Data warehousing expert Teradata has opened a second Global Consulting Centre in India at Pune.

Teradata’s Pune Global Consulting Centre will offer business intelligence solutions for telecommunications, retail, manufacturing, banking and insurance industries in the Americas.

Teradata selected Pune because of its talented pool of mature IT professionals and IT educational institutions that can provide training.

The Pune center will work jointly with the existing Mumbai centre.

The Mumbai facility focuses on business intelligence consulting projects implemented in Southeast Asia and the U.S.

Besides the Global Consulting Centres in Pune and Mumbai, Teradata has research and development centers in the South Indian cities of Hyderabad and Bangalore.

Tata Consultancy Services has rolled out IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) for small and medium businesses.

A subscription-driven model, some of ITaaS’ features include:

1) Customized low-cost solutions scalable to SMBs growing needs

2) Flexible pricing options that lets SMBs pay as they use

3) Allows SMBs to take advantage of TCS’ intellectual property, infrastructure and scale, as well as that of its partners

4) Provides SMBs with blueprints for business process improvement and delivers integrated end-to-end managed solutions in IT and telecom

While launching  ITaaS, TCS CEO S. Ramadorai said:

“Our aim to be a leading end-to-end business solution provider in the SMB segment is part of our overall strategy to expand into new markets and customer segments. We believe this model can help make Indian business even more competitive on the global stage and put the power of technology on their side to build competitive advantage. We view this as a means of making India Inc. more competitive and TCS being an integral part of sustainable and profitable growth of SMBs.”

ITaaS is hosted centrally on a common platform to facilitate alignment of technology adoption to the business needs of SMBs.

ICICI Bank has lost $263 million because of its exposure to credit derivatives and fixed income investments.

ICICI executives acknowledged that the bank and its overseas banking subsidiaries have an aggregate exposure of $2.2 billion in credit derivatives.

The bank claims it ” has no material direct or indirect exposure to US sub-prime credit”.

Greedy desi butcher and Citigroup CEO Vikram Pandit may fire more employees than previously reported.

Soon after taking over as CEO of struggling Citigroup, Vikram Pandit started sacrificing Citi jobs even as he grabbed about $26.7 million in stock (1.094 million shares) on January 22, 2008, according to the bank’s regulatory filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

New CNBC reports suggest that Vikram Pandit may butcher upto 37,000 Citi jobs over the next 12-18 months, compared to the previous estimate of 24,000.

CNBC also suggests that Vikram Pandit wants to make these upcoming job cuts permanent unlike in the past. This means that Citi will not rehire the laid off employees as consultants.