With the Copenhagen summit on climate change in full swing, Highway 61 mulls on what can Music do to help spread the awarness & the cause of  Going Green.

A couple of months back, H61 had written a song for the Go Green campaign of Cognizant Technology Solutions.

Four of the band members work with Cognizant & form a sub-set band of H61 called Harmonic Recession (you can see it’s relation to the IT industry ! )

The Go Green song helped Cognizant spread a message of “individual’s responsibility towards the environment” across it’s Global offices.  The song was written & composed by Harmonic Recession (& effectively by Highway 61) and was recorded for Cognizant.

The song was played in all the offices of the company and the response was unbelivable!

The lyrics were much appretiated & the rock feel of the song was well received.

Normally, songs about environment change are on the softer & graver side. But the Go Green song is fresh, young, lively and at the same time has a valuable message.

Mr. PremKumar Pandurangam, who heads the Go Green campaign in Cognizant, said,  ”My teenage son never used to take interest in the Go Green activities I used to take up for the Company. But after he heard the song, he became curious & involved!”

Truly, Music has power to change the world!

You can listen to the Go Green song on YouTube here. Just click the pic below:

Highway 61 urges you to spread the message and contribute in whatever big or small way you can towards the cause.

If you are involved with such activities, feel free to leave a comment & share your ideas.

Keep Rocking

Go Green !

\m/

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renowned heavy-music producer Joe Bar resi (Melvins, High on Fire), which allowe them to concentrate on performance and made the recording process all the more inspired. Support The record also featured a guesl appearance by Five Horse Johnson blues harpist Eric Oblander.

“The title, which came from the song ‘The Devil St Me,’ was a result of my be¬coming much more cognizant of the long arc of rock and roll, which first happened during Robot Hive. Terms Of Service Also, I had some¬what of a nihilistic mood at the time, because of what was going on politi¬cally. I had recently moved very close to Washington, D.C., so every day I would see Marine One, Marine Two, and Air Force One fly over my house. Perhaps I was becoming more paranoid and suspi¬cious…but I wanted to deal with it in the most artistic way I could without writing a protest song, which I feel can become self-righteous. Support Tickets So I came up with a song like ‘Mister Shiny Cadillac’ I’ve always wanted to avoid those kinds of things but it just eventually crept into the music.”

strafe cousins frohi

THE WEST

(WEATHERMAKER, 2009)

The most enchanting festival of lights is here, and with it some semblance of free time. Many of the profs are on temporary vacation and hence we’ve had at least a couple of classes cut down here and there. The weekend is mine for the taking and I’m guessing this might be the last completely un-hectic weekend for some time to come – what with placements and stuff round the corner.

Since my last blog, I’ve had two of my friends come down to campus, one from XLRI, and the other from FMS. The XL dude was here for Varchasva – which is our annual sports-cum-cultural meet. The event was a smashing success – not just because IIM L pretty much thrashed every other team in every competition, but also because we had Dominos and other food stalls on campus . Some yummy cheese burst pizza only added to the awesome taste of victory!

My FMS friend was here for a strategy-based competition organized by GlaxoSmithKline, which her team won. Procter & Gamble held their own competitions recently. So did Mahindra & Mahindra. And Uniball. And Cognizant. And Johnson & Johnson. And so many others. This has quite been the season of contests and is a blessing in disguise for everyone and their uncle who’re looking to garner some “CV points” even if they sound like “157th runner-up in an knee scratching competition conducted by You-knee-ball (out of 158 participants)”. Of course there are some real studs on campus, who win 50k and Summer internship offers and what not and have bombs rather than bullets on their CVs. During my college days I used to read about such people in the newspapers, thinking that one day when I join an IIM, I’ll also be featured like that for coming up with some awesome ground-breaking glass-shattering solution, but all those years hence, here I am, still reading the same newspapers and still looking up to others here.

