Walmart to expand its India R&D centre

Bangalore: Walmart, the world's largest retailer, said on Tuesday it would have 200 research and development (R & D) engineers at the @WalmartLabs centre in Bangalore. In November last year, the company had announced plans to set up an R & D centre in Bangalore, responsible for creating the next generation products and platforms for Walmart's e-Commerce business globally.

The company has since then build a team of about 20 people in Bangalore. It aims to add another 180 people by the end of 2012, according to senior officials of the company. They also said resources located in Bangalore would work in core R & D works, including new platform developments, analytics, big data and system integration. This is in line with the company's strategy to provide the customers ‘anytime, anywhere' access to its products through mobile devices, internet or at physical stores.

Gandhinagar: Commercially exploiting large tracts of wasteland, Gujarat is set to emerge as India's largest solar power destination. The Chief Minister, Mr Narendra Modi, will dedicate 600 MW of solar power projects to the nation on Thursday.

Currently, India's total solar power production is nearly 900 MW, two-thirds of which will be produced by Gujarat alone.

On Thursday, Mr Modi will launch India's first Solar Power Park with generation capacity of 500 MW in 3,000 acres Charanka village, Randhanpur taluka, in Patan district. Currently, it has an aggregated operational capacity of 214 MW of solar power projects commissioned at a single location. The Patan ceremony will be attended by representatives from Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Italy, Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK and the US.

The Gujarat Solar Park is an innovative concept of the State Government to promote solar installations in which it allocated developed land to the project developers with the entire infrastructure including power evacuation, roads and water for commissioning of the power project put on fast track.

Under its Solar Power Policy, the State Government had signed up memorandums of understanding for generation of 968.5 MW of solar power by December and also took an initiative to launch the Gujarat Solar Park with a vision to build it as the world's largest solar power park. Its foundation stone was laid in December 2010.

The dedication ceremony will be followed by the 'India Solar Summit 2012: Investment and Technology Expo' to be held in Gandhinagar on April 20 and 21, said Mr. D.J. Pandian, Principal Secretary, Energy and Petrochemicals Department.

TRAI sets quality norms for mobile banking services

New Delhi: The Telecom Regulatory Authority of India on Tuesday laid down ground-rules for telecom companies offering mobile banking services. Under the new rules, mobile companies have to enable banks to complete a transaction within ten seconds.

By the new guidelines, telecom companies have to give banks and customers the option to transact using either SMS, Interactive Voice Response, or Unstructured Supplementary Service Data (USSD). All the operators are already using these platforms and hence do not have to make additional investments.

USSD, for example, is used by operators to inform pre-paid cards users about their balance on a real-time basis. The service providers can also optionally facilitate the bank to use WAP or Sim Application Toolkit (STK). STK has been deployed by many mobile operators around the world for many applications, often where a menu-based approach is required.

Cost-effective
The regulations are aimed at ensuring that mobile operators offer good services to banks that launch mobile banking services. “Mobile banking consists of banking transactions and the use of mobile networks for communicating through mobile phones by the customer for such transactions. The entire transaction depends on the capability of the mobile network to deliver a fast, reliable and cost-effective method of communication,” TRAi said.

“The response time for delivery of messages for mobile banking services generated by the customer or the bank will be within the prescribed time-frame of less than 10 seconds for SMS, IVR, WAP and STK, and less than 2 seconds for USSD,” the regulator said. The regulations also mandate that if the SMS sent by the bank is not delivered to the customer due to network or handset-related problems, then a USSD communication confirming the completion of the transaction should be sent.

Two stages only
The regulator has also made it mandatory for operators to ensure that, to get the benefit of banking services such as cash deposit, cash withdrawal, money transfer and balance enquiry, the customer should be able to complete the transaction in not more than two stages. Every access provider needs to maintain records of mobile banking messages for six months for audit purposes. TRAI will monitor the quality of services offered by the mobile operators on a regular basis.

12th Plan to focus more on skills development: Montek

Bangalore: The Planning Commission is working on composite set of policies to include skills development in the 12th Plan.

