Summit Notebook

Love isn’t in the air for now

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 cue from the information technology giant and look for innovative ways to solve India’s centuries-old caste-related problems?

Audio – Outsourcing daily life

At the Reuters India Investment Summit we asked Managing Partner of IBM Global Services Sandip Patel about the first thing he would like to outsource from his daily life. His response, perhaps instinctively, was automating the cleanup of thousands of his emails.

Anantha Radhakrishnan, Vice President at Infosys BPO, yearned for extended telecommuting to cut down on travel time (and probably cost as well!!) when asked the same question.

Evidently, productivity improvements and radical cost-cutting measures are weighing heavily on the minds of corporate big wigs these days.

The BPO services industry, which was once able to fund disproportionately high wages and lavish perks for employees, is now plagued with rumours of disappearing stationary and depleting entertainment budgets all in the name of cutting costs.

Audio – Meltdown Melodrama

Hollywood and Bollywood screenwriters must beware. Their creativity stands no chance against the “cataclysmic” global financial crisis’ talent for script writing if Infosys BPO’s Anantha Radhakrishnan is to be believed.

In these “turbulent and tumultuous” times, the script being crafted by the crisis promises to “differentiate the men from the boys” in the business process outsourcing industry, with deep-pocketed firms expected to brace their way through the storm, according to Radhakrishnan, a vice president at the outsourcing firm.

But not before electric fluctuations in the currency market play their course, and bitter and desperate price battles are fought and won. Multi-stranded epics starring Amitabh Bachchan have to hang their heads in shame.

And all this amid heart-stopping uncertainty of the Hitchcockian variety.