The report cards of large software firms paint a grim picture of the year ahead, making analysts doubt Nasscom’s 11-14% growth forecast.

Their fears are not exaggerated, considering that the global economy has become much more challenging with the political crisis in the eurozone.

The top lines of IT companies will come under pressure if the crisis impacts the US in a big way. North America alone accounts for over half of the sector’s revenues. Revenues of the top four IT firms grew by a mere 1.2%, the slowest since the last quarter of fiscal 2009.

This was mainly due to a slowdown in spending by banking and financial services firms and telecom companies that account for a little less than half the sector’s revenues. A lot more caution has also set in after Cognizant lowered its revenue guidance for 2013.

Analysts say the fourth-quarter earnings are reminiscent of the financial crisis in 2008. However, Indian IT companies weathered the financial crisis that froze IT budgets in their traditional markets. So, there is no reason for panic, but companies need to revisit their business models to reduce risks.

Companies must look beyond traditional markets and traditional lines of business, that is, the US and financial services. They should innovate, integrate consulting, business intelligence and knowledge services.

They must also leverage the demand for domestic IT services that has started looking up, with large e-governance initiatives by the Centre and states.

A recent report by Gartner estimates the Indian IT infrastructure market at over $2.5 billion in 2013. Its principal research analyst says the gradual adoption of cloud computing will change the way Indian enterprises use IT, big ones as well as small ones.

Big IT players that have built up scale and have balance-sheet strength should go for acquisitions when organic growth is slowing down. Finally, India’s core IT strength is its high-quality manpower and lower cost of delivery.

So, the debate is not actually about offshoring but about IT spending. Once spending takes off, Indian IT firms would be back in business.

Source:http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/IT-companies-should-revisit-their-business-models-to-reduce-risks/articleshow/13145068.cms

Experts at the Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad (IIIT-A) have taken the technology of extracting summaries from a range of documents on the same topic a step further. Now, extracting the relevant tables and charts has also become possible, thereby helping the user in getting more varied and precise information.

According to Prof Ratna Sanyal of IIIT-A, who is also the coordinator for Universal Digital Library (UDL) and Technology Development in Indian Languages (TDIL), the technology to extract text summaries from various set of documents has already been available. “But under this technology, it was not possible to extract relevant tables and charts. There are many fields like economics and agriculture, where tables and charts often give lot of information in a precise manner. The new software that we have developed has overcome that problem,” she said.

Prof Sudip Sanyal, who was also part of the project, said, “We are living in an age of information explosion but a lot of this information is overlapping. With this software, the user will get the relevant tables and charts without having to pore through the entire range of documents.”

The team won the award for “Best Verifiability, Reproducibility, and Working Description award” for its paper “Extraction of Relevant Figures and Tables for Multi-document Summarisation” at the 13th International Conference on Intelligent Text Processing and Computational Linguistics held at IIT-Delhi in March. The award entailed the software to be verifiable and reproducible so that others can test it.

“We had already carried our set of experiments. But the experts there, who had come from countries like the United States, Australia, Germany, Mexico and other countries tested it on their own chosen domains like science documents, news stories and others,” said Prof Sudeep Sanyal. Three other students of IIIT-A — A Sadh, A Sahu and D Srivastava — were also part of the team that got the award.

Source:http://www.indianexpress.com/news/iiita-takes-summarisation-software-a-step-further/947517/