We need to encourage research for development: Infosys Co-Chairman

Three years ago, Infosys decided to felicitate outstanding researchers in various fields by setting up the Infosys Science Foundation, a not-for-profit trust. Infosys’ Executive Co-Chairman S. Gopalakrishnan speaks to Bibhu Ranjan Mishra about the reasons behind instituting the awards and also about technologies that are expected to steer the IT industry forward. Edited excerpts:

How successful you have been in meeting your objectives of promoting researches in the country?
Our objective was to recognize people of Indian origin doing researches relevant to India, and recognize them. This will encourage more people to do researches and enhance the quality of researches in India. We believe that as India looks at growth and development, invention and innovation coming out of researches will have a very important role to play.

There is a popular belief that since the IT industry hires graduates in large scale, students want to join the industry instead of pursuing higher studies and do research. What is your view on that?
I don’t believe the IT industry is responsible for not encouraging higher studies and research. We need world-class industry and for that we need to pay more to get good employees. Other disciplines have also started compensating people well. We need to create an environment where there are enough people who can go into other disciplines of engineering. We need to encourage people to do research rather than saying that the IT industry needs to reduce the salary of employees. Our initial focus was to establish this industry in India and scale it up.

What role do you think various fields of science will play in propelling the growth of IT industry?
Most of these fields are interrelated. If you look at the chip itself, which is a hardware, you will find that we all use it as the basis for building this industry. A lot of researches have happened in terms of increasing the number of processing units which are embedded into the chip; then we have gone into multi-core architecture. These innovations in chip technology are driven by basic and material sciences. Future opportunities like quantum computing and nano-material are heavily dependent on the other streams of sciences. When you look at algorithms, they come from applied mathematics and statistics. I see the need for creating an inter-disciplinary approach now to solve real-world problems in areas of healthcare, sustainability, education and poverty.

What are the technologies which have really been the backbone of the IT industry?
In my view, there are seven innovations which gave a boost to the proliferation of communication and networks. The first among them is the TCP/IP standard, which created a universal network and a universal way to address every element that is connected to the network. The introduction of personal computers was the second milestone as that democratized computing. People who have created them are those who are now creating content and contributing to the explosive growth of the internet that we see today. The other areas which gave a boost to communication networks are worldwide web, fiber optics, mobile phones, application architecture and search engine.

What are the emerging areas of opportunities for the industry?
There are a lot of new things that will have an impact on the industry. Internet is not only connecting the devices and appliances, it is also connecting people. In the next few years, we will have an explosive growth of connecting devices. Some people even say that 50-60 billion devices will be connected. The second area is explosion of data on the internet. People will require services to make use of the data after analyzing it and to store it. With the emergence of cloud computing, we are going through a phase where computing on-premise will actually become a back-up to computing from the grid or cloud. That transition will happen over the next 5-10 years, and that again will provide significant opportunities for us to re-look at how we deploy applications and do computing. We also expect the ‘voice’ to play a major role in the proliferation of internet.

Source: Business Standard, January 10, 2012

>IT, manufacturing in talent tug-of-war

>If the slowdown meant the information technology (IT) sector’s loss and the manufacturing sector’s gain in terms of acquiring engineering talent, it’s status quo once again. The software field has always attracted the best of talent on the back of higher wages, lucrative onsite assignments and a five-day week, but when hiring slowed down over the past couple of years, engineering graduates gravitated toward manufacturing.

However, this trend has been short-lived and the scales have tipped in IT’s favour again. Consider this: India will probably witness 450,000 to 475,000 engineers graduating this year, of which almost half are expected to be hired by the IT industry . “Around 200,000 engineers and 20,000 MBAs and other graduates are likely to be hired by IT. Other industries will have a tough time finding good talent,” says T.V. Mohandas Pai, Director and HR chief, Infosys Technologies.

The pressure on supply will lead to salary inflation in manufacturing. Companies see wages increasing any where between 20% and 30% this year. P. Balendran, Vice Presidentof carmaker General Motors India, says last year the average salary hike in manufacturing was 12-15%, but this year it is expected to go up to 20-21%. As students from tier-I colleges opt for IT firms, GM has been forced to recruit from diploma and industrial training institutes (ITIs).

