This document summarizes Infosys' plans to acquire companies in Europe and Japan, as well as provides background information on Infosys. The key points are: 1) Infosys' CEO said the company is looking to acquire companies in Europe and Japan in areas like healthcare and public services, with annual revenues up to $600 million. 2) Infosys has $3.8 billion in cash and is seeking acquisitions for strategic growth in new areas like cloud computing rather than just for growth. 3) Several major Indian tech companies are looking to overseas acquisitions to boost growth and reduce dependence on the US market, which accounts for over half their revenue currently.

1. c m y k c m y k
11New Delhi ●● Monday ●● 2 May 2011
Amazon sorry
for server
outage that hit
cloud services,
offers credit. Technomics
FTC is
preparing
for a probe
against
Google.
Samsung
first quarter
profit falls
30% on chips,
TVs.
Infosys eyes Europe, Japan buys
Bengaluru, May 1: Infosys,
India’s second-biggest soft-
ware services exporter, is on
the hunt for acquisitions in
Europe and Japan in areas
including healthcare and
public services, its chief
executive said on Sunday.
Speaking to Reuters a day
after the company
announced changes in its
top-level management, S.
Gopalakrishnan said Infosys
could acquire companies
with annual revenues of up
to $600 million.
“Up to $600 million may
not pose too much of a risk
or burden on the company.
But it’s a thumb rule or a
guideline rather than a hard
and fast rule,” said
Gopalakrishnan, who is set
to step down as chief execu-
tive in August to become
executive co-chairman.
Infosys was also seeking
acquisitions in new areas
like cloud computing, he
said. The company had cash
and cash equivalents of $3.8
billion as of the end of
March.
“Our philosophy has always
been that you plan organic
growth,” Gopalakrishnan
said. “ (But) you keep your
eyes and ears open, you
have a dedicated team look-
ing at acquisitions.”
“We do not want to set a tar-
get for acquisition because
we are not doing acquisition
for growth. We are doing
acquisitions for strategic fit
and adding capability at this
point in time,” he said at the
company’s sprawling head-
quarters campus on the out-
skirts of Bangalore, India’s
information technology hub.
Several Indian technology
players including Infosys’s
larger rival Tata Consultan-
cy Services and smaller rival
Wipro have been looking for
overseas acquisitions to
boost growth amid growing
competition from global
rivals such as IBM and
Accenture.
Indian software firms are
also looking to reduce a
dependency on their U.S.
market, which accounts for
more than half of the sec-
tor’s revenue, and want to
expand operations in Euro-
pean and Asian markets.
“There are multiple strategic
requirements for acquisition
so those are the things we
are looking at. Typically a
smaller acquisition rather
than a large one,” said
Gopalakrishnan, one of the
seven engineers who found-
ed Infosys in 1981 with
$250.
REORGANISATION
Infosys, which is also listed
on Nasdaq, on Saturday
announced top management
changes linked to the retire-
ment of its billionaire chair-
man and stuck to its practice
of giving its founders a shot
at running the firm. .
In a separate interview,
CEO-designate S.D. Shibu-
lal said Infosys planned to
complete an ongoing reor-
ganisation of its business
divisions in about two
months.
Infosys, which counts Gold-
man Sachs, BT and BP as
clients, is struggling to meet
growth expectations and its
shares have fallen over 15
percent so far this year.
It is dividing its business
into five global industry seg-
ments — financial services
and insurance; manufactur-
ing; energy, utilities, com-
munications and services;
public service practices and
healthcare; retail and life
sciences.
Infosys will also look to
strengthen its geographical
focus by having separate
heads for the Americas,
Europe and emerging mar-
kets, said Shibulal, who is
also one of the founders of
Infosys, and is currently its
chief operating officer.
Wipro earlier this year also
reorganised its key out-
sourcing business weeks
after it decided to replace its
joint CEOs with company
veteran T.K. Kurien in an
effort to boost growth.
— Reuters
Yahoo CEO
pay cut
by 75 pc
Y
ahoo Inc. cut CEO
Carol Bartz’s com-
pensation by 75 per-
cent to $11.9 million last
year as the Internet compa-
ny struggled to revive its
revenue growth.