Speaking after laying foundation stone for ‘Multi Skill Development Centre' (MSDC) in Bangalore, Mr Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman Planning Commission said, “We have realised skills development is an important condition to achieve 9 per cent growth.”

“Realisation has come late for us; it will be addressed in the 12{+t}{+h} Plan. We plan to devote more towards skills development. The Planning Commission has also realised for hitting 9 per cent growth again emphasis needs to be given for both higher education and skills development,” he added.

German connection
Mr Ahluwalia said, “Germany stands out for doing more through skills development among the industrialised world. Now, time has come for us to emulate and impart the same in India to secure future for our youth.”

“Demographic transition, we have not done enough. India has huge young population. Number of young people getting employment and earning is going up by the day. It is here we need to create more opportunities for young workers by offering both education and training,” he added.

Mr Ahluwalia said, “The Union Government is strongly in favour of public private partnerships (PPP) and state governments should tap this through various models for skills development.”

“Karnataka will be in the lead with these skills development experiment and Planning Commission will be monitoring its progress,” he added.

MSDC is a public private joint venture between Union Labour ministry and Karnataka Directorate of Employment and Training with technical support from German International Cooperation (GIZ).

Speaking on the occasion, Mr Hans-Herrmann Dube, Regional Director GIZ-South Asia said, “Germany has 350 years of history in offering vocational training. We treat it as important as academic learning.”

“In Germany, currently it offers good employment and youth earn good salaries,” he added.

Speaking on the occasion Mr Mallikarjun Kharge, Union Minister for Labour and Employment, said that his department has taken skills development on pilot basis with a German collaboration.

For the first time in the country two MSDC has been taken up in Gulbarga and Bangalore where 1,800 students in each centre will be imparted technical training in IT, environment engineering, electrical maintenance, electronic design and manufacturing, automation, welding and construction technology.

AP to ink pact with UK co for re-gasification facility

Hyderabad: The Andhra Pradesh Government and GDF Suez LNG UK Ltd will sign a project framework for setting up of a floating storage re-gasification unit at Kakinada seaport.

The terminal will be set up by GAIL and APGDC with an outlay of Rs 4,000 crore. This facility is expected to have capability to re-gasify liquefied natural gas of 15 mmscmd.

This floating unit will be a boon to gas-based independent power generation companies and thereby help boost the economic activity in the East Coast. The terminal planned to be completed by the end of 2013 will help generate additional 3,000 MW.

A project framework agreement for setting up of a floating storage re-gasification unit at Kakinada will be signed at New Delhi on Tuesday between the State-owned AP Gas Development Corporation and GDF Suez, according to a statement from the State Energy Department.

The Andhra Pradesh Government is keen that this project gets commissioned at the earliest to enable the State to help bridge the demand-supply mismatch of gas required for power plants in the State.

The natural gas produced domestically is inadequate to cater to the needs of electricity consumers including to the non-priority sectors. While 9.5 mmscmd has been allocated from KG-D6, barely 5 mmscmd is being supplied, hampering generation.

While additional capacity of 4,000 MW is under various stages of construction, there is no indication of fresh gas supplies. This project is expected to support 3,000 MW of power capacity.

The average cost of generation would work out to Rs 6 a unit versus Rs 9 a unit in the case of RLNG now.

Healthcare SMEs use cloud services to reduce cost

Hyderabad: With vast amounts of medical data generated each year, many small and medium-sized healthcare enterprises are opting for cloud technology to store, access and share data, to reduce operational costs and increase efficiency.

Unlike large super-speciality hospitals that have in-house technology for managing data, SMEs in the healthcare space – mainly 25-50-bed hospitals – are opting for cloud technology.

Hyderabad-based Razi Healthcare, which has 50 primary care hospitals across India, has adopted iON – a branded on-demand cloud computing offering from Tata Consultancy Services – to digitise patient-care profiles with electronic medical records (EMRs) for easy access and more accurate treatment.

