INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

Accenture Opens Offshore Dev Sites In India

IT consulting giant Accenture bolstered its overseas development facilities today with the opening of new sites in Mumbai, India, and Prague, Czechoslovakia. Accenture says the new sites will allow it to bolster offerings in outsourcing, software development and hosting services. Accenture already operates overseas technology centers in the Philippines and Spain. The company's increasing overseas presence is part of a trend in which firms seek to make use of low-cost, skilled IT workers abroad. Accenture says its newest overseas facilities will help the company expand its core offerings in the area of business transformation outsourcing -- restructuring and outsourcing entire business processes for enhanced performance, cost reduction and growth. Accenture says the Mumbai center, Accenture's first development site in India, will focus on application development. It is staffed primarily by software developers with expertise in UNIX, Microsoft and SAP. The Prague site will focus on providing business-process outsourcing of finance and accounting functions, as well as CRM and logistics services to clients in the manufacturing and chemical industries.

Germany Rolls out Red Carpet for Indian IT Industry

Buoyed by the 'green card' scheme launched by the visiting German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, and the slogan "kinder sttat inder" (children, not Indians) having subsided in Germany, IT professionals in India are suddenly considering Germany as the new El Dorado. Following the decision, the German embassy in Delhi has been inundated by queries .The green card scheme allows 20,000 IT professionals in Germany to work for the next five years. The country, though, has the capacity to absorb as many as 75,000 professionals, but the ceiling of 20,000 has been put due to "domestic political compulsions".

SAP chooses Java over .Net

The move is a blow to Microsoft, which is looking to enlist support for .Net among major enterprises. SAP, Europe's biggest software group, has decided not to use Microsoft's .Net software and is instead backing a competing offering from Sun Microsystems, the Financial Times has reported. Hasso Plattner, SAP chief executive, will announce next week the German group is to adopt Sun's J2EE architecture, a development platform for enterprise software based on the Java programming language, to run SAP software, people close to the talks told the newspaper reported. SAP's move is likely to be a blow to Microsoft, as the German group has one of the largest customer bases of any business software developer. .Net is Microsoft's initiative to create a standardised infrastructure for Internet services, but it is not compatible with Java, a widely-used cross-platform programming language.