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Satyam Computer services has shifted its gaze towards South Africa with initiatives to strengthen its presence in the republic. Satyam is banking on a number of contracts emanating from South Africa in the coming years and sees potential in providing IT solutions to the banking, energy and government sectors.

Mr.Virendar Agarwal, director and senior VP (Asia Pacific, Middle East, India and Africa) said that the country offered tremendous business opportunities. He also said that the republic of South Africa (RSA) constituting more than 60% of the IT market of american continent and a 20 percent annual growth in the IT spends.

Mr.Sehloho Francis Moloi, high commissioner for RSA to India said that the opportunities were there, but they had an acute shortage of skilled people to support the growth. He added that they would need at least 60000 trained ICT professionals to fuel their booming telecommunication sector. However, Satyam computer services will have to fight it out with Tata Consultancy Services, the biggest telecommunication firm in RSA for a formidable market share.

The cost of sending an employee to RSA is the same as that of sending him to US. Satyam is training 50 students from RSA and plans to hire almost 200 more local technical graduates, train them in India and bring them back. satyam has set a target of 75 percent YoY revenue growth.

Mr.Agarwal said that they would invest heavily in further developing the local human capital through various skill enablement initiatives.

Already riddled with problem of appreciating rupee, Indian IT firms are also finding it hard to retain employees with the top four firms viz, TCS, Infosys, WIPRO and Satyam witnessing an exodus of about 10000 people in the first quarter. Although all the four firms collectively hited more than 25000 employees in the April-June period, the net addition was just about 16300 taking their total head count to 285357 employees.

TCS, the biggest in terms if revenues as well as headcount saw an exodis of about 2500 employess, while over 2000 people quit India’s second largest software exporter, Infosys. The employee loss is estimated to be much higher at about 3500 at Wipro, the country’s third biggest IT firm, while Satyam, the smallest of the four, saw the lowest number - about 1600 people leaving the country.

TCS reported an attriction rate of 11.5 percent, up from 10.6 percent a year ago, Satyam saw, its attrition rate falling to 14.9 percent from 15.7 percent in the year ago period, where as Wipro wirnessed a sharps surge to 20 percent from 17 percent in the previous quarter and 15 percent in the year ago quarter.

Wipro Corporate Vice president (Human Resource) Pratik Kumar said that they has seen a spike in the percentage of people who have gone for higher studies, which is not very uncommon to see in quater one, because all admissions open up around this time.

Global chip maker Intel Corporation is developing a new generation of silicon wafers to make our everyday life simpler. Looking beyond the world of enterprises and businesses, Intel geeks are working on novel architectures that will make processors with billions of transistors to handle your daily chores, be it personal of professional.

Intel corporation’s South Asia Managing director Rama Murthy Sivakumar said that the next generation of our embedded chips would have a gamut of applications that would take care of our day-to-day activities at home, office or while travelling. He said that their functions would be richer than what modern multi-gadgets and consumer durables were doing for us at the individual or collective level. He said this on “the next wave of silicon technology” at an industry media conclave.

Highlighting the benefits of convergence of information and communication technologies (ICT) and their multifarious applications ina flat world, Mr.Sivakumar said each individual would be a potential customer for the trillion doller globalI CT industry, as enterprises and businesses have been over the decades.

With Technology and user value as the new mantras, Intel’s research abd development labs worldwide are designing new platforms on shich software mounted chips will be able to undertake perfect vision correction.