Cisco to accelerate existing programs

Cisco plans to accelerate its existing programs on enterprise collaboration, security compliances and workforce productivity in the IT Services vertical in the coming financial year. “Having reached the mark in creating new markets and delivering new solutions, we are looking at accelerating existing programs as our growth strategy in the coming year,” said Ajay Goel, the recently appointed senior vice president, IT services India and SAARC.

He opined that strong the India story continues despite rupee appreciation, slowdown in the US market and raising wage cost. Increased strategic outsourcing instances from telcos, shift towards IP voice adoption and large Indian ITO/BPO expanding outside of India are other current industry trends. “With the current industry trends, the company plans to grow much beyond the IT Services Industry’s growing pace.

The IT services industry is growing at the rate of 25 per cent in India,” said Goel. “It is the biggest vertical for Cisco and it derives 30 per cent of its revenue from this vertical.” “This year we want to completely focus on increasing the productivity of the customers from their operations,” he added.

According to a Nasscom report, the Indian IT services industry is estimated to reach $60 billion by 2010. Cisco has close to 52000 employees worldwide and India houses 3000 employees.

Samsung chip lines fully working

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. said its chip production lines hit by a power outage were fully operating by midday Saturday and expected total damage from the incident to be smaller than an earlier estimate.

The world's biggest maker of memory chips shut down six of its chip production lines on Friday after a power cut at its Kiheung plant, near Seoul.

The company now expects to lose 40 billion won ($43.4 million) from the outage.

U.S. research firm iSuppli Corp. said the incident could stretch the current NAND market shortage through to the first half of August, adding that the affected Samsung lines account for 35 percent of global NAND wafer output.

Samsung said all six lines were fully operating by 12:00 p.m. (0300 GMT), earlier than expected."

Samsung previously said full operation would begin no later than within two days and the damage would not exceed 50 billion won.

A problem at a switchboard at a transformer substation led to a power outage Friday afternoon, stopping six lines for memory and system logic chips at the plant.

The affected lines resumed production between early Saturday morning and midday after the power supply was restored late on Friday, Samsung said.

Some analysts had said the outage could wipe out as much as a month's worth of Samsung's total production of NAND flash memory chips, which are widely used for data storage in portable electronics.

Chips that were already in the fabrication process when the outage hit would have to be discarded while a ramp-up to the production level could take some time, they said.

"The Samsung outage comes at a critical juncture in the NAND market, when conditions are set to shift from shortage to oversupply," iSuppli said in a report dated Friday. "The major factor to watch now is how quickly Samsung actually recovers from this outage."

It would not have a major impact on Samsung's earnings given the fast recovery, iSuppli added. Shares in Samsung, South Korea's biggest stock with a market capitalisation of $94 billion, ended flat on Friday while its NAND rivals, including Japan's Toshiba Corp. and South Korea's Hynix Semiconductor Inc., rose on expectations of higher prices.

But shares of Apple Inc. fell overnight as the maker of popular iPod digital media player may be forced to pay more for NAND flash.

Samsung had a 44 percent share of the world's NAND flash market at the end of the first quarter, according to iSuppli.