Infosys plans for $750 million acquisition of Thomson Reuters in BPO space

December 4th, 2011

Infosys looking forward to achieve another milestone; the Indian IT giant Infosys is planning to acquire Thomson Reuters.

According to the official authorities of Infosys the deal will be for $700-750 million which is also expected to be one of the biggest acquisitions by an Indian company in the year. It was Infosys which took the initiative step and approached Thomson Reuters first through an email.

Thomson Reuters is a global leader which provides innovative solutions to many companies. Thomson Reuters is basically into analytics solutions and has extended their service to satisfied customers almost everywhere across the globe which also includes government agencies. Moreover the company also deals with health care business.

Even though Infosys has made acquisitions in the past, this is the first time they are into such a huge deal. Earlier the company has acquired Citicorp for 115.13 million US dollars which was resulted as a very good deal for the company. Moreover in the year 2008 and 2009 Infosys went for small deals and acquisitions which ended up in rapid growth for the company in the long run.

Chairman of Infosys, K V Kamath told that Infosys has grown their root deep into banking services. We are a company with excellent experience in banking services and financial & accounting services. It is time for the company to grow business beyond the boundaries of banking and financial services. The latest acquisition strategy is an initial step to diversify the business. We are also planning to adopt more acquisition strategies in the near future to make the company stronger in the overseas. The well skilled workforce and experienced employees with Thomson Reuters is an additional asset for Infosys to achieve the objectives and flourish the business.

Health care business has huge potential and large scope for business. Companies such as cognizant have generated huge revenue in the past years from this particular sector. The revenue generated by cognizant in the health care business is calculated to be above 30 % of the total revenue in the current year. Contribution made by health care related business to TCS is also remarkable. Infosys is looking forwards to follow the path of other leading IT and BPO players such as TCS and Cognizant.

As far as Thomson Reuters is concerned it is not just the health care business they are about to sell. The company is also planning to sell other two divisions which include broker dealers and hedge funds. It is expected that the latest acquisition will make huge contribution to the revenue generation by Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) division of Infosys.

Google+ to get Multiple Admin Feature this Month

December 4th, 2011

Google has finally given us a rough estimate of when we can start seeing a multiple admin feature for Google+ brand pages.

Yesterday Kristoffer Sorensen, a Marketing Strategist at Google, held a little Q&A session from the Google+ Your Business profile where he answered a handful of questions we’ve all been asking.

The main answer we were looking for was how long it would take Google to bring in multiple admin accounts for business pages on the social platform. While Sorensen couldn’t give away too many details, he did tell us that we could expect the feature before 2012 (“coming soon, before 2012!”)

With new YouTube analytics features being introduced this week, it was also expected that the Q&A would give a few solid details on analytics for Google+, however, Sorensen could only tell us that it was “coming soon”, no “2012” added to that one though.

Here’s how Sorensen summarised the topics that were covered yesterday:

Multi-admin capability? Coming soon, before 2012!
Analytics? Coming soon!
Ability to schedule posts or auto-post? This is something we’re talking about but there is currently no way to do this.
Hangouts on Air? These are only available to a limited group of testers identified by our team, but we’re determining whether this feature will become more widely available.
Page management on mobile device? Enabling this functionality is a priority for our team and something we’re working on!
Events integration? This is something our team is actively thinking about – we’d love to hear your thoughts on how you’d like this to work.

To see the full discussion you can visit the Google+ Your Business page here: https://plus.google.com/u/0/115200251016762857369/posts/SwZr7iGMAZ7

(We were also looking for some info on friendly URL’s but unfortunately there was no news on that one.)

Google to Compete with Amazon for Online Shopping

December 3rd, 2011

Amazon (AMZN) may soon have a new competitor on its hands in the form of search giant Google (GOOG). Google soon plans to allow visitors to buy products online and pay Google a fee which will offer 24 hour delivery.

The reason Google.com is keen to become more involved with online shopping is most likely down to an estimated 40% of Google’s current revenue coming from the retail sector. Google has touched on similar projects in the past with Froogle, Checkout, Google Product Search but in June 2011 recruited Stephanie Tilinius from Ebay to re-invent Googles online shopping avenues.

As a similar service to Amazon’s Prime service which locks users into Amazon.com , it  would result in a large section of product searches that are no longer done through Google which would lose revenue. After all most users only look for a product on Google now if they cannot find it on Amazon so they have created a lock in as the worlds best product search engine. That’s 40% Google cannot consider losing out on.