Oil could plummet down to $25 a barrel!

Oil prices are likely to keep falling until well into next year and could reach $25 a barrel before recovering, US bank Merrill Lynch. In a research report published on Thursday, it said oil prices should begin to rally in the second half of 2009.

Merrill Lynch recently cut its forecast for the average price of US crude oil futures and North Sea Brent crude oil to $50 a barrel from a previous estimate for both crudes of $90.

"With demand vanishing across all key oil consuming regions, benchmark crude oil prices continue to plummet," it said. "In the short-run, market participants will focus on both OPEC and perhaps even non-OPEC producer responses to balance the market."

"A temporary drop below $25 is possible if the global recession extends to China and significant non-OPEC production cuts are required," it said.

"In our view, oil prices could find a trough at the end of Q1 2009 or early Q2 2009 with the seasonal slowdown in demand. Then, as economic activity starts to strengthen, we see oil prices posting a modest recovery in the second half of 2009."

Oil prices hit a peak above $147 a barrel in July but have fallen more than $100 since then as the severity of the global economic downturn has become clear.

Merrill Lynch said a combination of high oil prices and high leverage had proven dangerous for the global economy.

"On October 1, we lowered our average crude oil price forecast in 2009 to $90 per barrel based on a global GDP growth forecast of 3 percent. Since then, our economists have revised their 2009 global GDP growth forecast down to 1.3 percent, a scenario consistent with a global recession.

"As a result, we are now lowering our average WTI and Brent crude oil price forecast to $50 per barrel for 2009."

It said the major downside risk to its price forecast would be a revision of economic growth assumptions for China, which are currently at 8.6 percent for next year.

"In the short-run, global oil demand growth will likely take a further beating as banks continue to cut credit to consumers and corporations," it said. "We now expect an outright contraction in global oil demand in 2009."

Source: Economic Times

Desi 'open source' software a big hit

Open source software is breeding entrepreneurships worldwide. Playing a key role in this blooming industry are several Indian developers. With their open source software solutions, these developers are taking computing to millions of people across the country and globally.

In fact, many of these have emerged as best with names like Hindawi, Zmanda and Dhvani or KDE Hindi. These products are helping an entire new generation of software developers.

Hindawi (hindawi.in) is a multilingual programming language tool that allows users to write computer programmes in languages other than English. In other words, Hindawi breaks the English language barrier and lets users do programming in their mother tongue.

These include equivalents of C, C++, lex, yacc, assembly, BASIC, LOGO etc in Hindi, Bengali, Gujarati, Assamese and other Indian languages.

These languages are called Hindi C or Hindi assembly or Bangla C or Bangla assembly etc for common understanding. They even have different names; such as, the equivalent programming language of C in Indian languages is Shaili Guru, Indic C++ is Shaili Shraeni, Indic yacc is Shaili Vyaakaran and so on.

However, these languages are syntax-compatible with their traditional English counterparts and can, therefore, utilise the existing libraries such as glibc etc. In a manner similar to the way C++ is syntax compatible to C and hence can use most of the C libraries.

WANem
WANem is a Wide Area Network Emulator, meant to provide a real experience of a Wide Area Network/Internet, during application development/testing over a LAN environment.

Typically application developers develop applications on a LAN while the intended purpose for the same could be, clients accessing the same over the WAN or even the Internet.

WANem thus allows the application development team to setup a transparent application gateway which can be used to simulate WAN characteristics like Network delay, Packet loss, Packet corruption, Disconnections, Packet re-ordering, Jitter, etc.

WANem was developed by three software professionals Manoj Nambiar, Hemanta Kumar Kalita and Debadatta Mishra all from India's largest IT company TCS.

The software was built to provide WAN access to the entire team since other WAN emulators were hardware-based, expensive and available to only a select few in test labs.

Zmanda Recovery Manager
Zmanda is an open source backup and recovery solution. Zmanda Recovery Manager aims to simplify the life of a database administrator with a simple-to-use yet robust recovery manager for the MySQL Server. It is a perl-based utility.

With ZRM for MySQL, network adminstrators can schedule full and incremental backups of their MySQL database. And also start immediate backup or postpone scheduled backups based on defined thresholds.

Network administrators can choose to do more flexible, logical or faster raw backups of their database, backup remote MySQL database through a firewall, get email notification about the status of backups and receive MySQL backup reports via RSS feeds and monitor and browse backups.

