Employee First - HCL Technologies

The first such articulation in the IT industry—is at the core of our efforts to provide our employees a work environment and culture they take pride in. HCL is committed to provide all its employees the same experience that we promise to external customers—by being proactive and responsive, and through technology and process innovation.

Our HR initiatives strive to provide excellent human resources leadership and expertise to the organization, as also to attract and retain a workforce that is diverse, inclusive and committed to creating quality customer service. At the core of our Employee First philosophy is the concept of talent transformation—recognition and enablement of competencies, as opposed to roles in skilling employees in necessary technical, business and behavioral areas.

The five-fold path [Support, Knowledge, Recognition, Empowerment, and Transformation]. Is about empowering and engaging employees in a unique environment of creating trust through transparency and an inverted organizational structure. It gives employees whatever they need to succeed through various unique initiatives like Career Power, Employee First Councils and ilearn that nurture leaders and give employees the freedom to chart their career path.

In accordance with these tenets, many initiatives have been introduced at HCL to keep the employee first culture alive:

• A smart service desk, where employees can raise a ticket on an internal service provider that is SLA-bound. Functions like admin, finance and training have been enabled to serve the employee
• A CEO Connect through U & I, where the CEO is personally available to every employee in the organization. He tours every location and holds multiple interactive sessions with discussions and Q&As. This is complemented by a fully functional President’s blog
• An Employee First Governing Council, comprising Function Heads who hold Town Hall Meetings and collectively address all employee questions and issues
• 360 Feedback , where employees have the option to rate their managers and the feedback and rating is made public across the organization
• Career Power – We are not prescriptive in the choices employees make. Based on the informed choices that they make, individual career development plans are drawn up which are supported by the company. In an attempt to build this culture in the way we function, HCL has a comprehensive online career portal.

Talent transformationis designed to build behavior based competencies in individuals the world is now not just talking about HCL’s Employee First but also adapting to the model. Our thought leadership through initiatives like Inverting the pyramid where top management is answerable to people below (through Employee Connect portals, Ticket system, etc.); Destroying the office of the CEO – moving away from Center of Command to Group dynamics which nurtures leadership at grass roots; and Open 360 appraisals – where employees can provide feedback on any manager and the results are published in the open in a Portal, is beginning to see the light.

Services - HCL Technologies

HCL provides services across the following business lines -

• Engineering and R&D Services (ERS) - offering services in Hardware, Embedded, Mechanical and Software Product Engineering.
• Enterprise Transformation Services (ETS) - offering services in the areas of Independent Verification and Validation, Process Transformation, Data Management, Integration Services, Architecture Services, Disruptive Technology Services, IT Strategy, and Change Management.
• Business Processing Outsourcing (BPO) - division of HCL Technologies Limited has delivery offices across India, UK and USA
• Enterprise Application Services (EAS) - focuses on areas like in ERP, SCM, CRM, HCM, EPM, BI and Middleware. This group is now part of HCL AXON, subsidiary of HCL Technologies, formed after HCL Tech acquired Axon Group plc. for £440m cash offer in 2008.

About - HCL Technolgies

HCL is a global technology enterprise and a name to reckon with, in the industry. The passion of its founder and the entrepreneurial zeal of its employees have made its Information Technology and Software services arm, HCL Technologies [HCLT], a leading provider of business transformation, enterprise & custom applications, infrastructure management, business process outsourcing, and engineering services. Leveraging its extensive global offshore infrastructure and network of offices in 26 countries, HCLT delivers solutions across a wide range of verticals such as financial services, manufacturing, consumer services, public services and healthcare. HCL takes pride in its philosophy of ‘Employees First, Customers Second’ which empowers its 83,076 transformers to create real value for over 500 forward looking customers, seeking to shift paradigms and transform the way business is being done.

When HCLT commenced its transformation journey based on the foundation of ‘Employees First’ in 2005, disruptive technologies and new business models were beginning to impact the industry. HCLT had already anticipated the shift from ‘employer driven’ to ‘employee driven’ market conditions. Today, the impact of this unique management philosophy is being recognized and praised worldwide for empowering employees to become the drivers of growth. HCL has also become one of the fastest-growing IT services companies in the world.

“Employees First, Customers Second – Turning Conventional Management Upside Down” – a business book authored by the CEO Vineet Nayar encapsulating HCLT’s transformation journey from 2005, was launched in June 2010. Already a massive bestseller in key markets, the book has won accolades from leading management thinkers and CEOs such as Tom Peters, Gary Hamel, Tony Hsieh, Judy McGrath, and Victor Fung. Covered by leading media groups around the world, the book has already been translated into five languages – French, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, and Chinese, and over 50 Employees First, Customers Second [EFCS] workshops for clients and partner organizations have been conducted in the USA, UK and APAC regions.

3-D Without the Glasses

A new type of display from Microsoft produces multiple images and tracks the viewers' eyes.

Today's 3-D movies are far more spectacular than the first ones screened more than 50 years ago, but watching them--both at the movie theater and at home--still means donning a pair of dorky, oversized glasses. Now a new type of lens developed by researchers in Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group could help make glasses-free 3-D displays more practical.