“Hospitals are using technology and cloud service for maintaining patient medical records, monitoring of patients, billing and payroll, to maximise resource utilisation at low cost and to improve doctor-patient understanding through electronic health records (EHRs), electronic medical records (EMRs), healthcare management and information systems (HMIS), picture archiving and communications systems (PACS), and point of care systems,” said Suresh, chief information officer, SevenHills’s e-health.

e-health is a part of Visakhapatnam-based SevenHills Healthcare Pvt Ltd, a web-enabled hospital management solution (HMS) that provides end-to-end solutions to medical players, where doctors and staff can access the stored data from anywhere through the web.

e-health is the country’s first paperless hospital model, where every patient is allotted a unique health identification card (UHID) at the time of registration. UHID provides complete details of the patient’s medical history as recorded in SevenHills’s e-health suite.

“Currently, there are only five or six full-fledged paperless hospitals in India, and seeing the high storage cost, more hospitals are looking to go paperless (which saves Rs 3 lakh storage cost for a 150-bed hospital),” Suresh said.

The Indian healthcare industry was estimated at $40 billion in 2010, and is expected to reach $280 billion by 2020. According to Frost & Sullivan reports, spending on IT by Indian healthcare players was estimated at $244 million in 2010 and is expected to grow at 22 per cent a year over the next 10 years.

“In this case, use of the cloud-based platform helps in reducing the IT cost of healthcare players, in the face of continued margin pressures and critical need to generate and store large amounts of health data,” Suresh said.

The cloud infrastructure allows hospitals to store data in multiple virtual platforms, such as infrastructure as a service (IaaS), software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and the service can be set up both on or off-premise.

Globally, cloud adoption by medical players is increasing. Currently, around 32 per cent of healthcare players use cloud service globally, and this is expected to go up to 83 per cent by 2016. However, cloud adoption in India is minimal, Sambamurthy Margam, managing director, Exleaz Consulting Limited, said, quoting a recent report.

“Seeing the potential, cloud adoption across sectors is expected to grow at a very high rate in the country,” he added. Exleaz Consulting, a web-based server having a wholly-owned subsidiary in Hyderabad, recently launched its cloud-based hospital management services (HMS) – MediEaz, a patient-centric, modular single unified database – in India.

MediEaz uses cloud computing services and provides the full range of clinical, administrative and lab capabilities which are linked by a single data repository. It helps businesses save up to 95 per cent of carbon emitted by on-premise servers.

“Among the cloud platforms, cloud IaaS services lower the barriers to market growth by minimising technology costs and upfront investments for small and medium healthcare players,” Suresh said.

ABB to invest Rs 250 crore to expand power products manufacturing base in India

New Delhi: ABB on Monday said it would invest Rs 250 crore to build new facilities in India to manufacture high-voltage power products and transformers. The company will also export products manufactured in India.

""The new manufacturing units will further strengthen our local footprint and enhance our product portfolio,"" said company local division manager (power products) Pitamber Shivnani.

The facilities will be located in Savli near Vadodara, Gujarat and produce high-voltage gas-insulated switchgear and plug and switch system hybrid switchgear as well as dry-type and oil immersed distribution transformers. The facilities are expected to be operational by the end of 2012.

ABB Group of companies operate in around 100 countries and employs about 13 5 ,000 people.

Piramal buys Bayer's molecular imaging assets

Mumbai: The cash-rich Piramal Group has begun making serious investments in pharmaceutical research and development (R&D). Piramal Healthcare Ltd (PHL) today announced an agreement to acquire worldwide rights to the molecular imaging research and development portfolio of Bayer Pharma AG. Financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed, but the move is significant, as the company would get rights to florbetaben that may help detect signs of Alzheimer’s disease.

Since the Rs 17,000-crore sellout of its domestic formulation business to US drug maker Abbott in September 2010, Piramal Healthcare has been on an investment spree across verticals —financial services, defence, telecom, and now, pharma R&D.

Earlier this year, Piramal Healthcare picked up an additional 5.5 per cent in telecom service provider Vodafone India for $618 million (Rs 3,151 crore, according to the current forex rate), raising its total stake in the telco to 11 per cent. Last August, it had bought the initial 5.5 per cent for $640 million (roughly Rs 3,260 crore).

