Wipro planning biggest restructuring exercise

Wipro is planning a wide-ranging restructuring to help employees shore up expertise in state-of-the art skills, a move that underscores the need to adapt to the fast-changing role of information technology in enterprises. The Bangalore-based company's head of human resources Saurabh Govil described the effort as the biggest restructuring exercise since Wipro ventured into the information technology business in 1981. "Very few companies would have tried anything of this size and scale in the past," said Saurabh Govil, a senior vice president.

Chief executive TK Kurien said that in 12-18 months, when the revamp is completed, the organisational will look more like an hourglass than a pyramid. "People who sit in between and do broking are going to be affected. They are slowly going to go away," he said, delivering a stark warning to those among the nearly 1.5 lakh employees who are seen as under-performers. The restructuring and training will involve enhancing or acquiring proficiency in emerging technology areas such as data analytics and cloud computing. Govil said that equally important will be what he called the "behaviourial aspects" of working in an industry where customers are increasingly demanding that technology should serve clearly-defined business goals.

Govil said restructuring is a critical part of the "New Wipro" and will help the company gear up for the next wave of IT services that includes greater focus on technology automation. "The reskilling exercise has the potential to take the capabilities of our employees to the next level, which in turn will translate into enhanced quality outcomes, better customer satisfaction and more revenues."

For several years, Wipro has been struggling to cross the 3% quarterly revenue growth mark. Kurien, who took over in February 2011, has said that he aspires to make India's third-largest software exporter a growth leader in the industry. While software industry grouping Nasscom has predicted that exports will grow by 13-15% in the year to March 2015, Wipro's revenue expansion is expected to be much slower.

"In future, everything will depend on how much value you add to the company, not how many years you have spent at the company," Kurien, 54, said. Govil was of the view that low-end work is increasingly automated and employees are increasingly expected to be connecting with customers, which is why "behavioral sensitisation" is such an important part of the restructuring. "Employees are no longer the back-end engineers delivering outsourced services remotely," he said.

Some experts, however, question if Wipro's latest attempt would help the Bangalore-based company gain a competitive edge. "As Indian IT services firms move up the value chain, they are trying to retrain their employees so that they have the domain knowledge of this digital transformation, including Smac (social, mobility, analytics, cloud)," said Samiron Ghoshal, the head of IT advisory at Ernst & Young.

Hand written notes better than typing on laptops: Study

Taking notes by hand is better than writing them on a laptop for remembering conceptual information over the long term, a new study has found.

"Our new findings suggest that even when laptops are used as intended - and not for buying things on Amazon during class - they may still be harming academic performance," said Pam Mueller of Princeton University, lead author of the study.

Mueller and researcher Daniel Oppenheimer, who is now at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), conducted a series of studies to investigate whether their intuitions about laptop and longhand note-taking were true.

In the first study, 65 college students watched one of five TED Talks covering topics that were interesting but not common knowledge.

The students, who watched the talks in small groups, were either given laptops (disconnected from Internet) or notebooks, and were told to use whatever strategy they normally used to take notes.

The students then completed three distractor tasks, including a taxing working memory task. A full 30 minutes later, they had to answer factual-recall questions based on the lecture they had watched.

The results showed that while the two types of note-takers performed equally well on questions that involved recalling facts, laptop note-takers performed significantly worse on the conceptual questions.

The notes from laptop users contained more words and more verbatim overlap with the lecture, compared to the notes that were written by hand.

Overall, students who took more notes performed better, but so did those who had less verbatim overlap, suggesting that the benefit of having more content is cancelled out by "mindless transcription."

"It may be that longhand note takers engage in more processing than laptop note takers, thus selecting more important information to include in their notes, which enables them to study this content more efficiently," researchers said.

Surprisingly, the researchers saw similar results even when they explicitly instructed the students to avoid taking verbatim notes, suggesting that the urge to do so when typing is hard to overcome.

Researchers also found that longhand note takers still beat laptop note takers on recall one week later when participants were given a chance to review their notes before taking the recall test.

Once again, the amount of verbatim overlap was associated with worse performance on conceptual items.

Ubuntu 'Trusty Tahr' is a solid step forward, not a leap

Latest version of Canonical's desktop Linux addresses a major UI gripe and builds the base for overdue tablet edition of Ubuntu

Ubuntu, Canonical's edition of Linux aimed mainly at end-users and desktops, published its 14.04 release on Thursday. It's an incremental upgrade, polishing existing features rather than introducing revolutionary new ones, but it features at least one rethinking of an interface feature that's divided Ubuntu users for some time.

