Adobe India head quits; Salesforce to buy data visualisation company

Adobe India and South Asia managing director Kulmeet Bawa has resigned to explore opportunities outside the graphic-software giant, The Hindu Business Line reported.

Bawa had been with Adobe since 2012 and led the two regions since June 2016. A former army officer, Bawa joined the corporate world in 2002. Before Adobe, he worked with Sun Microsystems and Microsoft.

Bawa had taken over Adobe India’s operations from Umang Bedi, who had left to join Facebook India.

Adobe India has another MD, Shanmugh Natarajan, who is is in charge of R&D and products. India is the second-largest base for the company outside North America.

Salesforce to buy Tableau for $15.7 billion

US-based Salesforce, which provides customer relationship management software, is buying data visualisation company Tableau for $15.7 billion to boost its analytics skills.

Salesforce said in a statement the acquisition will help it play an even greater role in driving digital transformation for companies around the world. It also help its customers tap into data across their entire business to make smarter decisions and accelerate innovation, Salesforce said.

This is Salesforce's biggest acquisition. It had previously bought US software maker MuleSoft in 2018 for $5.9 billion. The deal comes days after Google acquired  data analytics company Looker for $2.6 billion.

New supercomputers for weather forecasting

The Ministry of Earth Sciences will procure two supercomputers in a bid to make weather forecasting more efficient and accurate, The Hindu Business Line reported.

The combined computing power of the new equipment will be of 80 petaflops, or about eight times the current capacity of the systems, the report said, citing a top ministry official. The ministry is mulling on whether to buy two computers of 40 petaflops each or units with 60 and 20 petaflops, the report stated.

Earth sciences secretary M Rajeevan said that plans were in place to procure the two supercomputers at an approximate cost of Rs 1,500 crore.

The ministry has two supercomputers currently—one at the National Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecast at Noida and another at the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology in Pune. The new supercomputers will be placed at these two institutes.

TCS surpasses Reliance, IBM in market capitalisation

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) surpassed global tech heavyweight IBM in terms of market capitalisation on Monday. The Mumbai-based IT company also beat Reliance Industries to become India’s most valuable company.

TCS had a market value of Rs 8.47 lakh crore on Tuesday afternoon, up from Monday’s close of Rs 8.37 lakh crore ($120.5 billion). IBM’s market value on the NYSE on Monday was $119.8 billion (Rs 8.32 crore).  

Reliance Industries had a market value of Rs 8.45 lakh crore on Tuesday afternoon. It had overtaken TCS in May.

Nalanda-L&T spat over Mindtree reaches SEBI

The Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI) has received multiple complaints against Pulak Prasad, founder of investment firm Nalanda Capital, for allegedly provoking the minority investors of Mindtree to reject any offers from L&T, The Economic Times reported.

The complaints were filed by institutional investors of L&T, Mindtree and, in some cases, investors in both the companies, the report said.

According to the complaints, Prasad was effectively acting in tandem with the promoters of Mindtree in an alleged attempt to persuade public shareholders from selling any share to L&T.

The report also said that L&T had been making informal complaints to SEBI about Prasad, but the investors decided to file a formal complaint after L&T announced its open offer last Friday.

The complainants have asked SEBI to investigate if Prasad was acting in concert with Mindtree’s promoters and investors who were opposed to the takeover bid.