The sharp drop in the
value of Bartz’s pay pack-
age stemmed from the lav-
ish awards she got when
Yahoo hired her in January
2009 to engineer a turn-
around. The incentives
included 5 million stock
options with an exercise
price of $11.73. None of
those options have vested
yet because Yahoo’s stock
price still hasn’t reached
any of the thresholds out-
lined in Bartz’s contract,
which expires in January
2013. Bartz, 62, also
received $10 million in
cash and restricted stock
during 2009 to make up for
the benefits and stock
options she gave up when
she left her previous
employer, software maker
Autodesk Inc., to run
Yahoo. Since her arrival,
Bartz has eliminated hun-
dreds of jobs and jettisoned
online services that didn’t
fit into her plan to cement
Yahoo’s status as the Web’s
leading hub for news,
sports and entertainment.
The cost-cutting helped
Yahoo double its operating
income to $748 million,
exceeding a goal set by
board. — AP
Hacker is
ICANN
security chief
J
eff Moss, a prominent
computer hacker who
founded the annual
Black Hat and DefCon
security conferences in Las
Vegas, has been hired as the
chief security officer for the
organization that coordi-
nates names of the world’s
Web sites.
The organization, the
Internet Corporation for
Assigned Names and Num-
bers, or ICANN, plays a
vital role in making sure
that when you type a site
name into a Web browser,
your computer knows
where to go to find the site
you’re trying to reach.
ICANN manages the
domain name system that
underlies that chain of
communication.
“I can think of no one
with a greater understand-
ing of the security threats
facing Internet users and
how best to defend against
them than Jeff Moss,” Rod
Beckstrom, ICANN’s CEO
and formerly the director of
the U.S. National Cyberse-
curity Center, said in a
statement.
“He has the in-depth
insider’s knowledge that
can only come from fight-
ing in the trenches of the
ongoing war against cyber
threats.” — AP
Sony breach could cost card lenders $300 mn
MARIA ASPAN and
CLARE BALDWIN
NEW YORK
May 1: Credit card lenders
could be facing more than
$300 million of card
replacement costs if cus-
tomers affected by the Sony
Corp data breach decide to
replace their credit cards.
Analysts have previously
estimated that the incident
could cost Sony more than
$1.5 billion, but this is the
first time they have put a
price tag on how much
major lenders will also suf-
fer.
“It’s not insignificant,”
Sanjay Sakhrani, analyst at
Keefe, Bruyette & Woods,
told Reuters at the sidelines
of a payments industry con-
ference in Miami Beach on
Wednesday evening.
The FBI is working with
federal prosecutors in San
Diego as agents try to deter-
mine the facts and circum-
stances surrounding the
alleged crimes, FBI
spokesman Darrell Fox-
worth said on Thursday.
Each customer request to
replace a credit card would
cost lenders about $3 to $5
per card, several analysts
said on Wednesday and
Thursday. Those costs
would include the new piece
of plastic itself, postage, and
various customer service
costs.
Hackers earlier in April
broke into Sony’s PlaySta-
tion Network, stealing
names, addresses and possi-
bly credit card details from
77 million users. Sony shut
down the network on April
19 but waited about a week
to disclose that the system
had been hacked and users’
data could have been stolen.
INTO THE CLOUD
Credit card lenders could
also lose business from the
customers affected by the
breach, even if they were
quick to replace the cards.
New cards take time to be
activated, and in the mean-
time consumers could use a
different card, said Aite
Group analyst Julie Conroy
McNelley in an email to
Reuters on Thursday.
Consumers may also be
reluctant to use a card that
they perceive as higher risk
because it might have been
involved in a hacking
episode, even if the breach
of security was not the
issuer’s fault, Conroy
McNelley said.
By some measures, $300
million is a relatively small
amount for the credit card
industry. U.S. credit card
banks that issue Visa cards
and MasterCards made
about $2.12 billion in after-
tax profit in 2010, according
to the industry publication
PaymentsSource. That fig-
ure excludes American
Express Co and Discover
Financial Services, which
both lend directly to con-
sumers and process the
transactions on those cards
themselves.
The Sony breach was one
of the biggest online data
infiltrations ever and is a
sign that the industry may
face new threats.