Code-named "Trusty Tahr," 14.04 is one of the LTS (long-term support) editions of Ubuntu, designed to be supported for five years by Canonical, though some spin-off editions carry only three years of support. It sports the 3.13 edition of the Linux kernel, itself outfitted with some major virtualization and hardware support functions.

Of the latter, the most noteworthy addition is support for 64-bit ARM and POWER systems. Both are useful for server environments, but the former ought to prove doubly in demand when Canonical helps roll out the first Ubuntu-powered tablets running 14.04.

One major and long-awaited bit of interface polish involves a fix to the Unity window manager, which annoyed the Ubuntu community the same way Windows 8's Metro inflamed Windows users. Unity forced application menus to sit at the top of the screen, in much the same manner as Mac OS X, rather than be attached to their attendant windows.

This had bad repercussions for high-pixel-density displays. The menus grew more removed from the applications themselves, so as of 14.04, app menus are placed back with their own windows. The change has to be made manually, but it isn't difficult.

Relocating the menus is one of a number of changes made to allow Ubuntu to play better with high-resolution displays on desktops, smartphone, and tablets. Canonical clearly wants Ubuntu present on more tablets, and while it has specific installation instructions for those who want toload Ubuntu the way they side-loaded custom Android ROMs, Canonical is betting on itspartnerships with hardware makers to deliver Ubuntu as a mobile OS.

Canonical's biggest impact isn't on desktops or mobile devices, though; as with many other varieties of Linux, it's been on the server side. Canonical has been pushing Ubuntu harder as acloud building block OS recently, since the desktop market remains stagnant and mobile is difficult for outsiders to crack -- thanks to the Apple and Google duopoly. It makes sense then for Canonical to attack on as many fronts as possible.

It's worth keeping an eye on future desktop versions of Ubuntu to see whether Canonical reworks the system to take better advantage of containerization technologies like Docker. The application-virtualization system is now a notable component of Ubuntu Server and might well find its way into the desktop edition. Red Hat is said to be attempting a similar move with future versions of Fedora, using the lessons learned from Docker on the server side to better determine how to package and distribute the desktop edition. It'll be interesting to see if Ubuntu cooks up a plan along those lines, too, and how unlike Red Hat's approach it might be.

Two cloud companies started by Indian entrepreneurs that are shining globally

With the emergence of the concept of cloud computing, India has been fast evolving as a hot bed of companies centered around the technology, kick-started by visionary Indian entrepreneurs who are driven by the grit to challenge big players in the space, such as Salesforce.com, Google and Microsoft. In the last 10 years, though many Indian entrepreneurs have stepped forward and established interesting cloud computing companies, only a few of them have actually evolved themselves dynamically and fast enough to reach a scale that is enviable to even the established cloud computing vendors. Two such Indian cloud computing companies that have become established players in their own space in the global market are Zoho and Freshdesk. When we spoke to the founders of these companies, we found that their brilliance in creating just the right product that was aimed at resolving specific business challenges within the SMB community, clubbed with their unique business strategies and sales model contributed significantly to their consistent success. InformationWeek takes a closer look at their success stories and the factors that catalyzed their rapid growth in the global market. Zoho: A firm that believes in the bottom-up approach Way back in 1996 when Indian technology entrepreneurship was almost unheard of, Sridhar Vembu an IIT Madras alumni armed with a PhD from Princeton University kick-started a tech company called AdventNet that offered Web Network Management System (WebNMS) to the telecom OEMs like Cisco, Nortel and Motorola. AdventNet’s business was going good, till the year 2000 when the dotcom burst happened and as a result most fibre optic companies that were WebNMS’ customers went out of business. Observing that the company’s client numbers were dwindling, Sridhar decided to diversify AdventNet and launched ManageEngine, a suite of products built for IT admins/teams. Journey from AdventNet to Zoho During 2005 Sridhar realized that many startups and SMBs were emerging in the Indian and the global market that were aiming at turning their focus completely on running their business and not their IT. Also, such companies didn’t have heavy capital that they could invest on internal IT. Sridhar figured that a bundle of essential business productivity and collaboration apps delivered on a subscription-based SaaS model could be the answer to the problems of emerging businesses. This model would call for a much lesser investment and would also lessen the burden of hosting, managing, maintaining and supporting apps, thus allowing them to focus on what they do best. So in 2005 Sridhar took the big leap and launched the company’s first SaaS offering, an online word processor. This was followed by other SaaS services that include CRM, mail, creator, projects, support, sites, campaigns, reports, etc. 

