and UK markets, ICICI OneSource is now one of India’s largest providers of offshore business process and customer relationship management (CRM) services. More companies outsource business processes to India than any other country, according to recent industry research.

ICICI OneSource’s contact centre services include inbound and outbound calls, e-mail, chat and back office processing services. In transaction processing, ICICI OneSource focuses on specific verticals in the financial services sector where it has extensive domain expertise, including retail banking, credit cards, mortgages, insurance and asset management. According to Gartner Group estimates, the global business process outsourcing market is expected to reach $234 billion by 2005, with a significant portion of those revenues being realised by Indian companies.