Speaking of newspapers, I haven’t really got the time to read one in some three thousand years. I do subscribe though, and I just toss the day’s paper onto a mile high stack of old papers. It’s the same with most of the junta here. Term 2 as I’d blogged about earlier, is supposed to be the killer one. So far, it’s certainly living up to its name. If you thought that we’d be given any sort of leeway by the profs considering its summer placement season, you’d be surprised (like I was) to learn that “placements” is the last possible excuse you should be using. This apparently is because pre-, during- and post-placement processes sometimes disrupt class/quiz schedules and profs get wild at this. They are of the opinion that students should come to the IIMs for knowledge and not placements. I cant even begin to explain this one!

A lot of foreign exchange students have come to campus from various parts of Europe. Apart from having some really wild parties, they’ve also added to the overall beauty quotient, something that was briefly upped when the famous XL ki kudiyan were here for Varchasva.

Oddly enough, this term when activities are already at a high, profs in almost every single subject expect everyone of us to come prepared after reading cases and solving questions and readying presentations. Some people manage to do all this once in a while, but most classes start with a show of around 60 hands (in a class of 63) of people who haven’t prepared a thing for class. Some profs have explicitly mentioned that they would be giving marks for Class Participation (usually out of 10). Needless to say, there are a group of 7-8 highly enthusiastic people who ask so many (often nonsensical) questions, it leaves you wondering whether these guys will write questions instead of answers even in their final exams. One particular prof’s CP marking methodology really takes the cake though. According to his rules, everyone in class starts off with a 9 on 10 in CP. For each class you bunk or miss 0.5 will be deducted. Apparently coming in late is worse than bunking (go figure!), so that will make your CP account poorer by 2 marks. Ask random questions and try to act oversmart and you’d get a -5. And if you’re caught sleeping, you get a big fat zero. Now that’s what I call CP – Cruciverbalistick Pomegranetization (I’m all for randomness).

We’ve got 7 subjects this time around – including a lot of part 2 subjects of some really nightmarish part 1 subjects. God save me. (Overall though, it’s a good mix of subjects I must say, and certainly more business focused than last term.)
1) Management Accounting 2 – (Shiver)
2) Economics 2 (Shudder)
3) Marketing Management 1 (The Da Vinci Globe)
4) Quantitative Management 2 (The Lost Symbols)
5) Operations Management 2 (Shudder-Globe-Shiver)
6) Financial Management 1 (Om-Namah-Shiver-aaya)
7) Designing Work Organizations (Who am I kidding?)

All this shivering and shuddering isn’t only because of the subjects, but also because of the cold, which suddenly descended a couple of days ago. After around 12 am, the entire football field is enveloped in a low-lying blanket of fog – its definitely a sight to see!

By the way, a nice thing happened a couple of weeks ago. A business executive from the e-learning website www.testfunda.com got in touch with me and asked me to blog for them as they liked my writing style. Although I dont think I’m a talented writer or anything, I’m certainly happy to help aspirants who might just need the “If he can do it, then so can I” kind of motivation. You can read the interview here, and the blogs here (which for now are just mirrors of this blog).

Celebrations and Diwali puja will happen tomorrow on campus – I’m hoping we get some Diwali special delicacies too. Happy Diwali to one and all – Play safe!

UBS, Switzerland’s biggest bank by assets, has sold its Indian back-office captive to multinational services firm Cognizant Technology Solutions for around $75 million along with a five-year outsourcing contract worth up to $442 million.

The acquisition will strengthen Cognizant’s BPO practice and also help it expand its relations with UBS, an existing client. “We are among the top five companies providing technological services for the financial services sector. This acquisition helps us consolidate our position, expand our service offering and take our solutions to a wider geography. We have significant revenues coming from the US whereas the USB ISC (India Service Centre) has more than half its revenues coming from APAC and Europe regions. So, this helps in diversifying our revenue base,” Cognizant vice-chairman Lakshmi Narayanan told ET NOW on Thursday.

A report by Deutsche Bank said the deal was reasonably priced, through which Cognizant would acquire highly skilled employees. The report further said, “It highlights Cognizant’s ability to expand with existing clients and captives tend to have margin leverage potential related to improved span of control opportunities.” ET had reported last month that UBS was in discussions with Cognizant for a potential sale of its UBS India Service Centre and was exploring to bundle an outsourcing contract with the transaction. The bank had held discussions with Infosys and Wipro who count UBS as their customer. Divesting non-core captive operations is a strategy adopted by banks such as Citigroup and UBS for focusing better on their core operations and also gain better outsourcing rates by bundling such transactions with a multi-year contract. An upfront payment also helps them unlock value from non-core assets.

