Microsoft is laying off 27 employees in Redmond and Bellevue, according to the Washington State Employment Security Department. The departmentreceived a Worker Adjustment and Retraining Notification (WARN) from the company about the layoffs, which are scheduled to take effectNov. 1.
The company said in January it was planning to eliminate 5,000 jobs over the next 18 months, while still creating 2,000 to 3,000 new jobs. After two rounds of cuts this year, Microsoft said it was mostly, but not completely, done with the layoffs.
Monday, September 7, 2009
Friday, September 4, 2009
new openings, TCS
TCS to hire 25, 000 globally this year
India’s largest IT employer, Tata Consultancy Services, will hire 25,000 people globally this year, 90% of which will be India. Though significantly large when compared to the current recruitment numbers, the figure is 10,000 short of the number of people TCS hired last year. Tanmoy Chakrabarty, vice-president and head of government industry solutions unit, confirmed the plan.
“We will be hiring 25,000 people this year, which means roughly 25 lakh sqft of work space required and, therefore, we need to grow outside the metros. Tier-II cities are our only focus for expansion in the country as the top rung are clogged and saturated,” Mr Chakrabarty said.
With this, the total number of employees globally would go up to more than 1.8 lakh, making it one of the largest private employers in India and putting it in the league of Tata Steel, which has an employee base of 2 lakh people.
With the Indian government planning to spend Rs 40,000 crore on IT services, TCS with an estimated 32% market share, is actively looking into this space for more business.
At present, 70% of the this segment’s revenue comes from India while the smaller share coming from the US, Latin America, Africa and South East Asian countries. However, the revenue contribution from Indian
government businesses to the total company revenue of $6 billion is less than 5%, which the company intends to increase to more than 10% in the next three years.
“We will be hiring 25,000 people this year, which means roughly 25 lakh sqft of work space required and, therefore, we need to grow outside the metros. Tier-II cities are our only focus for expansion in the country as the top rung are clogged and saturated,” Mr Chakrabarty said.
With this, the total number of employees globally would go up to more than 1.8 lakh, making it one of the largest private employers in India and putting it in the league of Tata Steel, which has an employee base of 2 lakh people.
With the Indian government planning to spend Rs 40,000 crore on IT services, TCS with an estimated 32% market share, is actively looking into this space for more business.
At present, 70% of the this segment’s revenue comes from India while the smaller share coming from the US, Latin America, Africa and South East Asian countries. However, the revenue contribution from Indian
government businesses to the total company revenue of $6 billion is less than 5%, which the company intends to increase to more than 10% in the next three years.
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Layoffs in USA, Recession
US private sector job loss shrinks in August
Job losses in the US private sector fell to their lowest monthly level in nearly a year, a report by a private employment service showed on Wednesday, signaling stabilization in the labor sector.
US employers cut 298,000 jobs in August, fewer than a revised 360,000 jobs lost in July, according to the ADP Employer Services report. The July decline was originally reported at 371,000 last month. The median of estimates from 31 economists surveyed by Reuters for the ADP report, jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, was for 250,000 private-sector jobs lost last month.
"Despite recent indications that overall economic activity is stabilizing, employment which usually trails overall economic activity, is still likely to decline for at least several more months, albeit at a diminishing rate," ADP said. ADP and Macroeconomic Advisers said the report is designed as a proxy of the government's monthly non-farm payrolls report.
The US Labor Department will release August payroll figures at 8:30 am EDT on Friday. Earlier, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc said planned layoffs at US firms fell in August to 76,456, the second smallest monthly total so far in 2009.
US employers cut 298,000 jobs in August, fewer than a revised 360,000 jobs lost in July, according to the ADP Employer Services report. The July decline was originally reported at 371,000 last month. The median of estimates from 31 economists surveyed by Reuters for the ADP report, jointly developed with Macroeconomic Advisers LLC, was for 250,000 private-sector jobs lost last month.
