Study Reveals 95% Engig in India Unfit for Software Development Jobs

Talent shortage is acute in the IT and data science ecosystem in India with a survey claiming that 95 per cent of engineers in the country are not fit to take up software development jobs.

According to a study by employability assessment company Aspiring Minds, only 4.77 per cent candidates can write the correct logic for a programme — a minimum requirement for any programming job.

Over 36,000 engineering students from IT related branches of over 500 colleges took Automata — a Machine Learning based assessment of software development skills — and over 2/3 could not even write code that compiles.

The study further noted that while more than 60 per cent candidates cannot even write code that compiles, only 1.4 per cent can write functionally correct and efficient code.

“Lack of programming skills is adversely impacting the IT and data science ecosystem in India. The world is moving towards introducing programming to three-year-old! India needs to catch up,” Aspiring Minds CTO and co-founder Varun Aggarwal said.

The employability gap can be attributed to rote learning based approaches rather than actually writing programmes on a computer for different problems. Also, there is a dearth of good teachers for programming, since most good programmers get jobs in industry at good salaries, the study said.

Moreover, programming skills are five times poorer for tier III colleges as compared to tier 1 colleges. “Sixty nine per cent of candidates from top 100 colleges are able to write a compilable code versus rest of the colleges where only 31 per cent are able to write a compilable code,” the report said.

Agencies

Even 2017 Will See Indian Telcos Bleed Thanks to Jio, Says Crisil

Telcos will continue to face difficulties in fiscal 2018 as well and two of the top three telcos are set to “bleed” due to intense competition triggered after the launch of Reliance Jio, a report said today.

“The price war in the Rs. 1.5 lakh crore wireless telecom market will continue this fiscal year as well leaving bruised bottom lines,” Crisil’s said in a note.

“Two of the top three telecom players will bleed this fiscal,” it added.

It attributed the difficulties faced by the sector to the price war for data subscribers, but added market leadership is crucial to the business and if anything, competition will only heat up this year.

The note explained that global experiences have shown that the market leader enjoys superior profitability.

The report said two of the top three telcos will end last fiscal year with net losses, and this trend is expected to continue in the current fiscal year as well.

Since its launch last September offering free services for almost six months, Jio is estimated to have cornered 55 per cent of total data consumption, while the overall data traffic has grown five times in the last one year, it said.

“A 60 per cent fall in 4G data prices since launch of Jio has resulted in muted 2 per cent growth in adjusted gross revenue last fiscal year,” the report said.

For the current financial year, it sees a muted 0-5 per cent revenue growth for the top telcos, as they seek to protect their subscriber base, it said.

It said the picture on profitability is “grimmer” and pre-tax profit margins will drop further by 0.50-1 per cent, in addition to 6 percentage point fall seen for the past fiscal year.

It said the proposed merger between the second and the third biggest telcos—Vodafone and Idea Cellular—is aimed at strengthening market position if not leadership, alongside lowering investment needs and costs.

Agencies

11,500 People in Offshore Markets Hired for TCS in Fiscal Year 17

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) recruited over 11,500 people outside India during 2016-17, including graduates from engineering and B-schools in the US, as it ramps up local hiring in offshore markets to tackle visa-related challenges.

The country’s largest software services firm added 79,000 employees (gross) and 33,380 employees (net), taking its employee base to 3.87 lakh at the end of March.

Hiring locals in overseas markets often pushes up operational costs for IT outsourcing companies.

However, with the governments in markets like the US, Australia and New Zealand tightening their work visa norms, Indian IT companies are hiring more local talents in offshore markets to ensure compliance with rules.

“Our local hiring programmes in various geographies are progressing well. In FY’17, we recruited over 11,500 employees outside India, including some engineering campuses and the top-10 business schools in the US,” TCS CEO and Managing Director Rajesh Gopinathan told investors.

TCS did not provide details of the geographies where hiring was done.

However, the 11,500 number is lower than TCS’ hiring from international markets in 2015-16. According to the company’s annual report, it had inducted 16,173 people from international markets into its workforce in fiscal 2016.

America accounted for over 55 per cent of TCS’ USD 4.4 billion revenue in the January—March 2017 quarter, while over 25 per cent revenue came from Europe.

Companies like TCS and Infosys use work permits like H-1B visa (in the US) to send engineers to work on client sites.

However, over the past few weeks, the US and other countries like Australia have taken steps to tighten their visa regime.

This, in turn, has forced companies to adjust their business models to reduce their dependence on visas and hire more locals overseas instead.

