Technology giants this year have been encroaching on one another’s markets, buying up companies as they try to become one-stop shops for computing, networking and data storage, but Infosys still hasn’t jumped on the bandwagon.

Infosys Technologies Chief Financial Officer V. Balakrishnan compared acquisitions to “falling in love,” saying that one does not generally know when or how it will happen. When we asked about who Infosys was dating, Balakrishnan was noncommittal.

Speaking of love, Infosys is one of the few companies that had a dating allowance for employees, and Cupid’s arrows have been bang on target in the company’s campuses. Balakrishnan wouldn’t tell us whether the allowance has returned with the improved economic climate.

He did seem to support the idea of mid-20-something employees falling in love and tying the knot. Information technology has played a role in removing barriers imposed by the caste system in
India, Balakrishnan said.

Maybe the Indian government can take a queue from the information technology giant and look for innovative ways to solve India’s centuries-old caste-related problems?

Mahindra Satyam’s president of global operations, Atul Kunwar, told us the “first instinct” was to drop the Satyam name when the company was acquired in the wake of India’s biggest corporate fraud.

“We all need to have a name; sometimes we like them, sometimes we don’t,” Kunwar said while explaining that the company known as Satyam Computers was also known for its “solidity” and “great delivery.”

Mahindra Satyam has managed to retain the 380 customers that the firm had when Tech Mahindra won an auction to take it over. The Satyam name may have been a hard sell after the scandal, but one organisation insisted that the old name was good enough to be displayed in lights: international football’s governing body FIFA.

As parent company Mahindra & Mahnidra is big in vehicles, Korean carmaker Hyundai objected to its logo being shown in the list of sponsors for FIFA events, Kunwar told us. So the old name stood during the Confederation Cup that was held in South Africa in June.

Of course, those fighting the company in a class action lawsuit in the United States may not seem too amused, but then again, does anyone in the country care about “soccer”?

When 36-year old Madhu Kannan took over the reins at the Bombay Stock Exchange (BSE) earlier this year, he was faced with the task of turning around Asia’s oldest bourse, which had lost market share to tech-savvy new rivals.

Kannan, the youngest-ever CEO at the 134-year-old exchange, also had to gain acceptance from his employees in what had until then been a largely hierarchical firm.

He went as far as to stop gelling his hair to reveal more grays and look older, but at the Reuters India Investment Summit on Tuesday, the gel was back.

Kannan said he had become a lot older with his hair streaked with several more grays in the past six months, during which he moved out of a 26th floor office with sweeping views of Mumbai to a smaller office to be closer to his employees.

The old office is now a conference room.

But Kannan has a lot more to do if he wants to turn around his firm, something he hopes to do by more innovation to transform “what was essentially a single-product exchange to one which offers tradable products across all asset classes.”

He sees similarities between the current challenges facing the BSE and what his former alumnus, the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), faced earlier this decade.

One of Kannan’s recruits to a seven-member top executive team that possibly seeks to emulate the NYSE’s successful turnaround includes James E. Shapiro, who worked at the NYSE for 16 years in several senior management roles.

At NYSE, Kannan was part of a top team that oversaw the purchase of an electronic trading system and a subsequent IPO.

In a move that invites comparison to his past, the BSE under Kannan has bought a financial technology services firm, Marketplace Technologies, and is in a preparatory stage for a listing.

On Wednesday, the Reuters India Investment Summit comes to the information technology hub of Bangalore.

The city has become synonymous in the West with outsourcing and “cheap labor” but is rapidly emerging as a hot spot for research and development. Bangalore is also marching ahead in the information technology value chain. Some companies like Wipro actually outsource work from India to Egypt.

However, the city poses several challenges for the multinational companies. Infrastructure growth in the city hasn’t kept pace with population growth and economic development. Power cuts are frequent, and it isn’t uncommon to see pothole-filled roads clogged with traffic against a backdrop of modern glass and steel buildings.

Other challenges for the outsourcing industry include pressure from populist U.S. politicians, who point out that the economic recovery hasn’t been able to curb unemployment. Buffalo, though, is unlikely to take away any jobs from Bangalore in the foreseeable future.

The Bangalore leg of the Summit will feature senior executives from the information technology giants including Infosys, Wipro, Mphasis, Mahindra Satyam and SAP.

India managed to escape the worst of the global downturn and is poised, along with China, to lead the global economy out of the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Confidence is returning, with the stock market up 70 percent this year. A rousing re-election win for the Congress party in May has spurred expectations that long-delayed financial sector reforms will be implemented and sorely needed infrastructure investment will accelerate.
 
Still, questions linger. Global demand that drives India’s once red-hot outsourcing sector is slow in returning. Companies that hoarded cash to tide themselves through the downturn are wary of adding capacity until there are clear signs of demand. Consumer spending is being driven by stimulus measures that are unsustainable. The government is hamstrung by a stubbornly high fiscal deficit.
 