Citibank sold its Indian back office business to TCS for around $505 million in October last year and Citi Technology Services for around $127 million to Wipro in December last year. Both these transactions came with assured outsourcing business of around $3 billion together for these vendors. While around 2,000 staff of UBS’ India captive unit in Hyderabad will move to Cognizant as part of this transaction, the bank’s captive operations in Poland has not been included in this deal, a Cognizant spokesman added. The $442-million outsourcing contract bundled with this deal includes work beyond back office and knowledge process outsourcing and could involve application development and IT hardware management as well. “It remains to be seen if UBS’ other existing vendors Wipro and Infosys will see any negative impact on their revenues from the bank,” said an outsourcing expert familiar with the transaction.

“Ideally, UBS would like to consolidate its work as part of this transaction,” he added. For Cognizant, a deep focus on the financial services vertical has been fetching rich dividends compared with TCS, Infosys and Wipro. On a run rate basis in a difficult environment, Cognizant is adding more revenues per quarter in BFSI than its larger peers, according to a recent Edelweiss report.

“Over the past three quarters (since October 08, right up to and including June 2009), Cognizant cumulatively added $56 mn of revenues in BFSI compared to the preceding three quarters (for Infosys and TCS, the corresponding numbers were in the negative zone at $88 mn and $43 mn respectively),” Edelweiss analysts Viju George, Kunal Sangoi and Pratik Gandhi said in their September report.

Cognizant Tech’s (CTSH) estimates continue to climb, well after its latest earnings surprise.

Company Description

Cognizant provides software development and maintenance for companies transitioning into e-business. The company utilizes both on-site consultants and outsourced project members.

On Aug 4 Cognizant reported second-quarter results that included a 13% revenue growth. The company brought in $777 million. Coupled with an operating margin of 20.8%, above the company’s target, Cognizant earned just over $141 million.

Earnings were 36% higher, year-over-year, and yielded EPS of 47 cents. This was 12 cents higher than last year and beat the Zacks consensus estimate by a dime. The company has beaten estimates in 3 of the past 4 quarters.

Estimates Still Climbing

In the past month estimates saw 3 and 4 upward revisions for this year and next year, respectively. The Consensus Estimates for 2009 is now $1.67, up from $1.53 since the report. Forecasts for next year are averaging $1.82, up from $1.70.

Given these estimates the projected year-over-year growth rates are 16% and 9%.

Industry Comparison

Cognizant is at the top of the software industry, beating out 101 other companies. The company easily tops the industry norm for net profit margin with 16% compared to 3.3%. Its ROE is an impressive 23.5%, about 3 times the 8% that its peers average.

Once IT spending begins again , companies in need of tech workers will likely turn first to consultants and outsourcing companies before they take on full-time staff. Whether this decision contributes to what’s often called a “jobless recovery” will depend on where the work is going — onshore or offshore.

This view is gleaned from surveys and analysts trying to understand what’s next for tech job market. In the hunt for clues about the future, some of the best evidence about what’s head may be with companies yhat are already doing well. Take Cognizant Technology Solutions Corp., for instance.

It’s been a miserable year for many IT companies, but Cognizant, in its most recent quarter, reported a revenue gain of 13% to $776.6 million, boon growth for most companies. One reason for this can be explained by one of its customers, Emmaus, Penn.-based Rodale Inc., publisher of Prevention, Men’s Health, and Women’s Health magazines.

By hiring Cognizant, Rodale CIO Ken Citron was able to cut costs for infrastructure, hardware, help desks and networks by 15% on annual basis. The IT savings was achieved, in part, because Cognizant remotely manages some of the systems offshore.

About three quarters of Rodale’s IT infrastructure employees became Cognizant employees, and the remaining either received severance or moved into some other role . While Rodale didn’t want to disclose the number of employees affected by the change, Citron said the change is allowing the compay to focus on its core needs, especially its customer-facing applications and services.

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