Source: www.business-standard.com

NTT Data Corporation, the data services operation of the world’s largest telecom company, NTT Corporation of Japan, has set foot in India by acquiring 68.7 per cent equity in Pune-based software developer Vertex Software.

One of the largest players in the Japanese IT services market, NTT Data Corporation has begun to grow outside its home market, which so far had been focusing only on China .

It will buy Vertex’s shares from its current shareholders — Japan-based Mitsui & Company and US-based software firm LogicSoft, according to sources in Vertex.

Vertex Software, a company involved in mobile product engineering, handset porting, MMS and WAP porting, software testing services and product development, has a turnover of a little over Rs 24 crore.

The company has offices in Pune, Tokyo and Acton (US). While the amount of the deal was not disclosed by the company, a top Vertex official stated that the deal would be completed in the first week of December.

NTT so far has been dealing with Japanese and Chinese firms and has tie-ups with a number of IT companies based in China. The company now plans to acquire a business base in India, considering the low manpower and shortage of IT expertise in China, sources said.

NTT Data also plans to increase its overseas consignment to ¥10 billion in FY10 from some ¥3.4 billion in FY06, while raising its dependence on non-Chinese areas to 10 per cent or more from the current 5 per cent.

Vertex hopes to increase its revenue to ¥1.5 billion over the next three years from ¥620 million in FY06. It will continue its own sales operations and carry on receiving software development orders from NTT Data.

Founded in 1967, the company was formerly known as NTT Data Communications Systems Corporation and changed its name to NTT Data Corporation in 1998.

The company is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. It is a subsidiary of Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corporation. The company, which recently bought Tryarc, had stated its intention to buy mid-size IT firms in Europe and India, where it still does not have a presence.

NTT Data Corporation, together with its subsidiaries, engages in the marketing, leasing and installation of various data communications systems, primarily in Japan.

The company’s services include hardware and software development, systems integration, network and intranet development and e-commerce services. The company primarily operates in Japan. It is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan and employs about 21,300 people.

The company, through its subsidiaries, also provides education and training services, consulting services, software development and maintenance, staffing and agency, general affairs outsourcing, and financial information services, as well as various services related to credit card operations.

In addition, it involves in-contact centre businesses and package software sales. zzzzzzzAs of March 31, 2007, the group pre-tax profit doubled to ¥85.7 billion ($714.9 million), sales rose 15 per cent to ¥1.04 trillion.

The company’s operating profit surged 93 per cent to ¥90.2 billion. Net profit jumped 80 per cent to ¥50.6 billion. For 2007-08, the company expects sales to grow 3 per cent to ¥1.08 trillion, lifting its projected pretax profit by 6 per cent to ¥91 billion.

Source: www.nytimes.com

IN the latest twist on the information-age truism that technology is making the world even smaller, entrepreneurs in India are trying to build a new market for the offshore services they offer: helping small businesses cope with even the most mundane day-to-day tasks.

Thanks to Indian companies like Brickwork India and GetFriday, even sole proprietors can have personal assistants to conduct research, monitor the Web, make appointments and even give them a wake-up call and tell them to get some exercise — all for as little as $15 an hour.

A woman in New Jersey who works for a health care company used the new services to investigate trends in pharmaceutical marketing. An entrepreneur in Toronto used them to build his Web site. A Web designer in Louisiana has them search for images he can use. A builder in Tennessee uses them to get statistical reports on vacant lots before he buys them.

A man in Cambridge, Mass., even started a business, TajTunes, in which he gets the workers to telephone people in the United States with singing telegrams for $5 a call.

“Who hasn’t dreamt of having someone to do all that stuff?” said Kim Levy, the Morristown, N.J., woman who used Brickwork to scour the current literature and come up with a report on health care dynamics. Ms. Levy is the vice president for strategic planning at Micromass Communications, a 120-person company based in North Carolina that helps medical businesses with marketing. She has also used a New York-based service, Ask Sunday, for more personal tasks.

Like many others using the services, Ms. Levy was inspired by two books: Thomas L. Friedman’s “The World Is Flat” and Timothy Ferriss’s “The 4-Hour Workweek.” Mr. Ferriss preaches that people spend 80 percent of their time on the trivial 20 percent of tasks, and he urges readers to outsource anything that can be done for a cost less than the value of their own time.

Mr. Ferriss recommends Brickwork and GetFriday, and both services are reaping the benefit. Brickwork has a staff of 160 in Bangalore and uses as many as 150 others as consultants, according to its founder and chief executive, Vivek Kulkarni. Brickwork says that it has had 150 clients in the United States and many more in Europe, Australia and Hong Kong.

GetFriday, a division of TTK Services, has a staff of 140 serving about 1,000 clients, according to the company’s director, Sunder Prakasham. He said that a related division, YourManInIndia, serves 20,000 Indian expatriates who want to get things done in their homeland. GetFriday charges $15 an hour, plus $10 a month, though rates are lower for those who have monthly plans. For instance, a 40-hour-a-month plan costs $360. Brickwork charges $15 to $25 an hour.

There is a three-week wait for new clients of GetFriday, and the company is hiring 25 people a week to meet the demand, Mr. Sunder said.

However, the waiting time is but one of a number of imperfections in the still-developing market for outsourced labor. People in the United States who have used the services of companies like Brickwork and GetFriday say they have wrestled with miscommunication, poorly received instructions and work that has not met expectations.

“This stuff is very much in its infancy, both in terms of trust from the buyer side and in ink on deals,” said Frances Karamouzis, a vice president at the Gartner Group, where she is an analyst who specializes in outsourcing. The people in India “don’t always have the greatest client service skills or business acumen or accents,” she said. But those hurdles can be overcome. Failures result when the person doing the outsourcing has not set the right expectations or is not properly understood.