An interesting thing to note here is that the company entered the market way before Google launched its Google Apps for businesses, which included similar web-based productivity software for organizations. In 2009, the name of the company was changed from AdventNet to Zoho Corporation. “Today, Zoho Corp, headquartered in Pleasanton, CA, has three divisions, each focusing on different market segments. While Zoho.com is focused on online business productivity and collaboration apps; ManageEngine is focused on enterprise IT management ; and WebNMS is focused on the needs of OEMs,” says Sridhar. Though currently Zoho is targeting the SMBs in the global and the Indian market, the company aims at expanding into the large enterprises as well. Elaborating on this, Sridhar says, “At Zoho, we believe in the bottom-up approach. We serve small businesses first and eventually bubble up servicing larger companies. We like the SMB market better as there are more SMBs than larger companies in the world. While it has its own set of challenges — like reaching these SMBs is tough — the volume makes this interesting.” Acquiring 10 million customers It has been roughly 9 years since Zoho.com was kick-started and within this short time span the company has scaled up from zero customers to 10 million customers, with the company adding about 250,000 users every month. In addition, though the company is established by Indian entrepreneurs, the offerings are extremely popular across the globe with the company having maximum customer base in the U.S., Canada and U.K. Zoho has undoubtedly grown by leaps and bounds since its inception. “Today, Zoho has about 1,000 employees spread across in offices located in California, Austin, New Jersey, Singapore, Tokyo and Beijing, apart from Chennai. Our support and sales teams are based out of India and cater to customer’s needs, across the globe. We are expanding on sales and marketing along with strategic partnerships that will help us reach a wider audience

IBM Steps Up Investment In SoftLayer Cloud Partners

As IBM tries to accelerate its SoftLayer cloud services business to offset big hardware losses that have been plaguing the company, it’s turning to channel partners to help it step up its cloud game. As part of a cloud services push, IBM will unveil updates to its SoftLayer partner program that will boost margins on monthly recurring sales, dedicate more money to channel co-marketing funds, and expand in-person training opportunities for partners.   

Central to IBM's SoftLayer push are increases in the percentage discounts paid to partners for recurring monthly SoftLayer business. IBM said it will increase discounts from between 5 percent and 15 percent for deals worth as much as $15,000 in recurring revenue to a new range of 5 percent to 20 percent for deals ranging from $15,000 to $100,000 monthly. This is in addition to SoftLayer's existing referral program, which pays 10 percent the first year, 8 percent in year two, and 6 percent thereafter. 

Tom Blair, Senior Vice President, Global Sales, SoftLayer, said IBM is stepping up efforts to more effectively leverage its channel with the goal of boosting the number of channel-led accounts from 40 percent to 50 percent by the end of 2014. Blair said that since IBM purchased SoftLayer last year, about 120 IBM partners have joined the 1,400-strong SoftLayer partner program.

A new marketing initiative, meanwhile, will increase partner access to co-marketing funds, according to IBM. For every $1,000 of monthly cloud business a partner can commit to within a six-month window, IBM said it will match that amount in co-marketing funds. For example, if a partner commits to $3,000 of new monthly cloud business in the next six months, IBM will match up to $3,000 in co-marketing dollars spent by the partner.

Robert Verola, President, Vicom Computer Services, a $118 million IBM Premier partner based in Farmingdale, N.Y., said Vicom is just now beginning to move clients to the cloud. "What we want to see are compelling services priced properly for partners to make healthy recurring revenues," he said.  

"In two years from as much as 10 [percent] to 15 percent of our business will moved to the cloud. SoftLayer has been very aggressive about winning our business. But for now, we only make a move when it financially makes sense. Right now we are still just getting our feet wet," said Verola. 

As part of the update, IBM also said it has combined two existing SoftLayer partner programs—Hosted Reseller and Strategic Reseller—into one streamlined offering called the SoftLayer Services and Solution Provider program. In addition, it will expand the number of two-day hands-on SoftLayer training sessions by the end of second quarter to 21. IBM said nine of those road show training classes will be held in North America.

"We see huge opportunities in midmarket and large enterprise," said Ed Bottini, Global Cloud Computing Ecosystem Manager, IBM. "We are trying to ease cloud adoption for partners and let them tap into big opportunities to grow their business incrementally with cloud services."

In IBM’s first-quarter earnings released recently, the company said cloud revenue increased more than 50 percent vs. the previous quarter, and cloud offerings delivered as a service now represent $2.3 billion in annual revenue.

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