Other challenges include India’s infamous red tape, the threat of inflation in a fast-growing economy prone to bottlenecks, widespread poverty, and infrastructure that is inadequate to support a rapidly urbanising population of more than one billion.
 
Top executives and bankers will discuss their own plans and the broader opportunities and challenges for Asia’s third-largest economy during the Reuters India Investment Summit in Mumbai and Bangalore, which will generate exclusive stories, video and analysis. These will be immediately available only to Thomson Reuters clients during each Summit.

John Thain says he put shareholders first and his interests second in deciding to sell Merrill Lynch to Bank of America.

Thain, speaking at the Reuters Global Finance Summit in New York, said a deal to sell a partial stake in Merrill Lynch to Goldman Sachs would have been better for him, but the sale of the entire Wall Street firm to Bank of America was the best outcome for shareholders.

Over a fateful weekend in September 2008, as Lehman hurtled toward bankruptcy, AIG floundered and the financial system looked into the abyss, Merrill held discussions with Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley for various transactions, Thain said.

Initial discussions with Bank of America involved either the sale of the entire company or a 9.9 percent stake and a multibillion credit line, the former Merrill CEO said.

With Goldman, discussions only involved the stake sale and the credit line. Discussions with Morgan Stanley about a strategic transaction were brief, he said.

“When Bank of America offered $29 a share on Sunday afternoon, it was clear to me that was the best thing for our shareholders,” Thain said. 

Thain was fired by Bank of America soon after the deal closed, and is now considering a career in private equity and other jobs. 

“The risk to the shareholders, the risk to the company that a 9.9 percent stake and a multibillion dollar credit facility might not be enough was much too high,” Thain said. “Now, for me personally, it might have been better. But my job was to protect the shareholders.”

Takeo Sumino, chief operating officer of Nomura Holding America Inc, wants to make one thing clear: neither he nor his Tokyo colleagues are into the habit of breaking into song first thing in the morning at the office.

A Wall Street Journal story in July said that one group of Nomura traders sang a company song in morning meetings.

“Japan created the video game, Japan has created the karaoke culture, but that does not necessarily mean that Nomura as a company will ask people to sing a song every day,” he said, trying to debunk reports of culture clashes between Nomura bankers and their new colleagues at the former Lehman Brothers empire in Asia and Europe.

“I worked in Nomura for 22 years. I never sang a song in the morning,” he said. “If you want to sing a song or listen to my song I can take you to karaoke, but you don’t need to come to my office because I don’t sing a song.”

Sumino acknowledges that the Lehman deal has changed things at Nomura, but insists it's been in positive ways.

Bankers who could only communicate in Japanese are now rattling off e-mails and water cooler conversations in English, he told the Reuters Global Finance Summit.

“I do think a very big transition, a transformational change took place in Nomura after we started working with Lehman,” Sumino said.

“E-mail traffic in English . . . . is tremendously larger,” he said. “The number of individuals in Tokyo who used to be able to operate only speaking in Japanese, a lot of them are now communicating and writing and speaking in English.”

Swine flu is turning out to be a sales bonanza for drug companies - just don’t call it a windfall, says GlaxoSmithKline.

As one of the world’s top suppliers of both vaccines and antiviral medicine, CEO Andrew Witty resents the implication that billions of dollars of business simply fell into his company’s lap when the World Health Organisation declared H1N1 a pandemic in June.

“For me the word windfall means you’re walking down the street and something fell out of the sky,” he told the Reuters Health Summit. “We’ve spent the best part of 15 years investing for this situation and our ability to manufacture and supply potentially 500 million or so doses (of vaccine) is all because of these investments.”

U.S. healthcare reform is top of everybody’s agenda right now — but Barack Obama isn’t the only government leader chasing a new deal.

“If you are talking healthcare reform, it’s our daily life in Europe,” Novo Nordisk CEO Lars Sorensen told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.

“Prices are being impacted, there is parallel trade — all kinds of tricks that are aimed at reducing cost. Europe is very anemic at the moment.”

European governments have been pushing back against rising healthcare bills for years with a range of measures including price cuts, and ballooning budget deficits in the wake of the financial crisis are not helping one bit.

Have healthcare companies sunk as far as controversial tobacco companies in the public eye? One medical equipment maker thinks so.

Makers of medical tests, implants and other devices face anywhere from $2 billion-a-year in industry-wide taxes in the House of Representatives’ health reform bill passed on Saturday to $4 billion-a-year under a Senate version.
The Senate measure’s tax is not deductible and would be applied much like the tobacco settlement from cigarette makers years ago, said Beckman Coulter CEO Scott Garrett.

“That hurts, that stings to be treated like the tobacco industry,” he told the Reuters Health Summit in New York.

It could hurt customers — hospitals, patients and others — too. Companies have said they would have pass along any higher costs from the tax directly onto users.

Garrett, whose company makes clinical diagnostic tests as well as other research instruments, said he was “rooting for the House version,” which is tax deductible and phases in the charges starting in 2013.