Vivek Wadhwah

Date: Thursday, December 19, 2002 1:56 PM

H-1B and JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER

www.ZaZona.com

Vivek Wadhwah has often made a number of comments to the press implying that
Americans are lazy and/or incompetant. He runs a company called Relativity
that has a marketing program/vapourware called Rescueware.

Rescueware has been reported in the press as:
o Solving the Y2K problem
o Converting mainframe code to the web.
o Converting mainframe code to being object-oriented.
o Presumably it also bakes bread.

Vivek's racist remarks are more than just irritating. In January of 2002 he
was part of a group that advised President Bush on the IT industry.

http://www.colosseumbuilders.com/Guild/h1b/library/myths/usn20000710relativity.htm
But Wadhwa was fed up at the time with the work he was getting from several
U.S. subcontractors: You presented them with a problem, he says, and they
would always say they could solve it-just to get the contract. In St.
Petersburg, he met Andrey Terekhov, the head of a Soviet software team who
is "the closest thing I've seen to an Einstein." When Wadhwa laid out his
problem, Terekhov and a couple of colleagues spent three hours considering
it and came back with a credible plan of action. "He was the first one who
said yes for the right reason," Wadhwa says.

http://news.indiainfo.com/spotlight/it/31itdown.html

Flexible Indian nature made IT bounceback easier’
By Ela Dutt
May 31, 2001 16:12 Hrs (IST)

New York: Indian American entrepreneurs in the US say that they are coping
better with the prevailing downturn of the information technology (IT)
economy than their American counterparts.

"The thing about Indians is that we know how to make do with less and we are
also very flexible," said Vivek Wadhwa, founder and Chief Executive Officer
(CEO) of the North Carolina-based Relativity Technologies, Inc.

"Americans are not used to that. We learn from our mistakes and quickly
develop new business plans," Wadhwa added.

While the downturn has hardly spared anyone, no established Indian American
company has bitten dust yet, said technology pioneer Kanwal Rekhi.

"It all goes back to our coming over to this country, butting heads, knowing
how hard it is to get the first job, knowing the discrimination. Compared to
that, the recession is baby stuff," said Wadhwa.

Rekhi said that the backlash is helping companies trim the flab and become
more cost efficient. "Many companies have been forced to go through the
process of trimming the overweight and if you are not able to do it you are
out, so the process to become healthier, leaner and meaner is on," said
Rekhi.

"I think that it is absolutely true that Indian American entrepreneurs are
different from others," contends Anirban Basu, senior economist and Director
of the Applied Regional Economic Studies Institute based in Towson,
Maryland.

"They are seldom extravagant with their operating expenditures. They will
provide as much infrastructure for themselves and for their workers as is
necessary and will focus cash on essential aspects of marketing, research,
and development."

Rekhi said that with dotcoms crashing right, left and centre, it is the best
time for a start-up. He elaborated, "First of all, everybody else does not
think it is a good time, so competition is not tough. One can hire people
easily, and salary demands are more reasonable. Property values and rentals
are down, and you can buy lots of cheap computers. So if you are a serious
entrepreneur, start now, and in a year the market will be higher."

Rekhi believes that India's IT industry suffered from ills similar to the
industry in the US but is hopeful of its eventual success. "In India, the IT
companies had done silly things also, salaries had ballooned, and things had
become unsustainable."

"Even there this downturn has had a salutary effect. The Indian IT industry
will eventually win with the cost and quality advantage."

India Abroad News Service

http://www.newsindia-times.com/2002/02/01/eco-it-top.html

Indian Americans, recognized for their prowess in the information technology
(IT) sector, are part of President George W. Bush’s bid to reach out to the
recession-hit business community around the United States.

On Jan. 17, a team led by U.S. Commerce Secretary Don Evans, which included
Northern Virginia Technology Council’s vice chairman Sudhakar Shenoy, met
with a small group of North Carolina’s IT heavyweights, including Vivek
Wadhwa, chief executive officer (CEO) of Relativity Technologies.

“It is more like a fact-finding mission to see things first hand — to see
how the country is being affected on the ground by the downturn,” said
Shenoy, founder and CEO of Information Management Consultants (IMC).

“Of course, we all know everyone is being affected, but they want to hear it
from the people. I think it is a great idea,” he added.

“It was interesting to see how focused the Bush administration is on the
technology sector and it was refreshing to see how open-minded these guys
were. They don’t look like government bureaucrats, but like people who have
been in the real world of business,” said Wadhwa.

The North Carolina-based legacy systems company, which, though not large, is
among the leaders in altering old systems to fit the rapidly-changing
technologies in the IT sphere.

Wadhwa and Shenoy were part of the smaller meeting the commerce secretary
held with some five IT leaders in the state. They also held a Town Hall
meeting attended by close to 150 entrepreneurs and others, where
Indian-American entrepreneur Chaco Verghese raised issues that may bedevil
trade with India.

Verghese is among those organizing the visit of Andhra Chief Minister N.
Chandrababu Naidu to U.S. in the near future.

Apart from Evans, Wadhwa and Shenoy, the smaller one-on-one meetings
included Hector Barreto, head of the Small Business Administration; Glenn
Hubbard, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors; and the Bush
administration’s technology czar, Philip Bond.

The hour-long meeting discussed issues including patents, which are killing
the industry and need to be eliminated.

“We talked about what the government needs to do to mend the economy,” said
Wadhwa, who emphasized at the meeting that 2001 had been “a horrible year”
for software companies, but they had come out of it alive. “I said that the
government cannot write better software for us, it cannot help market it,
but it can fix the economy. It needs to fix the tax structure, and put in
whatever stimulus is necessary,” Wadhwa told Indo-Asian News Service.

Shenoy agreed that business process patents, in particular, were very
harmful in the software field. Evans promised to look into it. The Bush
administration has been pressing the need for a fast-track legislation, and
Wadhwa noted that the meeting was also about trying to drum up support
within the business community for this.

“The group agreed that we needed freer trade. IT companies become
international very rapidly. And Evans said we need to be able to negotiate
trade deals better with companies in India and China,” Wadhwa said.

Evan’s team has been holding these kinds of meetings around the country
looking at various sectors. It recently held one in Chicago, addressing the
retail sectors, and one in Columbus, Ohio to highlight the manufacturing
sector’s issues. It will be holding one soon in Florida to focus on the
tourism industry.

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