TCS to buy Computational Research LabsIndia's top IT Services company said it's buying Computational Research Laboratories, a Pune based firm that's into high performance computing (HPC), and best known for Eka, India's first supercomputer built by a private sector firm, and at that time billed as the fourth most powerful in the world, for $34 million. The acquisition points to the direction other IT Services companies need to look at to ride the coming wave of emerging technologies. In its market predictions for HPC in 2012, IDC, a research firm made a reference to how closely knit HPC is to two other big trends: Big data and cloud. N Chandrasekaran in a  press statement touched upon it: “CRL’s core capabilities in designing and building high-performance environments, coupled with our strong focus on cloud-based, domain-rich industry platforms makes TCS very relevant to address the customers’ growing requirement of HPC applications". It must have been fairly simple for TCS to make this decision. CRL is a group company, a 100% subsidiary of Tata & Sons. TCS Vice Chairman S Ramadorai is the chairman of the board at CRL. When CRL came up with its proposal to build a supercomputer, Ramadorai, then TCS CEO was one of its biggest advocates. Oracle pays $2 million in settlement with SECA few months ago, it was Cadbury. Now, it's Oracle. WSJ reports that Oracle has reached a $2 million settlement with the American securities regulator SEC for a violation of foreign corrupt practices act. Here's an extract from SEC statement .

For example, according to the SEC's complaint, Oracle India secured a $3.9 million deal with India's Ministry of Information Technology and Communications in May 2006. As instructed by Oracle India's then-sales director, only $2.1 million was sent to Oracle to record as revenue on the transaction, and the distributor kept $151,000 for services rendered. Certain other Oracle India employees further instructed the distributor to park the remaining $1.7 million for "marketing development purposes." Two months later, one of those same Oracle India employees created and provided to the distributor eight invoices for payments to purported third-party vendors ranging from $110,000 to $396,000. In fact, none of these storefront-only third parties provided any services or were included on Oracle's approved vendor list. The third-party payments created the risk that the funds could be used for illicit purposes such as bribery or embezzlement.