“As we move into the digi-
tal world, we put more and
more of our digital identity
into the cloud, or digital
devices... Security is going
to be a tremendously impor-
tant part of what we do,”
Daniel Schulman, American
Express group president of
enterprise growth, told
Reuters at the sidelines of
the annual conference, host-
ed by PaymentsSource pub-
lisher SourceMedia.
A FACT OF LIFE
Schulman and other credit
card executives speaking at
the conference declined to
comment directly on the
breach or the implications
for their security standards,
but they said there generally
is increased attention being
paid to protecting customer
data.
Global credit card security
standards are increasingly
necessary as payment tech-
nology evolves, MasterCard
Chief Emerging Payments
Officer Ed McLaughlin told
Reuters.
Payments security is
evolving along with “intelli-
gent devices,” like smart-
phones and contactless
cards, he said. Upgrading
certain security standards —
for example, adopting chip-
and-pin credit cards, which
are widely used outside the
United States — also
depends on merchants, who
typically only upgrade their
terminals every five to seven
years, he said.
— Reuters
DATA THEFT
KAPIL KHANDELWAL
O
ver the last few
weeks, we have
seen Apple iPod
Touch and Microsoft’s
Xbox Kinect actually come
into the surgeon’s opera-
tion theatre and assist them
in performing complicated
surgeries that require high
accuracy and precision,
very successfully!
Last week an orthopedic
surgeon in Mumbai con-
ducted a knee replacement
surgery using an app down-
loaded from the Apple app
store using his iPod Touch.
To assist in the surgery,
iPod could well have been
the Apple mobile phone or
iPad.
The iPod is easier to use
and gives better accuracy
and precision as a comput-
er device to the surgeon.
Elsewhere, Microsoft
Xbox Kinect was used by
surgeons in their operation
theatre to provide hands-
free control to view radio-
logical images for refer-
ence during the surgery and
help in saving time.
Moreover, the same
motion sensors are being
used along with surgical
robotic systems such as da
Vinci and Zeus. These were
a landmark on its own as
devices and applications
primarily designed for
entertain and gaming were
adapted by healthcare pro-
fessionals will increase in
the future.
Precision in surgery is the
key to building a huge
armory of robots and tools.
These iPods and Xbox Kin-
nect could create a more
precise connection
between a surgeon’s move-
ments and the reaction of
the surgical tools he uses to
perform the surgery. So
what does the future
behold?
In my column, a few
months ago I had men-
tioned that robotic and sur-
gical assistance systems
are very complex. They
depend on many enabling
technologies and pose
many challenges of how to
integrate these into a func-
tional system.
These technologies and
challenges require a signif-
icant amount of R&D, are
dependent on ICT tech-
nologies and each other
progress at different
speeds. Human-machine
interface designs, sensor
systems, mobile energy
supply, energy efficiency
and biocompatible materi-
als are some of the main
issues.
However it is now clear
from these entertainment
and gaming devices are
now redefining how the
basic design, form factor
and how we interact. The
same transformation will
take place in how surgeons
will interface with the sur-
gical and medical equip-
ment will be in the future,
through natural user inter-
face (NUI).
One thing is very clear.
Many of the surgical and
medical equipment of the
yesteryears required the
surgeon to go through
years of training and men-
toring. NUI in the next gen-
eration of medical and sur-
gical equipment will allow
surgeons to be able to
quickly transition from
novice to expert.
While the in the next gen-
eration of medical and sur-
gical equipment interface
requires learning, that
learning will be eased
through equipment design
which gives the surgeon the
feeling that they are
instantly and continuously
successful.
This can be aided by tech-
nology which allows sur-
geon to carry out relatively
natural motions, move-
ments or gestures that they
quickly discover control
the medical equipment or
manipulate the on-screen
content such as a scan or
radiographic report. This
will definitely boost robot-
ic telesurgery or a robotic
nurse to triage a patient in
the remotest corner of India
in the future using the same
gestures in the Microsoft
Xbox Kinect or the inter-
face of the iPod Touch.
A Dose of IT
Kapil Khandelwal is Director, EquNev Capital and
a leading healthcare and information communica-
tion technology (ICT) expert.
iPods, Xbox Kinect
assist in surgeries
Apple’s might shakes industry
PETER SVENSSON
NEW YORK
May 1: Consumer technolo-
gy companies reporting
financial results this week
are looking like rowboats
bobbing in the wake of
Apple Inc.’s supertanker.