"Despite recent indications that overall economic activity is stabilizing, employment which usually trails overall economic activity, is still likely to decline for at least several more months, albeit at a diminishing rate," ADP said. ADP and Macroeconomic Advisers said the report is designed as a proxy of the government's monthly non-farm payrolls report.
The US Labor Department will release August payroll figures at 8:30 am EDT on Friday. Earlier, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc said planned layoffs at US firms fell in August to 76,456, the second smallest monthly total so far in 2009.
IT market
Microsoft India plans to train to 1 lakh teachers every year
Microsoft India is planning to train up to 1 lakh te achers every year under its primary teacher training programme – Shiksha. Till da te, it has trained more than 3.7 lakh government scho olteachers, about 11,000 pr incipals and 19 million students across the country.
Karan Bajwa, general manager, public sector – Microsoft India, said, “When we launched this initiative, we had set a target to train 80,000 teachers over a span of four years. But we have exceeded that target by over four times. Our revised aim is to train 80,000-1 lakh teachers every year.”
According to Bajwa, the education scenario in India faces numerous challenges such as the huge number of student base, lack of quality teachers as well as the problem of replicability, which results is varied modes of education across schools and colleges.
In addition to its primary level training, Microsoft has also come up with progra mmes aimed at training te achers and students in the secondary as well as higher education levels. One of th em is DreamSpark, which aims to provide students wi th access to the latest Microsoft developer and desi gner tools free of cost.
Also, as a direct inves tment to improve the empl oyability quotient of stud e nts, Microsoft India has tr a ined about 10,000 faculty members to teach advanced industry technologies, indirectly reaching more than 80 per cent of all engineering students.
Bajwa said the MS platform was the most preferred by educationists and students in schools compared with open source platforms since it helps in a saving of at least 17 per cent due to its low maintenance and low upgrade cost as well as easy availability.
Karan Bajwa, general manager, public sector – Microsoft India, said, “When we launched this initiative, we had set a target to train 80,000 teachers over a span of four years. But we have exceeded that target by over four times. Our revised aim is to train 80,000-1 lakh teachers every year.”
According to Bajwa, the education scenario in India faces numerous challenges such as the huge number of student base, lack of quality teachers as well as the problem of replicability, which results is varied modes of education across schools and colleges.
In addition to its primary level training, Microsoft has also come up with progra mmes aimed at training te achers and students in the secondary as well as higher education levels. One of th em is DreamSpark, which aims to provide students wi th access to the latest Microsoft developer and desi gner tools free of cost.
Also, as a direct inves tment to improve the empl oyability quotient of stud e nts, Microsoft India has tr a ined about 10,000 faculty members to teach advanced industry technologies, indirectly reaching more than 80 per cent of all engineering students.
Bajwa said the MS platform was the most preferred by educationists and students in schools compared with open source platforms since it helps in a saving of at least 17 per cent due to its low maintenance and low upgrade cost as well as easy availability.
Layoffs in USA
BAE Systems lays off 360 workers in Santa Clara, CA
For much of the recession, Silicon Valley's defense companies have been one of the bright spots in the employment picture. But recently, three companies have announced layoffs after the loss or cancellation of defense contracts. The latest, following Lockheed Martin and Rockwell Collins, is BAE systems.
The global company said Wednesday that it is laying off 360 employees out of about 1,800 at its Coleman Avenue operation in Santa Clara — 20 percent of the workforce. The reduction is due to the Army's cancellation of the Future Combat Systems Manned Ground Vehicle program, the company said.
BAE is an American subsidiary of the British global defense company BAE Systems. It makes the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in York, Pa. Its Coleman Avenue facility in Santa Clara is mainly used for the engineering of ground combat vehicles. FMC, which once made the Bradley there, became United Defense in 1994 and that company was purchased by BAE in 2005.
Rockwell Collins announced last week that it is closing its San Jose facility and laying off 600 people after cancellation of the F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft and the loss of a contract for displays on the F-35 Lightning II aircraft. Lockheed Martin said in June it would lay off several hundred people at its San Jose branch because of a change in scope of a classified program and the cancellation of part of a space-based, high speed military communications program.
