Bangalore India

Wipro Limited has announced the completion of the cash tender offer by its indirect wholly-owned subsidiary, Roxy Acquisition Corp, for all outstanding shares of Infocrossing Inc. at a price of $18.70 per share in cash.

The depositary for the tender offer has advised Wipro that, as of the expiration of the tender offer, approximately 20,465,514 shares had been validly tendered and not withdrawn in the tender offer, and such tendered shares (together with all shares tendered pursuant to guaranteed delivery procedures) represent approximately 100 per cent of Infocrossing’s issued and outstanding shares.

All validly tendered shares have been accepted for payment in accordance with the terms of the tender offer, Wipro said in a release

Assuming the receipt of a sufficient number of shares tendered pursuant to guaranteed delivery procedures to ensure that Wipro holds at least 90 per cent of Infocrossing’s outstanding shares, Wipro intends to complete the acquisition of Infocrossing through a short-form merger as soon as practicable.

If necessary, Wipro intends to exercise its option under the merger agreement to purchase newly issued Infocrossing shares in order to ensure ownership of at least 90 per cent of the outstanding Infocrossing shares to complete the short-form merger. In the short-form merger, all outstanding Infocrossing shares not purchased in the tender offer will be converted into the right to receive $18.70 per share in cash.

"Profile of a successful tester is different from that of a successful developer and youngsters are not aware of the importance what a software tester has," said Anant R Koppar, chairman and CEO of KTwo Technologies Solutions delivering a keynote on the topic "Resourcing Challenges in Testing Industry".

Koppar was addressing around 150 software testers at the STEP Auto 2007 - International Conference on Software Test Engineering, Process and Automation organized by ISQT.

"Indian market for testing industry is estimated to be around USD 0.8 to 1 billion in 2007 and the latest survey says that we have a short fall of 15,000 testing professionals and another 25,000 software testers are required in the coming years," he said.

"There’s a need for clearing the misconception in the minds of young graduates who often opt for software development as a career instead of software testing. We have to create an awareness at the college-level itself with respect to opting software testing as a career,” he added.

"The objective of having such events is to propagate the message that testing is one of the major business verticals in the Indian market and is one of the major sources of revenue for India," Koppar said.

He also felt that opting a career as software tester is both creative and lucrative, and felt that the profile of software a tester speaks more than that of a software developer. “The demand for testers is high compared to developers.”

The three-day conference will have key speakers from well-known companies addressing different topics.

Acer India, has announced the launch of the its Aspire 4920 for the Indian market.

The new Acer Aspire 4920 from the Gemstone series is equipped with the Vista Home Premium OS and is geared for impressive on-the-go performance and home entertainment.

It uses the latest Intel Core2 Duo mobile processor T7300, supporting Mobile Intel GM965 Express chipset and Intel Wireless WiFi Link network solution for speed and performance, better graphics and signal and has great storage capacity with a 160 GB HDD. It is clubbed with the Acer Video Conference solution with the Acer CrystalEye webcam, its smart built-in angle enabling productive multi-way conferencing, an Acer said in a statement.

With a 14.1" WXGA Acer CrystalBrite TFT LCD display and system memory of 1GB RAM upgradeble up to 4GB, the Acer Aspire 4920 comes equipped with battery life up to three hours. The Acer ePowerManagement allows you to choose the power management setting to extend the battery time. Additionally, the latest version of Acer SignalUp and Acer GridVista technologies have been incorporated into this notebook for more reliable wireless connectivity as well as optimized feature driven display management.

S Rajendran, general manager – Sales and Marketing, Acer India, said, “The Acer Aspire 4920 Gemstone notebook is part of Acer’s initiative of providing customers with both the mobile computer experience and design excellence on the same platform at the best available price.”

It offers the latest technology like disk anti shock protection, Gigabit LAN, easy-to-use system utilities, like the Acer Empowering Technology features and Easy-launch buttons for WLAN, Bluetooth2.0, email, Internet and user-programming.

Acer Aspire 4920 notebook is currently available in the major cities and ia priced at Rs 54, 999

Seagate Technology, owners of Maxtor brand external storage drives, announced new hard drives and retail solutions that gives consumers and businesses more freedom to create, share and protect their digital content.

The company announced nine new products, which focus on data security and increased capacity to meet the worldwide demand for all types of digital content. The products include new Maxtor storage solutions that provide simple and automatic backup, encryption and a 'bare metal system restore' - featuring updated industrial designs.

Seagate also announced the first 1-terabyte (TB) hard drive with full disc encryption for strong data security. This includes the Cheetah hard drive, the highest-performance hard drive offering 28 per cent increase in sustained data transfer rates compar ed to previous generation drives.

Speaking on the launch, Rajesh Khurana, Country Manager (India & SAARC countries), Seagate Technology, said the storage industry was witnessing a paradigm shift with the consumer market rather than the enterprise market taking the center stage, "The home is now larger than the office in the amount of storage consumer and content continues to explode" said Khurana adding that Seagate new product portfolio will cater to the needs of storage hungry applications that consumers are using.

"Security, data protection, simplicity are integral to Seagate's products and solutions. From enterprise computing to consumer electronics, home entertainment, security and mobile applications, these products make it easy for users to keep their valuable data safe, secure and accessible," Khurana added.

Although one stop solution for an enterprise is much sought in the IT world, CIOs still have to wait for a long time before their dreams come true.

This is what IT heads came to know at the “Revenge of CIOs,” an event organized by CIOL as a part of its EnterpriseConnect Series, here on Wednesday.

A question posed by Sridhar S, Head- IT, Hutch, at the Q&A session, led to an interesting debate, and the venders said it would be ideal thing to think about an end-to-end solution for an enterprise as a whole.

“IT landscape is so complex in an enterprise that one stop solution to address the needs as a whole is difficult”, said Murali Krishna, Technical Head, HP Software.

“But through consolidation we can gain some grounds, and Business Service Management (BSM) is very much helpful,” he added.

While HP spoke about BSM, Riverbed, Datacraft and Wipro presented the case studies on WAN optimization, Intrusion detection and Business Continuity Planning respectively.

Pradeep Chakraborty, Executive Editor, CIOL moderated the discussion.