Close to oblivion in 1997,
Apple is now the world’s
second-most valuable com-
pany, after Exxon Mobil
Corp. On April 20, it report-
ed net income of $5.99 bil-
lion for the January-to-
March period, nearly double
that of a year ago. It shipped
a record 18.65 million
iPhones during the quarter.
Its iPad tablet computers are
so popular, the company
couldn’t make enough.
Apple’s ascendancy has
produced many losers and a
few winners, as underscored
over the past two weeks.
MICROSOFT : LOSER.
Apple dethroned
Microsoft as the world’s
most valuable technology
company a year ago. In its
mid-fall report, it surpassed
Microsoft in quarterly rev-
enue. In the January-March
period this year, it surpassed
Microsoft in net income,
too.
On Thursday, Microsoft
reported that revenue from
the Windows operating sys-
tem declined for the second
straight quarter because
people are buying fewer
Windows computers.
Some prospective buyers
are going to Macs instead -
Apple reported that it sold
28 percent more units. Oth-
ers are going to iPads. Gold-
man Sachs now believes that
more than 30 percent of
iPads sold may be replacing
PC sales.
NOKIA : LOSER
Nokia said this week that it
will slash 7,000 jobs
through layoffs and out-
sourcing. It still sells more
phones than anyone else, but
it’s losing share to Apple,
especially when it comes to
smartphones.
Research firm Strategy
Analytics also said revenue
from Apple’s iPhone sales
surpassed that of Nokia’s
phones in the January-to-
March period, as iPhones
are much more expensive
than the average Nokia
phone. That makes Apple
the world’s largest phone
maker by revenue.
To better compete with the
iPhone, Nokia is ditching its
old Symbian software and
adopting Microsoft’s Win-
dows Phone 7. But the tran-
sition will take time; the first
Windows-powered Nokia
phones aren’t expected until
late 2011 or early 2012.
RIM: LOSER
The maker of the Black-
Berry is in a predicament
that’s similar to Nokia’s.
RIM warned Thursday that
net income, revenue and
unit sales for the quarter
ending in May will come in
below its previous forecast.
The company’s high-end
phones are looking old com-
pared with the iPhone and
ones running Google Inc.’s
Android software. They
aren’t selling as well as the
company expected.
RIM promised investors
that new phones with
revamped software will
bring sales roaring back in
the latter half of the year, but
investors are skeptical, send-
ing RIM’s stock down Fri-
day.
HTC , SAMSUNG ,
MOTOROLA: WINNERS
Although all three compa-
nies compete with Apple’s
iPhone, they are doing well.
Unlike Nokia and RIM, the
three are betting on
Google’s Android system,
which comes the closest to
mimicking the look, feel and
functions of the iPhone.
For South Korea’s Sam-
sung, smartphone sales were
a bright spot in the first
quarter as overall phone
sales declined.
— AP
PlayStation services to be resumed
SONY SAID it would resume some services on its PlayStation
Network this week and offer incentives to customers to try to
prevent them turning to competitors after the theft of personal
information belonging to 78 million user accounts. Top Sony
executives apologized for the massive data breach at a news
conference in Tokyo on Sunday, the first public comments from
senior management on the crisis. “We apologize deeply for
causing great unease and trouble to our users,” Kazuo Hirai,
Sony’s number 2 and the frontrunner to succeed CEO Howard
Stringer, said bowing deeply three times during a lengthy news
conference. Stringer was not at the event. Many PlayStation
users around the world had been angered by the fact that the
first warning of one of the largest Internet security break-ins
ever came a week after Sony detected a problem with the net-
work on April 19.
“Infosys could
acquire companies
with annual rev-
enues of up to $600
million.Up to $600
million may not pose
too much of a risk or
burden on the com-
pany.But it’s a a
guideline rather than
a hard and fast rule.”
One thing is very clear.
Many of the surgical
and medical
equipment of the
yesteryears required
the surgeon to go
through years of
training and
mentoring. NUI in the
next generation of
medical and surgical
equipment will allow
surgeons to be able to
quickly transition from
novice to expert.
AGE
THE