The development comes at a time when the over USD 140 billion Indian IT industry is grappling with challenges like fluctuating currency movement and technology changes at a fast pace.

New technologies like automation and artificial intelligence are also making a number of jobs redundant that in turn is impacting hiring at IT firms.

TCS added about 79,000 employees in 2016-17 as compared to 90,000 gross hires in the preceding financial year.

”...going forward, we have said directionally it is going to come down and the total net intake also will be lower than what we have done this year,” TCS Head of Global Human Resources Ajoy Mukherjee said.

Agencies

Persistent Systems to Team on New Industrywide Digital Platform for Clinical Care

Persistent Systems and Partners HealthCare, founded by Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Massachusetts General Hospital, announced today a strategic collaboration to develop a new industry-wide open-source platform with the goal of bringing digital transformation to clinical care. Persistent will help the digital transformation of clinical care at Partners and, together with Partners, develop an open-source platform to lower the barriers for knowledge exchange across health care providers and enable a new generation of decision support apps in the clinical environment.

This four-year collaboration will bring together the world class clinicians and researchers at Partners HealthCare with Persistent’s innovative healthcare technology and product engineering expertise.

The co-developed digital platform will be based on Substitutable Medical Applications & Reusable Technologies (SMART), an open, standards-based technology platform along with Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). The platform will enable provider systems across the country to rapidly and cost effectively deploy industry-leading best practices in clinical care across their ecosystems.

“The collaboration serves as a powerful example of how healthcare visionaries and leaders in technology can create positive disruption. By combining forces with Partners HealthCare to design this platform, we’re striving to bring continuous transformation of the healthcare experience. We’re confident this is just the start” said Sudhir Kulkarni, President of Digital at Persistent Systems.

“Making innovative clinical tools available to our physicians at Partners and across the country relies on strong collaborations between academia and industry,” said Dr. Anne Klibanski, Chief Academic Officer at Partners HealthCare. “The co-development of this platform should yield a new tool that integrates applications directly into the clinical workflow -- ultimately improving patient care.”

Sandy Aronson, Executive Director of IT for Partners Personalized Medicine recognizes that “advances in clinical analytics and machine learning have the potential to drive medical discovery at a pace never seen before but we currently lack the ability to efficiently place resulting breakthroughs in the hands of clinicians. Through this collaboration we will band together with other institutions to extend electronic health record (EHR) ecosystems so that the benefits of this work are quickly and broadly delivered to patients”.

India Fast Growing Market for VMware’s Computing Business

VMware, Inc., a global leader in cloud infrastructure and business mobility, sees growth in adoption of its digital workspace solutions by Indian organizations. With more than 1 million end-points managed in India, VMware saw some notable customer wins including – Max Life Insurance, MSC Software, Malayala Manorama, Karunya University, among others.

 VMware is one of the industry leaders in delivering a secure digital workspace which gives IT a more efficient, simplified way of managing users, devices and applications. The average return on investment for digital workspace expenditures is 150 percent. In 2016, VMware surveyed more than 1,200 IT decision makers, IT influencers, and business decision makers worldwide and found 78 percent have successfully executed or are actively executing mobile initiatives and are moving to a digital workspace. Digital workspaces deliver better security, reduce IT management costs and complexity, and prevent data loss.

 “The digital workspace is the defining model for end-user computing in the mobile cloud era. Business is changing in India and digital workspaces are adding real business value for organizations, and at the same time allowing users to focus on the work to be done, not the technology in their hands,” said Arun Parameswaran, Managing Director, VMware India. “We are at the heart of this change by delivering a comprehensive end-user computing platform built on a mobile-cloud architecture that enables organizations to drive digital transformation.”

 “Enterprise mobility is witnessing a paradigm shift towards consolidation of enterprise systems that seamlessly enable not just multi-platform devices and apps, but also emerging connected devices such as wearables, IoT, machine learning and virtual reality systems. Proliferation of mobile endpoints has compelled businesses to address threat management with automated and adaptive defence mechanisms while simultaneously driving richer user experience. This year will see a change in how businesses approach mobility, from a device-focused approach to a more comprehensive strategy. To ensure the long-term success of enterprise mobile strategy, many organizations are implementing ‘Mobile Center of Excellence’ where multiple stakeholders having IT and business expertise are collaborating to reshape business models, maximize corporate performance and derive business value,” said Benoy CS, Director, Digital Transformation (ICT) Practice, Frost & Sullivan.