S. Vishwanathan, Managing Director of John Fowler, a manufacturer of filters and filtration systems, says the manufacturing industry primarily hires mechanical engineers, but the IT industry is interested in them too. “It is difficult to get good engineering design engineers,” he notes, adding that salary levels in manufacturing have gone up about 20% since the slowdown. Here, C.S. Kumar, professor of mechanical engineering at IIT-Kharagpur, points out that since mechanical engineering students have strong analytical skills, they are a natural fit in the IT industry.

Murlidhar S., co-founder and COO of MeritTrac, a skills assessment company, also estimates the wage bill inflation for the manufacturing sector at the entry level at 25-30%. “The IT sector itself will have to pay 15-18% more due to the competition. Big IT companies currently start with salaries between Rs. 200,000 and Rs. 270,000. Manufacturing pays 30% less at the fresher level. They would have to match up,” he says.

Raja Radhakrishnan, Senior Vice President (Human Resources), ABB India, foresees a supply shortage for the manufacturing sector this year. “Although India has ample engineering talent, we find qualitative talent hard to come by. Engineers today need to be trained even after they pass out. When it comes to companies like ABB, there is a higher incubation time for retooling and imbibing skills,” says Radhakrishnan. Sanjay Shelvankar, CEO of talent acquisition solutions company ScaleneWorks, says IT firms now hire functional people, even at the fresher level, to service verticals such as manufacturing.

The trend will only accelerate as firms focus more on specialisation. Market watchers advice manufacturing companies to have better campus initiatives. While many multinational manufacturing companies do have campus programmes in tier-I engineering colleges, they can hardly match up to the well-oiled recruitment engine of the IT industry. Kumar of IIT-Kharagpur notes that manufacturing firms have to increase their presence in tier-I campuses by sponsoring programmes and chairs, just like the IT industry, by setting up labs with state-of-the-art equipment named after them and by offering scholarships. “Manufacturing has to build good connections with colleges, invest in relationships, pay more, offer good careers and internships to become attractive employers. Today bright talent has many more opportunities,” sums up Mohandas Pai of Infosys.

Source: Financial Express, April 14, 2011

>Only 25 % IT graduates readily employable: NASSCOM

>At 25, and with a computer science degree from one of the top regional engineering colleges, Sandesh Kumar considered himself to be the luckiest among all his batch mates when he was picked by Infosys Technologies last year. But within three months, Kumar realised the initial training at Infosys’ sprawling Mysore campus was getting nowhere. “I actually sucked at everything – communications, language and understanding about some of the latest development tools,” Kumar says. “The company was kind enough to flag early that I might face hurdles ahead and I decided to quit,” he adds.

While Kumar’s unemployability is an extreme case, of the 550,000 engineering graduates passing out every year, anywhere between 10% and 25% cannot be readily employed by any technology firm in the country. Software lobby NASSCOM says only 25% of graduates working in IT are readily employable, while it is roughly 15% for back-office jobs. Growing gaps in skills needed for computer science graduates to start coding at the earliest is nothing new, but India Inc.’s modest progress in dealing with the problem is what marks the seriousness of the issue. India’s US$ 60 billion outsourcing industry is already spending almost $1 billion a year on readying these graduates, picked up from different campuses. But only marginal headway has been made with the percentage of employable engineering graduates moving up by just a per cent over the past six years to 25%.

“I did go to a private institute in Hyderabad for a three months refresher course, but they taught us more of the same. It didn’t seem to help at all,” agrees Kumar who joined a multinational tech support centre in Bangalore last month. While NASSCOM believes a quarter of the engineering graduates are unemployable, consulting firm Aspiring Minds paints a gloomier picture. In an employability study conducted last August, the firm found that merely 4.22% of engineering graduates are employable in product companies and only 17% in IT services.

On its part, NASSCOM says India’s large pool of engineers makes the employability percentage look even more daunting. “Comparison of India’s employability percentage with other nations is not fair. The talent pool in those countries is much smaller, and the quality of education has been much higher. The right to education bill has just been passed in India, and it will take time for it to show results,” says NASSCOM Vice President Sangeeta Gupta. NASSCOM has started two common assessment tests, which set a common benchmark for employability especially for students from tier 2-3 engineering colleges. “The 45-minute evaluation tests you on analytical, comprehension, writing and verbal skills. If a person is not good in voice, good analytical skills will get him a job in the BPO function in an IT firm. We have also started the train-the-trainer programme for universities,” she says.