They can even define retention policies and delete expired backups, recover a database easily to any point in time or to any particular transaction, eg just before a user made an error.

Zamanda was founded by Chander Kant who is the company's CEO. A Masters in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a BS in Computer Science from the IIT, Kanpur, Kant was named one of the "Top 20 Linux Luminaries" by Linux World Magazine in 2004.

Dhvani
Dhvani is text-to-speech system for Indian languages. It is a framework to develop Indian Language text to speech system. It can serve as a backend for speech synthesisers in Indian Languages, in conjunction with a language-specific text-to-phonetics module.

The software uses images in conjunction with voice output in local languages to make the computing device accessible to a larger section of the Indian population.

Currently, Dhvani has a phonetics-to-speech engine which is capable of generating intelligible speech from a suitable phonetic description in any Indian language. In addition, it is capable of converting UTF-8 text in Hindi and Kannada to this phonetic description, and then speaking it out using the Phonetics-to-Speech engine.

Current C- GNU/Linux implementation supports Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Gujarati, Bengali, Telugu, Punjabi, Tamil and Oriya. The project was started by Simputer project head Dr Ramesh Hariharan, IISc, Bengaluru.

MayaVi2
MayaVi is an open source tool that allows easy and interactive three-dimensional visualisation of data. It is written in Python and uses the Visualization Toolkit (VTK) for the graphics.

In 2000, Prabhu Ramachandran, then an IIT Madras aerospace engineering student, started work on the MayaVi project with his colleagues to visualise computational fluid dynamics data.

"Popular tools available for the purpose at that time were proprietary and prohibitively expensive," noted the Linux For You magazine, published from Delhi, which has announced its FOSS (Free and Open Source Software) India Awards for those involved in a "saga of innovation".

MayaVi is a scientific data visualiser. It is written in Python and uses the Visualisation Toolkit (VTK) for visualisation.

MayaVi2, the next generation of MayaVi, is currently under development.

JTrac
JTrac is a customisable issue-tracking Web-application written in Java. JTrac can be installed in a few minutes without having to type any commands.

Designed to be generic, users can customise fields to track items (like bugs) and allocate tasks etc. It's a lightweight J2EE application built on the Spring Framework.

It has support for file-attachments and email integration. JTrac also offers customisation options, especially in the areas of workflow and field-level permissions and compares well to even commercial tools.

TuxType
Another from the Indian winners is TuxType which five students of the Government Engineering College at Thrissur built Unicode Malayalam support.

It is an educational typing tutor for children. It features several different types of gameplay, at a variety of difficulty levels.

TuxType (tuxtype.sourceforge.net) became the first FOSS typing tutor to bundle Unicode support for Indian languages at a time when Indian language solutions in computing were eagerly awaited.

TuxTyping is an educational typing tutorial game featuring Tux, the Linux Penguin. The player guides Tux to eat fish which are falling from the top of the screen. The game is intended for children learning to type. Also, it has higher difficulty levels which even experienced typists may find challenging.

DeepOfix
DeepOfix features claim to be one of the quickest and simplest operating system installers written for Dhvani. According to the software developer, users don't need to have any prior experience on GNU/Linux for this. A user can complete the server installation with just 15 simple questions and within 25 minutes.

DeepOfix is one of the few GNU/Linux operating systems to ship with built-in and pre-integrated support for LDAP.

LDAP support in DeepOfix goes beyond installation -- in DeepOfix LDAP is not just installed, but also configured as the default store for user account data and password information.

Source: Times of India

2.5 lakh may lose jobs in BPO sector

Business Process Outsourcing firms are likely to see 2.5 lakh job losses by the first quarter of 2009 in the wake of downturn in the US and other developed economies, BPO industry association said.

Though the industry is likely to see thousands of job losses, the silver lining is that the recession would compel more companies in the US and Europe to look at outsourcing as a way to cut costs and improve efficiencies, the Business Process Industry Association of India (BPIAI) President Samir Chopra said.

Praveen Sengar, Head-Software, Services & Industry (Vertical Reserach), IDC India Ltd saidthe slowdown is likely to impact expansion plans of the industry, as the time taken for signing up new clients is taking longer time.

"It will also result in greater consolidation and promote diversification into areas hitherto considered as non-core activities," Sengar said.

Chopra said that urgent government measures are required to boost the industry, specially for the medium and small enterprises.

Both fiscal and administrative measures like extending tax relief for another 5-10 years and export promotion steps, including market development fund is need of the hour, Chopra said.

