Every age, it seems, must have its Nero.

The indifferent figure callously fiddling while Rome is burning all around him.

We see one such Nero-esque figure in the ponytailed Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of the struggling IT company Sun Microsystems.

Sun’s fortunes have taken a massive beating after the dot com bust. Wave after wave of layoffs has roiled the company, revenues have fallen, profits have collapsed and the share price has sunk deep into the sewer.

And our ponytailed Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz, protege of former CEO Scott McNealy, is blogging - yes, wasting his highly paid CEO time blogging - as the Sun ship slowly sinks into a quagmire.

Sun’s stock is now trading near its 52-week low. And Ponytail is blogging.

Sun’s server revenues are declining (for Q4, 2007, according to IDC). And Ponytail Continue Reading…

Sameer Gandhi of Sequoia Capital has joined Accel Partners as partner in their Palo Alto office.

At Accel, Sameer will help develop companies in the consumer Internet and software segments.

At Sequoia Capital, Sameer had been a partner leading several investments including Barracuda Networks, eHarmony, Gracenote (acquired by Sony), Marketlive and Sourcefire (FIRE) among others during his decade-long stint at the firm.

Sameer previously worked as a technology banker at Broadview and a sales engineer at Oracle.

Sameer holds an MBA from Stanford University and a BSEE and MSEE from MIT.

The U.S. Justice Department has fined IT consulting services company iGate Mastech Inc $45,000 to settle charges that iGate discriminated against American citizens and Green Card holders in hiring employees.

iGate is a Pittsburgh-based company originally founded by a bunch of Indians.

This is what the U.S. Justice Department had to say about the fine Continue Reading…

Among the many mismanaged IT companies in America, Sun Microsystems is perhaps the worst.

Since the dot com bust, this clueless company (co-founded by Vinod Khosla in 1982) has been tottering its way to losses and more losses and significant erosion of shareholder value.

Scott McNealy, he of the Microsoft-baiting fame, just couldn’t fix the company’s woes and had to make way for his pony-tailed successor Jonathan Schwartz.

Now Schwartz finds himself in the same boat. On Thursday, the company reported a loss ($34 million) and fall in revenue (down 0.5% to $3.266 billion) for its fiscal third quarter.

Even as other IT companies like IBM, Continue Reading…

Web domain name registrar Network Solutions has named Kamalesh Dwivedi its Chief Information Officer.

At Network Solutions, Kamalesh will be responsible for overseeing operations, engineering, enterprise data services and program management.

Before joining Network Solutions, Kamalesh worked as Executive VP and CIO of BPO TeleTech Holdings.

Kamalesh previously worked for broadband equipment company ADC Telecommunications and set-top boxes manufacturer Scientific-Atlanta.

Besides graduating from the Harvard Business School’s Program for Management Development, Kamalesh earned BS and MS degrees in engineering from IIT Kanpur and Carleton University, Ottawa respectively.

Data warehouse software firm Kalido is setting up a competency center in the South Indian city of Bangalore to take up product development, verification and services.

The Bangalore facility will complement existing operations in Burlington, Massachusetts and London. 

The Bangalore center, which will also support evolving product requirements and professional services needs of both regional and global clients, will be led by Ashish Vikram.

Internet and e-commerce services provider Sify Technologies plans to raise $57 million through sale of 12.81 million Indian equity shares to Infinity Satcom Universal Private Limited at a price of $4.46 per share.

The aggregate proceeds of $57 million from this sale, according to Sify, would be used to fund the company’s growth and development.

Infinity Satcom Universal Private Limited is an Indian entity controlled by Ananda Raju Vegesna an Executive Director of Sify Technologies and also brother of Sify’s MD and CEO Raju Vegesna.

Sify’s shareholders approved the share purchase by Infinity Satcom Universal Private Limited at an extraordinary general meeting on March 17, 2008.

Sify said the shares were sold to Infinity Satcom Universal Private Limited in an offshore transaction and no selling efforts were made in the U.S.

Sify said in a statement that “the purchased shares will not be registered in the United States and will not be traded in the United States as American Depositary Shares.”

DVD and CD manufacturer and distributor Thomson’s Technicolor Division plans to launch a DVD Compression & Authoring Operation in the South Indian city of Bangalore.

Set to open in May 2008, the new DVD Compression & Authoring  facility will be managed by Sumit Malik.

The new DVD Compression & Authoring facility will focus on the domestic Indian market and also function as an off-shoring location to boost Techinicolor’s capacities for worldwide DVD services.

The upcoming DVD Compression & Authoring  facility will be co-located in Thomson’s Paprikaas Animation and Game Design facility in Bangalore.

The Compression & Authoring operation will be based on Thomson’s research and development efforts for high-definition Blu-ray Disc and standard-definition DVDs.

What an irony!

When Indian IT companies like Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro are stepping up their investments in the U.S., VMware is going the other way.

Virtualization software house VMware joined the hordes of U.S. corporations that are screwing American workers with its just-announced plans to boost research and development operations in India through an investment of $100 million.

VMware’s Easter gift to struggling American workers include:

* Investing U.S. $100 million in India by 2010
* A new, state-of-the-art 82,000 square foot development center in Bangalore
* Doubling VMware’s India-based engineering organization to more than 1,000 people in the next two years

VMware already has a significant presence across India with offices in Bangalore, Pune, Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai. The company entered India Continue Reading…

With the U.S. economy in complete meltdown, the party is over for Indian outsourcing firms like Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Infosys, Polaris, Satyam et al.

Some Indian software firms like TCS have already reported delays in orders from their top clients.

U.S. financial services firms that have taken a severe beating and borne the brunt of the recent carnage on Wall Street are among the major clients for several Indian software houses.

The big question now is when will Indian firms - that staffed up in the go-go days of hyper growth - start laying off employees, Continue Reading…

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.