[photopress:tajmahal.jpg,full,alignleft]India’s Tata Consulting Services, (one of 96 Tata companies) says Microsoft will become a strategic investor in TCS China, along with Chinese partners. The company has software export bases located in Beijing and Tianjin.
Microsoft will hold a 10 percent stake. TCS will have 65 percent and the three Chinese partners will hold the remaining 25 percent.
Tata is an Indian company that bestrides its own world like a colossus. On Air India (started by Tata) I once sat next to a director who was responsible for taking over British companies and shaking them into profitability. I asked him the Tata secret and he said, ‘Fire all the middle management on the first day.’
The story is that Tata started off in the hotel business with the Taj Mahal in Bombay in 1903 because other hotels in India would not allow Indian guests. This seems, to say the least, dashed unlikely.
Nevertheless the founder, Jamsetji Tata, effectively started Indian modern industry in India. He was well traveled and, yes, constructed the Taj Mahal Hotel in Mumbai in 1903. It was, and is, an example of how a great hotel should be run.
The Indian Hotels Company is a Tata group company that runs the Taj brand of hotels and is now taking over the Ritz-Carton Hotel in Boston to which, it can be presumed, Indians will be welcomed.
TISCO, now Tata Steel, was established in 1907 to set up India’s first iron and steel plant in Jamshedpur. The plant started production in 1912. It produces steel at one of the lowest costs in the world. Since then the group has gone from strength to strength and is currently worth about $21.9 billion), the equivalent of about 2.8 per cent of India’s GDP.
This software venture is not a major Tata project but important nevertheless.
Source: IT Wire and research