He further said the terrorist attacks in Mumbai has led to the widespread cancellations of visits and forthcoming international events.

Source: Times of India

As crisis drags on; layoffs mount globally

Credit Suisse and Nomura Holdings announced big job cuts on Thursday, further evidence the global financial crisis is unrelenting for an industry battered by heavy losses and weak markets.

The 5,300 layoffs by the Swiss bank and a further 1,000 in London by Japan’s biggest broker are the latest in the global financial sector which has now seen over 150,000 jobs culled since September when Lehman Brothers filed for bankruptcy.

Of these, more than 50,000 were at Citigroup, which has made more writedowns than any other bank in the world during the crisis.

While the axe had been falling for months in the industry, Lehman’s fall sparked carnage in financial markets and reshaped the industry landscape, resulting in job losses from New York to Singapore to Mumbai. “I don’t think people really know what’s next. It depends on sentiment, which will in turn drive credit markets, which in turn will weigh on banks or not,” said a London-based equities trader.

From the United States to Asian export giant Japan to European powerhouse Germany, the world’s top economies are now in recession as the global crisis deepens.

They are not the only ones with Singapore, New Zealand and Hong Kong also joining in. The losses at banks are increasing. Credit Suisse said on Thursday it made a net loss of about 3 billion Swiss francs ($2.5 billion) in October and November.

It has already cut 1,800 jobs this year and said this week it would cut 650 investment banking jobs in Britain. “Investment banking had a significant pretax loss, reflecting the challenging conditions in the financial markets in the quarter and the costs associated with risk reduction,” the bank said.

Credit Suisse’s shares jumped 8% in European trade in a broader market up 1.6%.
In Asia, Nomura, Japan’s biggest brokerage, said the decision to cut as much as 22% of its London staff followed an internal review after the purchase of the Asian, European and Middle Eastern assets of Lehman Brothers.

Nomura had said the purchase of parts of Lehman Brothers would help the Japanese brokerage achieve its profit target despite poor financial market conditions. “This is a natural move,” said Azuma Ohno, a brokerage analyst at Credit Suisse Securities in Japan.

“Once Nomura bought Lehman, it cannot continue Japanese-style life-time employment. It needs to be flexible in costs to be profitable.”Australia’s top investment bank, Macquarie Group, is cutting 10 to 15% of its jobs in Asia, two sources said last week.

Banks are axing jobs across Asia and even in countries such as India, where investment bankers were snapped up feverishly in the last few years in anticipation of strong initial public offerings and M&A markets. “The layoffs will come in phases and will stretch into 2009,” said Singapore-based Will Tan of Webbe International, an executive search firm specializing in the financial sector.

The job cuts from Nomura and Credit Suisse came a few hours after a report of layoffs at Bank of America. Bank of America CEO Kenneth Lewis said the bank is in the “final stage of our analysis” for planned job cuts following its purchase of Merrill Lynch, the Charlotte observer said on its website on Wednesday. Layoffs have also gathered pace at fund management firms.

State Street, one of the world’s biggest institutional money managers, said on Wednesday it plans to lay off as many as 1,800 people, or 6% of its staff, in the first three months of 2009. Private equity firm Carlyle Group is cutting about 100 jobs — around 10% of its staff — a source familiar with the situation said. The reductions are the first major cuts made by a large US private equity firm since the global economic crisis hit.

Middle market investment bank Jefferies Group will slash nearly 15% of its employees worldwide and close offices in Dubai, Singapore and Tokyo as it contends with heavy losses for 2008.

Source: Reuters

AT&T likely to cut 12,000 jobs

AT&T, the largest US phone company, will cut 12,000 jobs, striving to trim expenses as the US economy falters. The reductions amount to about 4% of the workforce, Dallas-based AT&T said on Thursday in a statement.

The company plans to record $600 million in expenses for severance this quarter. The reductions would bring AT&T’s total job cuts to more than 25,000 this year. The carrier and its smaller competitors are grappling with slowing consumer spending and a jobless rate at its highest level in 14 years.

AT&T fell 18 cents to $28.90 in early trading after closing at $29.08 on Wednesday on the New York Stock Exchange. The carrier also plans to reduce spending next year to cope with the slowdown, with plans to give specific forecasts for 2009 spending plans in late January.

