It’s a wrap: News this week (July 13 – July 19)

There have been multiple developments this week on the tech front. From IT services companies’ quarterly results to Google I/O Connect highlights, this is the list of the most important developments for a quick catch-up:

Google I/O Connect 2024 highlights

Google held the second edition of its annual Google I/O Connect event in Bengaluru on Wednesday. Developer productivity and innovation, startups, artificial intelligence (AI), and Cloud were the overarching themes of the event. Google announced that it is partnering with the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) to support 10,000 Indian startups for AI innovation. Selected startups will be offered $350,000 in Google Cloud credits for investing in Google Cloud infrastructure and computational power required for AI.

Further, in a bid to attract more developers and help them with new avenues of innovation, Google introduced the availability of India-centric APIs. It includes Google Wallet APIs to simplify the integration of loyalty programs, tickets, and gift cards. For developers using Google Maps Platform, India-specific pricing is being introduced with up to 70% lower costs on most APIs and Google is also collaborating with ONDC, offering developers building for ONDC up to 90% off on select Google Maps Platform APIs.

Lastly, Google DeepMind announced that the Indic language initiative Project Vaani, initiated in partnership with Indian Institute of Science (IISc), is now being expanded. It will have 14,000 hours of speech data across 58 languages, collected from 80,000 speakers in 80 districts. The team also introduced IndicGenBench, a benchmark to evaluate the generation capabilities of LLMs in Indic languages.

Deals of the week

Sirius Digitech, a joint venture between Adani Group and Abu Dhabi’s International Holding Company (IHC), on Wednesday, announced the acquisition of a cloud platform company Coredge.io to expand its offerings for data centre operations through cloud and AI solutions. As per the agreement, Adani Group will buy a 77.5% stake in Coredge's parent Parserlabs India.

Secondly, Hinduja Tech, a subsidiary of Ashok Leyland is set to acquire Germany-based engineering firm, Tecosim Group, for €21 million (approximately ₹190 crore). This move is aimed at expanding Hinduja Tech's presence in the European market and enhancing its global capabilities in mobility engineering services. 

IT services firms announce quarterly results

This week, Infosys, Wipro, and LTIMindtree announced their quarterly results for Q1FY25.

Starting with Infosys, the Bengaluru-based firm reported a revenue growth of 3.6% year-on-year to ₹39,315 crore, up from ₹37,933 crore in the corresponding quarter of last year. Like the previous quarter, in this quarter too, Infosys has underscored its focus and commitment to generative AI. However, the company did not disclose specific figures. The company also reported a healthy growth in the banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) sector especially in the Americas region.

LTIMindtree, on the other hand, reported a 1.53% decline in net profit for the June quarter of FY25, compared to ₹1,152 crore in the same period last year. However, on a sequential basis, net profit rose by 3%. LTIMindtree’s top three industry verticals and largest geography performed well sequentially, CEO Debashis Chatterjee said. This in turn attributed to a measured uptick in IT spending for critical initiatives with clients balancing innovation and fiscal prudence.

Wipro had a gross revenue of ₹219.6 billion at a decrease of 1.1% sequentially and 3.8% on a yearly basis. Net profit for the quarter was at ₹30.0 billion, an increase of 5.9% QoQ and 4.6% from the year ago. CEO Srini Pallia who has now completed over three months in the new position, said that the company is bullish on the five-point strategy that he outlined during the last quarterly results, including building a robust big deals pipeline and leveraging generative AI. 

Windows’ Blue Screen of Death

Multiple sectors faced disruptions on Friday due to a technical failure involving Microsoft and cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike. The outage affected businesses not only in India but also in Australia, Germany, the United States, and the UK.

Reports indicate that millions of Microsoft Windows users encountered the "Blue Screen of Death" (BSOD), which can cause abrupt system restarts and potential loss of unsaved data.

Microsoft attributed the issue to a "configuration change" in its Azure backend, disrupting connections between storage and compute resources and impacting Microsoft 365 services.