On Vacation - Sorry for the late post

Hi...All,

Sorry for the late post. I am on a month long vacation (whole of Dec) to India & will start posting once I am back.

A Very Happy New Year To You All.

Regards.

Business India names KV Kamath as Businessman of the Year

K.V. Kamath, Chairman and Managing Director of ICICI Bank, has been selected as Businessman of the Year 2005, by Business India.

He was selected for this coveted distinction, now in its 24th year, by an eminent jury, which met recently in Mumbai. As is the tradition at Business India, the jury was chaired by Business India's Businessman of the Year 2004, S. Ramadorai, CEO, Tata Consultancy Services Ltd.

He is credited with the transformation of ICICI from a development finance institution to a full-fledged commercial bank, now India's second largest after the State Bank of India. Kamath took charge as Managing Director and CEO of ICICI in 1996, from his respected predecessor N.Vaghul who remains non-executive chairman. Since then, he has worked relentlessly towards making the institution a savvy and tech-enabled financial powerhouse.

The mega reverse merger of ICICI Ltd with ICICI Bank in 2002 coupled with a host of strategic initiatives helped ICICI dramatically redraw its business boundaries.

Today ICICI has evolved into a well-recognized brand offering a slew of retail finance products backed by robust distribution channels. It has a network of 590 branches and over 2000 ATMs which cater to its 14 million customers. Additionally, it is building a global footprint with subsidiaries in the United Kingdom, Canada and Russia and branches in Singapore and Bahrain. With an asset base of Rs 1,89,218 crore ICICI continues to grow at a scorching pace.

Driven To Excel

The explosion in use of consumer electronic products, computers and digitization of data has lead to an increased need for storage. In India too, enterprises - both multinationals and others, have experienced a growth in their storage needs.

Yogesh Kamat, Country Manager and Simon Lee, Director - marketing APAC, Maxtor, spoke about advanced digital storage technology in the hard disc drive space, its market status and the company's new offerings for enterprises.

"As the world goes digital, the need to store data increases. Demand for computer storage is being driven not only by the conversion of manual data to electronic data, but also by new data that is being created as a result of new technologies such as the internet, enterprise and server demands, and an increase in the demand for PCs and notebook drives," said Kamat.

iting factors leading to an increased demand in the Indian hard disk drive market, Kamat said, "One obvious reason is that high-power and storage-heavy applications today demand additional storage space. Moreover the vast amount of non-magnetic data provides a large window of opportunity for the hard disk industry."

"Other factors include the decreasing cost per megabyte, the low installed base of these solutions and the transition in the amount and type of data that is to be stored and managed," he added.

Another important contributor lowering hard drive factory cost is a fall in the amount of components to build disk drive units of high capacity, he felt.

System integrators and IT managers are defining new areas of opportunities for high capacity disk drives. To help IT managers build and maintain their storage systems, Maxtor has recently come up with its new offering - which is specifically designed for use in multi-drive environments and storage arrays.

On the new introduction, Lee informed that the drive brings together a host of new advanced features and technology to help system IT managers build and maintain their storage systems. The features are designed to maximize performance and improve data integrity and ease of use in reference storage, data protection and cost-sensitive enterprise applications.

Also the procuct enables the drive to withstand higher rotational vibration from adjacent drives and also has accelerated error recovery that completes commands within 15 seconds, without reduced data integrity, making it ideal for RAID applications.

Lee informed that interoperability between Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and SATA makes the MaXLine family the ideal complement to its SAS drives, providing customers the broadest range of capacity and performance for their enterprise storage needs. The SAS interface allows SAS and SATA disk drives to be configured in the same enclosure, enabling customers to mix and match high-performance

With an emphasis on quality, technology, staying competitive and time to market, the company's products have made significant inroads in the Banking, Finance and Telecom segments.

Restaurant chain of Kamat won the best in the Indian category

Restaurants offering Indian cuisines, satisfying the taste buds of Arab and expatriate populations in Gulf countries, should improve their upscale ratings for its wider acceptance, renowned chef Sanjeev Kapoor has said.

Celebrity chef and television personality Sanjeev Kapoor of 'Khana Khazana' told entrepreneurs running Indian restaurants in Oman that besides good food they should consider ambience and service.

Kapoor, who was the chief guest at the Best Restaurant Awards 2005 in Muscat yesterday, lauded the efforts to recognise the best in the hospitality business.

The restaurant chain of Kamat won the best in the Indian category based on voting by customers during the poll for the award sponsored by the Ministry of Tourism in partnership with Oman Air and Hotel InterContinental.

One of its kind

It's Kindness Week from Dec 5 to 11, so go ahead and be nice!

Have you been kind to someone today? Because if you haven't there's still time — Kindness Week will be celebrated from December 5-11 and Kindness Day on December 8.

A small organisation spearheaded by Vile Parle resident Vasant Kalbag started the concept with the message —Kindness Unlimited.

"A week like this is celebrated internationally, we decided to celebrate it locally too. During the Kindness Week, we plan to hold various activities.

Apart from sending out posters and flyers, we also plan to hold an activity which we call 'Pass It On'. This will have us giving out cards to students in various schools and asking them to do three kind acts.

Of the three acts, one must be directed towards oneself, the second for the environment and the third for a stranger," says Kalbag. "Also each day has a specific quality to it like — forgiveness, tolerance, etc," he says.

Lopa Vyas, a trustee of the group says that a little kindness goes a long way. "Besides school children, we are also planning to take the initiative to various colleges and corporate houses," she says.

Yellow Pages to have bilingual index

GETIT Infomediary Ltd, the largest publisher of official telephone directories in the country, proposed to introduce bilingual index for its yellow Pages, a senior company executive said today.

Since there was no significant demand for the local language directories and Yellow Pages, the company would make the index bilingual, K Dwarakanath Kini, GETIT general manager, (operations) told reporters here.

Kini, who was here to release the 12th edition of Coimbatore GETIT Yellow Pages and Corporate Pages, said the company, publishing Yellow Pages in 28 cities, is bringing out five million directory copies annually, contributing to about 80 per cent of all official telephone directories in India.

Yellow Pages has over 20 million users and 72,000 advertisers, across the country, he said.

With presence in six districts in Tamil Nadu, besides Pondicherry, the company would expand its operations in Erode and Tiruchirappalli in a month's time, Kini said.

Jayakumar Ramadoss, vice-chairman, CII, Coimbatore, released the first copy of Coimbatore Yellow Pages, which has 1,880 categories and over 18,300 business listings. (Agencies)

Rajasthan to brew more beer

Beer-brewing capacity in Rajasthan is set to increase because of the change in the retailing policy initiated by the state government since April this year.

Starting this financial year, the Rajasthan government moved over to a licence-based retailing of alcoholic beverages against the earlier auction-based system.

Though confirmation from state government sources was unavailable, industry sources said tax revenue collected from the sale of beer in Rajastan had increased to Rs 117 crore during the first six months of this financial year against Rs 55 crore collected during the same period last year. Tax collection from the sale of IMFL has also increased to Rs 156 crore during the first six months.

While the tax revenues from sales of alcoholic beverages had doubled during the first half of this financial year, existing breweries in the state are looking at expanding capacity, apart from the two greenfiled projects taking shape there.