The carrier said its still adding jobs in its wireless and video units. In July, the company said it would eliminate 10,000 jobs to reduce overlap in some departments after its 2006 purchase of BellSouth Corp. Before that, the company announced 4,650 cuts, some in its home-phone business, which has lost customers to cable operators and wireless competitors.

Source: Agencies

Recession times, HP freezes on pay hike!

Hewlett-Packard, the world’s largest personal-computer maker, is freezing salaries as part of chief executive officer Mark Hurd’s efforts to contain costs, people familiar with the plan said.

Employees have been notified by e-mail that they won’t receive a salary increase in fiscal 2009, which began in November, according to two people who asked not be identified because the message was confidential. The only exceptions will be in countries where pay freezes are illegal, the two people said.

Hurd has cut jobs, closed offices and merged data centers to lift profit, even as he expands through acquisitions. Hewlett-Packard also is limiting travel, curtailing hiring and eliminating favorite science projects to save on research costs in 2009, chief financial officer Cathie Lesjak said last month on a conference call. Hewlett-Packard, which has 3,20,000 employees, declined to confirm the salary freeze.

In this difficult macroeconomic environment, we believe it is prudent and responsible to reduce costs where possible, said spokeswoman Emma McCulloch. HP has a longstanding and disciplined approach to managing costs in order to invest in the company’s growth.

Hurd, who became CEO in 2005, received $25.3 million in total compensation in fiscal 2007. Worldwide technology spending growth will slow to 2.6% next year, less than half the rate initially predicted, research firm IDC said last month. Growth in the US will decelerate to 0.9%, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company estimated.

Hewlett-Packard’s PC sales, which account for about a third of revenue, rose 10% to $11.2 billion last quarter, beating some estimates. Demand for notebooks offset declining printer sales in a shrinking economy. Last month, Hurd forecast a rise in profit to as much as $4.03 a share this fiscal year, more than the $3.89 anticipated by analysts in a Bloomberg survey. Investors took that as a sign the company is prepared to squeeze more profit out of sales as customers reduce spending.

It will be a challenging environment and were planning on such, Hurd, 51, said on a November 23 conference call with reporters. We can only control the things we can control, which is our cost structure and the competitiveness of our products.

Also in India
A HP employee in Bangalore said that employees in India too had received a mail from the company saying there wouldn’t be any salary increase in fiscal 2009. Salary increases in India’s technology sector have been amongst the highest in the world in the past few years. If HP does not hike salaries in fiscal 2009, this would be the first time in many years that a major technology company in India would be avoiding a salary increment.

Source: Agencies

Infosys Technologies will freeze new recruitments

Infosys Technologies will freeze recruitment after meeting this fiscal year's target of hiring 25,000 staff, a telling sign the Infosys global downturn is hitting India's $52 billion outsourcing sector.

India's second largest software services firm however has no plans to cut jobs and is sticking with its third quarter outlook, CEO Kris Gopalakrishnan told reporters.

He said the outsourcing sector's growth rate would halve next year as some customers delay orders.

"Last year the IT industry grew more than 30 percent, this year it is looking at somewhere in the region of 15 percent," Gopalakrishnan said.

India's export-driven IT sector, used to a scorching pace of growth, has been hit by the financial crisis and recession in the United States, which contributes more than half their revenue.

In the last few years, the outsourcing industry has created tens of thousands of jobs, mainly attracting young workers, as global companies look to trim labour costs.

Infosys hired 16,000-17,000 employees in the first half of the fiscal year that began in April and would honour commitments to 6,000 under training, Gopalakrishnan said.

Infosys, which counts Goldman Sachs and Philips Electronics among its clients, cut its full-year dollar revenue outlook in October due to the worsening global downturn.

Gopalakrishnan said on Thursday the company would freeze fresh recruitment, apart from meeting specific skill needs.

"We will have to look at controlling our cost, controlling our expenses making sure that we run an optimised business. We will have to look at what are things we need to do in order to prepare ourselves for the recovery."

"Growth is coming more and more from emerging markets so hese are the things we need to prepare ourselves. We should not lose momentum in this slowdown," he said.

But Infosys still expects its strong client base and a weakening rupee to help it meet a forecast for December quarter earnings of $0.57 a share. The rupee has fallen nearly six percent so far this quarter against the dollar.

"Infosys is seeing further degradation of the demand environment, with headwinds from leadership changes at customers, a shrinking large deal pipeline .... Pricing pressure has emerged," CLSA Asia-Pacific said in a report this week.