“India represents a complex and competitive life insurance market. Technology plays a critical role in partnering with business and gives us a competitive edge in the market. Business Mobility is one key area where we are focusing on to enable our workforce to work more efficiently in servicing our growing customer base better. We’re working closely with VMware to help us with the end user computing strategy to empower our employees, while keeping our confidential information secure,” said Ekhlaque Bari, Executive Vice President & Head IT, Max Life Insurance.

 “Delivering critical news as it happens is the advantage you have over competition in the publishing industry. Thanks to VMware AirWatch, our reporters can break news live from the field, much to our readers’ delight,” said VV Jacob, General Manager, Systems, Malayala Manorama.

Building on the digital workspace innovations to accelerate its adoption, VMware recently introduced new updates to its award winning Workspace ONE solution. These updates make it easy for IT to deliver unified access and single sign-on experience to Intranet applications, and will offer richer conditional access capabilities that combine real-time security hygiene with compliance automation. Updates to the market-leading AirWatch Unified Endpoint Management portfolio have enhanced support across OS platforms for mobile (iOS, Android), desktop (Windows 10, macOS), purpose-built (ruggedized) and IoT endpoints to simplify provisioning and end-user onboarding.

T20 Team Chonkpur Cheetahs Welcome a Woman Player in the Team

Amazon India’s latest T20 campaign Chonkpur Cheetahs, launches the fourth film. The campaign India ke Sapno ki Apni Dukaan which portrays a series of film is a journey of an aspiring team to reach their goal of playing in T20. The campaign converses various ways in which Amazon enables the team to get one step closer to their dream of playing in T20. The dreams of the Chonkpur Cheetahs is a metaphor for the dreams of millions of Indians and how Amazon can enable them in small way to achieve those by providing access.

The upcoming fourth film introduces a wicketkeeper who to the audience, a key player who has been missing in the team so far. The coach and the team together stumble upon their potential wicketkeeper under unusual circumstances, who runs a business with her brother. The coach along with the team offers her to be the wicketkeeper after they observe her quick reflexes and sturdy hands while working at the shop. She happily agrees and becomes a part of the team.

Commenting on the recent film, Ravi Arun Desai, Director, Mass and Brand Marketing, Amazon India said “We are happy to witness how Chonkpur Cheetahs has taken the nation by storm with the dream team, becoming a household name. We believe that dreams and chase to them is not limited by gender or by anything. As Amazon, we want to show our support to millions of Indians who have dreams and the passion to pursue their dreams by being their partner in this pursuit. In this particular film leaving conventional wisdom, the team shows that they value talent above all and get a women wicketkeeper for their team. With over 10 crore products, Amazon is truly “India ke Sapno ki Apni Dukaan” – a place where you will find anything that you need to fulfil your aspirations just  a click away, so go ahead and be a Chonkpur Cheetah!”

Shoppers Stop Creates 160 Feet High World’s Largest Cricket Bat!

In celebration of the ongoing cricket fervor in the nation, Shoppers Stop has created the world’s largest cricket bat which measures 160 feet in height and 18 feet in width.

The record-setting cricket bat is displayed at Magrath Road Junction (opposite Garuda mall). To mark the occasion, Shoppers Stop invited Mithali Raj - Captain of the Indian Women's Cricket Team to sign the cricket bat. Also present for the occasion was Govind Shrikhande, Customer Care Associate and Managing Director, Shoppers Stop Ltd.

An ode to cricket aficionados, this one-of-its-kind cricket bat has been made in a record time of 10 days by the in-house Visual Merchandising team. Over 60 people worked round the clock to construct this enormous structure. Shoppers Stop is set to apply for a mention in the Limca Book of Records.

Govind Shrikhande, Customer Care Associate & Managing Director, Shoppers Stop Ltd said, “Our focus is to create exciting and engaging experiences for our customers and thereby bring the romance back to retail. The ongoing cricket buzz gave us the perfect opportunity to delight our customers by creating this record-setting world’s largest cricket bat. And who better to celebrate this occasion than the Captain of our beloved Indian Women’s Cricket Team Mithali Raj.”

Ace Cricketer and Captain of the Indian Women’s Cricket Team, Mithali Raj commented, “It is so great to see Shoppers Stop, India’s leading and most loved fashion retailer, celebrate Cricket, one of India’s most loved sports, in such a wonderful way. The record-setting 160 ft. cricket bat looks remarkable. It is a great opportunity for cricket lovers to express their love and enthusiasm for the game.”

Catch the world’s largest cricket bat installed at Magrath Road, Bengaluru.