The global company said Wednesday that it is laying off 360 employees out of about 1,800 at its Coleman Avenue operation in Santa Clara — 20 percent of the workforce. The reduction is due to the Army's cancellation of the Future Combat Systems Manned Ground Vehicle program, the company said.
BAE is an American subsidiary of the British global defense company BAE Systems. It makes the Bradley Fighting Vehicle in York, Pa. Its Coleman Avenue facility in Santa Clara is mainly used for the engineering of ground combat vehicles. FMC, which once made the Bradley there, became United Defense in 1994 and that company was purchased by BAE in 2005.
Rockwell Collins announced last week that it is closing its San Jose facility and laying off 600 people after cancellation of the F-22 Raptor fighter aircraft and the loss of a contract for displays on the F-35 Lightning II aircraft. Lockheed Martin said in June it would lay off several hundred people at its San Jose branch because of a change in scope of a classified program and the cancellation of part of a space-based, high speed military communications program.
IT market
Google apologises, explains 'big deal' Gmail outage
Google said Tuesday's widespread Gmail outage occurred when the company took some servers offline to perform routine maintenance, causing its remaining routers to become overloaded with traffic.
"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," wrote Ben Treynor, a Google vice president of engineering,on Tuesday in 2159 hrs (local time) post on the Gmail blog.
"Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologise to all of you; today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such," Treynor wrote.
Gmail, Google's popular free e-mail service, was inaccessible to many of its tens of millions of users for about 100 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, prompting widespread chatter on Twitter and other social networks.
Gmail's problems were a top trending topic on Twitter, with users trading updates and posting links to blogs such as Mashable, which published a post called, "5 Things to Do While Gmail is Down." (No. 1: "Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming 'Gmail is down!' and inquiring 'Is Gmail down?' ")
"When something like this used to happen, you would wonder if it was just you," Rachel Sklar, editor-at-large of Mediaite.com, told CNN. "Here, it was immediate that you knew what was going on because of Twitter, and you knew that everyone had the same problems."
People couldn't access Gmail via the Web interface on Tuesday because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server, Treynor explained. He said Google's engineers are compiling a list of things they intend to fix or improve as a result of their investigation into the outage.
"We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done; for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom," he wrote.
Gmail had 36.9 million US users in June, according to ComScore, a company that measures Internet use. Gmail remains the third-most popular Web-based e-mail service, after Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail.
"We know how many people rely on Gmail for personal and professional communications, and we take it very seriously when there's a problem with the service," wrote Ben Treynor, a Google vice president of engineering,on Tuesday in 2159 hrs (local time) post on the Gmail blog.
"Thus, right up front, I'd like to apologise to all of you; today's outage was a Big Deal, and we're treating it as such," Treynor wrote.
Gmail, Google's popular free e-mail service, was inaccessible to many of its tens of millions of users for about 100 minutes on Tuesday afternoon, prompting widespread chatter on Twitter and other social networks.
Gmail's problems were a top trending topic on Twitter, with users trading updates and posting links to blogs such as Mashable, which published a post called, "5 Things to Do While Gmail is Down." (No. 1: "Immediately flood Twitter with tweets alternately proclaiming 'Gmail is down!' and inquiring 'Is Gmail down?' ")
"When something like this used to happen, you would wonder if it was just you," Rachel Sklar, editor-at-large of Mediaite.com, told CNN. "Here, it was immediate that you knew what was going on because of Twitter, and you knew that everyone had the same problems."
People couldn't access Gmail via the Web interface on Tuesday because their requests couldn't be routed to a Gmail server, Treynor explained. He said Google's engineers are compiling a list of things they intend to fix or improve as a result of their investigation into the outage.
"We've turned our full attention to helping ensure this kind of event doesn't happen again. Some of the actions are straightforward and are already done; for example, increasing request router capacity well beyond peak demand to provide headroom," he wrote.
Gmail had 36.9 million US users in June, according to ComScore, a company that measures Internet use. Gmail remains the third-most popular Web-based e-mail service, after Yahoo! Mail and Microsoft's Hotmail.
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