It’s a wrap: News this week (April 13 — April 19)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From acquisitions of the week to the launch of Llama 3, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

Acquisitions of the week

ITC Infotech, the technology and services arm of ITC, announced the acquisition of Blazeclan Technologies. Subject to clauses, the deal is expected to close within the next eight weeks. Regulatory filing has shown that the all-cash deal is worth ₹485 crore. With the acquisition, ITC Infotech will ramp up its cloud capabilities and digital transformation offerings.

Next, on Friday, Aurionpro Solutions announced the acquisition of Mumbai-based Banking and insurance-focused PaaS startup, Arya.ai. The acquisition, valued at approximately $16.5 million, sees Aurionpro Solutions acquiring a majority stake (67%) in Arya.ai.

IT consulting and services company Happiest Minds Technologies has also executed a share purchase agreement to acquire 100% equity interest in Macmillan Learning India, subject to the terms and conditions set out in the agreement. 
Upon closing the transaction, Macmillan Learning India will become a wholly-owned subsidiary of the company. The cost of acquisition is ₹4.5 crore and it is expected to be completed by April 30, 2024.

In global acquisitions,  Commvault announced that it is Appranix, a leading provider of cloud cyber resilience technology.  Notable clients of Appranix include prominent brands such as Live Nation and Norwegian Cruise Line.

Llama 3 out

Meta launched the third generation of its large language model Llama 3. The model is trained on ‘two recently announced custom-built 24K GPU clusters on over 15T token of data — a training dataset 7x larger than that used for Llama 2, including 4x more code.’ The company said that Llama 3 demonstrates superior performance in language nuances, contextual understanding, and complex tasks like translation and dialogue generation. Meta’s AI Assistant is also now powered by Llama 3.

Microsoft’s investment in UAE-based G42

Microsoft has announced an investment of $1.5 billion in UAE-based AI company G42. As part of the partnership, Microsoft will take its AI technologies and skilling initiatives to UAE, and make Brad Smith, vice chair and president of Microsoft part of the G42 Board of Directors. The G42-Microsoft partnership will invest $1 billion in the development of developers in the UAE and broader region.

G42 will run its AI applications and services on Microsoft Azure. The two companies will also work together to bring advanced AI and digital infrastructure to countries in the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa.

Infosys, Wipro quarterly results

For the fourth quarter, Infosys posted a 30% year-over-year (YoY) growth in its consolidated net profit at ₹7,969 crore for the quarter that ended March 2024. The same was at ₹6,128 crore in the consecutive quarter last year. Revenue from operations in the fourth quarter stood at ₹37,923 crore, a 1% increase from ₹37,441 crore in the previous year's quarter. On the same day, Infosys announced that it acquired German-based in-tech for €450 million.

Wipro, which got Srini Pallia as the new CEO after the resignation of Thierry Delaporte, reported that its net profit fell by 8% to ₹2,835 crore for the fiscal fourth quarter, compared to the same period last year when it stood at ₹3,074 crore for the quarter ended on March 31, 2024. Revenue from operations decreased by 4% year-on-year to ₹22,208 crore, down from ₹23,190 crore in the same period last year.