“The percentage of non-engineering graduates in the pool of IT and BPO firms is also rising steadily. Companies are not complaining of any dearth of talent, as there is a large pool of three million graduates available to them a year, of which the industry’s demand is about 240,000 only per year. We don’t see a dearth for talent in future as well, though there will be competition from other sectors,” she adds.

Tech employers such as Adobe, the world’s biggest maker of graphic design software, says a stronger coordination between campuses and companies is needed. “The issue is real but not too much of a glaring problem for us as we go to the Tier I institutes where the curriculum is up-to-date and our experience has been good. But in other technology schools it is a problem. The curriculum is stuck in a time warp and there is very limited exposure to the industry,” says Jaleel Abdul, Senior Director, HR, Adobe Asia-Pacific.

“The best practice would be to let students learn from the industry and have strong university programs. Several of our senior technical team go to colleges as guest faculty and students come for internships, that helps a lot. As a result of most colleges not being in touch with the actual requirements, companies have to make a lot of additional investments in training which can be avoided,” he adds. Sanyukta, an engineering student set to graduate next year, says she had tough time finding a course that taught software testing – a growing, multi-billion dollar business for Indian tech firms.

“We need premier institutes to offer such courses, most of my batchmates are doing crash courses in testing from smaller private institutes,” she says. Some tech executives, however, play down the employability issue. “When you have such a big pool, these challenges will exist and I would say that going forward training will become core to companies. This will help us realign skills to business needs as and when needed and not wait for an institute to offer graduates in a particular discipline,” says the CEO of one of the top 10 software exporters. He requested anonymity because his company is under a silent period.

Apart from investing more in in-house training, IT companies have also started looking at non-engineering graduates for carrying out simpler tasks. As technology firms automate their commoditised service offerings, they do not necessarily need engineers to perform all tasks. Instead, they are increasingly hiring non-engineering graduates for testing software applications and managing computer infrastructure of their clients in order to do more with fewer staff and at lower wages than computer engineers.

From nearly 10% of their current workforce, non-engineering graduates could now account for nearly 20-25 % of the staff at companies such as TCS, Wipro and HCL, over the next one to two years. Multinational rival Cognizant already has almost 20% of its global workforce who are non-engineering graduates. Meanwhile, efforts made by NASSCOM and other educational institutions are expected to improve employability for IT engineers to 30% over next few years. “I wish our institutes were situated inside these IT companies or vice versa. It can help bridge the skill gap,” Kumar says.

Source: The Economic Times (Online Edition), April 7, 2011

>IT sector in need of hands in all domains: Infosys CEO

>The IT sector is presently recruiting at a strong clip, with a demand for skills in multiple verticals, according to Kris Gopalakrishnan, CEO and MD of Infosys. Ahead of expansion plans for the Indian Institute of Information Technology and Management, Kerala (IIITM-K) here of which he is chariman, Gopalakrishnan told ET that his company had already made 25,000 offers during this financial year. “We have made 25,000 offers in campuses this financial year, and our plans for the coming year will be disclosed in April,” he said, adding that there was a strong demand across various disciplines in the IT sector.

The IIITM-K is setting up a residential campus at the Technocity here, focusing on high power computing and information system management. IIITM-K’s Director-in-charge, Elizabeth Sherly said courses had been designed with the congruence of academics, research and industry requirements in mind. She said the 10-acre campus for IIITM-K in the Technocity campus would help the institute raise itself to a higher level, with the student capacity also moving up from the present level of 120 post graduate students to about 700 students pursuing Masters, M.Phil. and Ph.D. programmes.

The institute is proposing to launch four new schools in its new campus, namely schools for computer science and engineering, computational science, informatics, and humanities and social sciences. Sherly said inter-disciplinary education was a key area of focus, enabling students to tune their skills to contextual requirements.

Source: The Economic Times, February 16, 2011