The new lens, which is thinner at the bottom than at the top, steers light to a viewer's eyes by switching light-emitting diodes along its bottom edge on and off. Combined with a backlight, this makes it possible to show different images to different viewers, or to create a stereoscopic (3-D) effect by presenting different images to a person's left and right eye. "What's so special about this lens is that it allows us to control where the light goes," saysSteven Bathiche, director of Microsoft's Applied Sciences Group.

3-D technology has seen a renaissance recently. Thanks to the success of movies likeCoraline, Up, and Avatar, Hollywood is spending more money than ever to give audiences a stereoscopic experience. And electronics manufacturers are racing to replicate the 3-D theater experience in the home. The market for 3-D-capable televisions is expected to growfrom 2.5 million sets shipped in 2010 to 27 million in 2013, according to the research firmDisplaySearch. However, the glasses required to watch 3-D video is a turnoff for many would-be early adopters.

At the Society for Information Display International Symposium in Seattle last month, companies showed off 3-D displays that don't require glasses. These sets often use lenticular lenses, which are integrated into the display and project different images in two fixed directions. But a viewer needs to stand in designated zones to experience a 3-D effect; otherwise the screen becomes an out-of-focus blur.

Microsoft's prototype display can deliver 3-D video to two viewers at the same time (one video for each individual eye), regardless of where they are positioned. It can also shows ordinary 2-D video to up to four people simultaneously (one video for each person). The 3-D display uses a camera to track viewers so that it knows where to steer light toward them. The lens is also thin, which means it could be incorporated into a standard liquid crystal display, says Bathiche.

The idea of tracking viewers to make the glasses-free 3-D easier has been around for decades. One of the big challenges, explainsKen Perlin, professor of computer science at New York University, is that the computers used for eye-tracking were too expensive and too slow to make such a system practical. As computers have become faster and cheaper, viewer-tracking systems have gotten up to speed; other components, particularly those needed to target viewers, have remained bulky and impractical to manufacture on a large scale.

IBM Acquires Cloud Computing Integration Company Cast Iron Systems

IBM has acquired cloud computing startup Cast Iron Systems to “broaden the delivery of cloud computing services for clients.” Cast Iron Systems provides a SaaS cloud integration software. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
Cast Iron Systems’ software-as-a-service provides cloud computing integration appliances for large and midsize companies, including Allianz, NEC, Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Dow Jones, Schumacher Group, ShoreTel, Sports Authority, Time Warner, Westmont University and others. The company has capitalized on the growing trend of companies running key business applications through software as a service models and cloud deployments.
Clearly, the acquisition represents IBM’s strong push to the cloud, with IBM expecting the global cloud computing market to grow to $126 billion by 2012.Cast Iron’s offerings will help IBM customers integrate their cloud-based applications and on-premise systems and advance IBM’s capabilities for a hybrid cloud model.
This year, IBM bought up health care data management firm Initiate and Intelliden. Last year, IBM acquired six companies, including Guardium, RedPill Solutions, SPSS, Ounce Labs, Exeros and Outblaze.

Google Android on Apple iPhone

Android ported on iPhone

A hacker who goes by the name of David Wang has just done something to prove that platforms of competing smartfone companies can indeed be compromised. 

David posted a video on the 'Linux on the iPhone' blog demonstrating how Google Android can be booted onto a first-generation iPhone. He suggested that Android could be ported to all versions of Apple’s smartphones, a move that seemed greeted positively by many of the blog’s supporters.

In his blog, David also said, "At some point this summer, Apple will release the iPhone OS 4, which will include features such as multitasking and an 'iAd' mobile applicationadvertising platform. Lack of multitasking has been one of the traditional complaints lodged against the iPhone, and used as a selling point for smartphones running the multitasking-capable Google Android."

CSS announces suite of cloud tools

CSS Corp, a provider of IT operations optimization, announced a suite of tools and services to help enterprises, independent software vendors (ISV) and services providers to levearage public, public and hybrid cloud infrastructure.


The CSS suite of Cloud management tools include:
CSS CloudSmart: CloudSmart is an ANT-based automated deployment tool to automate complex enterprise application deployment process on the cloud. ANT tasks and run book automation for deployment on Amazon Web Services (AWS) Eclastic Compute Cloud EC2 are part of the feature set.


CSS Cloud Buddy Enterprise: Cloud Buddy Enterprise is a tool that helps organizations take advantage of the capabilities of AWS Simple Storage Service (S3) storage.


Also Read: Storage-as-a-service: Cloud Storage 

It features an Enterprise Administrator console that manages access privileges/storage limits at the group and user levels. Cloud Buddy Enterprise has multi-mode access such as web, WebDAV, web services and Native Client for Windows to the AWS S3 storage.

It also has an integrated indexing engine, to index all the ?les that get stored on the AWS S3.


CSS CloudBuddy Analytics: Cloud Buddy Analytics is an Open Source web based tool to generate reports about S3 Bucket access. It has an intuitive interface for a rich user experience.

Cloud Buddy Analytics takes care of enabling logging, fetching logs and generating reports and can be con?gured for Multiple S3 Accounts, and could be made available on the network as a multi-user tool.


CSS also announced availability of its cloud enablement services, which include:
· Cloud design, orchestration, automation and testing services
·Cloud monitoring and management services
· Cloud support services

“Nick Sharma, CEO of CSS Corp. “Our cloud computing suite of tools and services are helping our customers truly benefit from the private, public and hybrid infrastructure.”