Is Infosys eyeing acquisitions in the US?

Indian software major Infosys Technologies Ltd expects to find acquisition opportunities in the US during the downturn, co-chairman Nandan Nilekani was quoted as saying.

"Acquisitions will definitely be very accessible in this market from a price point of view," Nilekani told the Wall Street Journal in an interview. "If it makes sense, we'll do it."

Companies that operate in the healthcare and pharmaceuticals sectors might make particularly interesting targets, he said, adding that Infosys has $2 billion in cash and no debt.

In the interview, Nilekani reiterated Infosys's earlier guidance of about 12 per cent revenue growth for the fiscal year ending March 31. That would be a sharp deceleration from growth of 35 per cent, as measured by the US accounting rules, in the year ended March 31, 2008.

Nilekani told the Journal that potential customers are holding back both because of the economic crisis and a rise in protectionist sentiment.

On the economic crisis, Nilekani said "I've never seen this level of lack of clarity." He said executives are "more focused on short-term tactical issues" than making bigger decisions about outsourcing.

In response, Nilekani said Infosys is working with customers on alternative payment arrangements, including some that would link fees to business results. Other customers are asking to pay on a per-transaction basis, rather than a lump sum for a system.

Nilekani said rising protectionist sentiment in the US also is affecting customers' decision-making about outsourcing.

The economic stimulus bill, for example, includes a provision preventing participants in the US' financial bailout programme from hiring workers with H-1B visas, which are commonly used by the non-US outsourcing companies.

"Political issues have become more pre-eminent in our conversations," he added.

Partly for that reason, he told the journal that he does not know whether more the US firms will lay off domestic workers and move more jobs to India, as International Business Machines Corp plans to do, Nilekani said.

Agencies

AT&T Looks for Customers for Center in India

AT&T Inc., a US-based company offering advanced IP-based business communications services, is set to acquire customers from IT, ITES, manufacturing and finance service companies for its newly launched data center in India.

AT&T set up its India data center in Bangalore last December. Since then the company is looking at the growing demand from multinational customers in India for online data centers with highly resilient facilities and a wide range of IT infrastructure management services.

Talking to CXOtoday, Gopi Gopinath, chairman and chief executive officer of AT&T Global Network Services India, said, "Since the data center has just become operational, we have not got any customers in India so far, but the data center has been build to 'Green' specifications laid down by the parent company across all data centers."

The Whitefield center has a 5,000 sq ft of capacity and can expand unlimitedly. It is part of a $1 billion planned AT&T global network and portfolio investment for 2009. Data center customers will have access to a wide range of fully integrated managed hosting, application and networking services to support their data and e-commerce needs. Connectivity to the centre can be supported with AT&T's existing suite of managed data services in India.

The data center is built to the same rigid specifications consistent with AT&T's other 37 global data centers and are enabled with services that proactively manage customers' hosting solutions for predictable application performance. They are protected from intrusion and failure with the same multi-layered security, failsafe redundancy, diversity measures, and rapid response recovery measures built into each data center.

"We will be able to support multinational customers in India who turn to AT&T for integrated hosting and network solutions, allowing them to focus on running their businesses," said Gopinath.

The center is directly connected to AT&T's global MPLS backbone to offer a portfolio of hosting solutions with network performance and features. Among them are greater agility when making real-time changes to IT environments, more control to extend applications to the customer's premises or to other data centers, and the ability to include 'on network' capabilities in a customer solution.

CXotoday