nasscom

Indian IT firms reject 90 percent of college graduates and 75 percent of engineers who apply for jobs because they are not good enough to be trained, according to Nasscom.

Wipro employs 95,000, Infosys 1,05,000 and TCS 1,43,000. Of the Fortune 500, only Wal-Mart in America adds more people annually than either Infosys or TCS.



Last year Infosys hired 28,231 people, including 18,000 graduates paid Rs.3 lakh a year. This year they will hire 20,000 at Rs 3.25 lakh. Infosys is hiring though there isn't enough business. Currently, 30,000 people at Infosys are 'benched'.

Why are they still hiring and raising salaries? Because they cannot find competent people and due to this reason, this year Infosys increased its training of employees to 29 weeks. That's seven months of training. Why do they need so much training? And why is the quality of applicants so poor?

Infosys spends twice as much as its American competitors on training, four percent of revenue. Nine half-literates are produced by our colleges, by Nasscom's numbers, for every graduate of passable quality. What is Nasscom's solution to this? It wants government to boost college enrolment from 10 percent of those in secondary school, to 25 percent. Nasscom knows that this will only increase the number of job applicants, not the quality, but there's no other solution.

India produces three million graduates, but Nasscom says that next year it will see a shortage of 500,000 graduates, because incompetents will swamp the rest.

banking

Infosys Technologies, which counts Bank of America, Royal Bank of Scotland and ABN Amro among its top customers, sees more
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opportunities emerge as these banks merge their business and technology systems in order to consolidate their operations and integrate better with the acquired entities.

For Infosys, which derives around 33% of its revenues from banking and financial services (BFSI) customers, consolidation among the top US and European banks is bringing new business, with some of these individual contracts worth around $500 million each, potentially.

“There are six integration projects we are currently looking at,” said Ashok Vemuri, senior vice-president and global head for banking and capital markets business at Infosys. “Fortunately, we have landed on the right side in most of these M&A developments,” he added without offering comments about any specific customers.

While BofA is in the process of integrating its systems with Merrill Lynch, RBS is attempting to consolidate its IT systems with ABN Amro. As these banks merge, they now face a mammoth task of integrating their software applications, consolidating
their data centres and other trading platforms into single entity, so that their customers are able to transact without facing any merger-related issues.