Last year, it had also set up a financial services subsidiary, Piramal Finance, for the purpose of housing two non-banking financial companies (NBFCs) with a combined corpus of Rs 1,000 crore as well as a private equity venture. Again in 2011, the group floated a new company, Piramal Systems and Technologies (PST), to make a foray into the defence security space. More recently, earlier this month, the group's real estate arm, Piramal Realty, bought Hindustan Unilever's Gulita property in Mumbai for Rs 452.5 crore.

The Piramal Group, spanning healthcare, glass, real estate and financial service, clocked a turnover of Rs 5,000 crore in 2010-11.

On the latest R&D initiative, the company said Piramal Healthcare's newly created subsidiary, Piramal Imaging SA, had acquired the portfolio, including rights to florbetaben, a positron emission tomography (PET) tracer. Florbetaben, which is in the final stages of its Phase-III clinical trials, helps detect beta-amyloid plaque deposition in the brain, an indication of probable Alzheimer's disease.

Ajay Piramal, the Piramal Group chairman, said, “We plan to build a promising portfolio in the pharma space, including our newly acquired molecular imaging assets, which will help us create a global branded pharma business.”

The company would fund the acquisition through internal accruals, he said.

Piramal estimates that the new class of PET imaging agents for Alzheimer's has a global market potential of up to $1.5 billion. Piramal Imaging has plans to set up a dedicated global commercial team for florbetaben.

“Core members of Bayer’s research and development team working on the portfolio will be joining Piramal Imaging, which will carry forward the development of florbetaben and take it through regulatory approval processes worldwide. Piramal is planning to file for regulatory approvals in 2012,” a company statement said.

As per the agreement, Piramal will have the intellectual property (including patents, trademarks and know-how), worldwide development, marketing and distribution rights of the lead compound florbetaben as well as other clinical and pre-clinical assets of Bayer’s molecular imaging business.

The field of molecular imaging is not very competitive yet, and US companies Eli Lilly, GE Healthcare and Bayer play in the segment. "Only Eli Lilly has a competitive product in Alzheimer's, but that too was very recently launched," said Swati Piramal, director, PHL.

SEBI unveils new format for reporting financial results

Mumbai: The SEBI has unveiled a new reporting format for disclosing financial results for companies other than banks.

The new format follows a February notification from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs.

The notification incorporates changes in listing agreement regarding disclosure of interim financial results by listed companies.

Companies have to file their income statement and balance sheet in this format starting FY12.

Companies filing consolidated results have to include details of profit / loss of associates and minority interest. They have to provide separate details on promoter/ promoter group shares pledged.

In their balance sheets, companies now have to provide details of money received against share warrants under shareholder's funds.

eClerx acquires US-based Agilyst

New Delhi: eClerx Services Ltd has acquired US-based Agilyst Inc, a knowledge process outsourcing company through its overseas subsidiary eClerx Investments Ltd.

Agilyst Inc will operate as a fully-owned subsidiary of eClerx. Amarchand Mangaldas, which acted as the Indian legal advisor to eClerx Services, said in a statement. The transaction will be funded from eClerx's internal resources and there is no intention to raise any incremental capital. The deal value is confidential.

Avendus Capital served as the financial and strategic advisor to eClerx on the transaction while MAPE Advisory Group served in the same capacity for Agilyst.

Agilyst's management team will continue to manage day-to-day operations. The consideration for the acquisition will be all cash and includes a substantial earn out component based on Agilyst's future performance.

Founded in 2007 by Mr Mahesh Dhillon, Agilyst is a back-office operational and analytics company focused on the North American media industry.

Agilyst's services include critical error identification, customer experience analysis and end user support services. Agilyst has a low cost delivery base in a Tier-2 city. It employs approximately 1,000 people, most of them in India.

Founded in 2000, eClerx provides data analytics and customised process solutions to global enterprise clients. eClerx currently employs more than 4,000 people across five delivery centres in India It has sales and marketing offices located in London, New York, Austin, Dublin and Singapore.

On Friday, Shares of eClerx declined by Rs 6.25, or 0.85 per cent, to close at Rs 728.50 at BSE.