Microsoft will help cloud customers fend off patent lawsuits and expand coverage of related litigation costs, seeking to distinguish its services from rivals in the fast-growing market for internet-based computing.

As more companies host their applications and services on Microsoft's Azure and other cloud providers, they are increasingly becoming the target of lawsuits from companies seeking to make money by claiming patent infringement.

State-run power giant NTPC on Wednesday registered a lower 7.5 per cent net profit at Rs 2,468.72 crore for the third quarter compared to a year ago due to higher fuel cost.

The company spent Rs 12,080.43 crore towards fuel in the quarter ended December 2016 as against Rs 10,580.28 crore in the same period in 2015.

Bengaluru: Indian technology outsourcing companies’ inability to find new customers even as US rival Accenture Plc is managing to do business with firms that dominate the consumer Internet, including Google, Facebook Inc. and Amazon.com Inc., again underlines the reason behind the dismal growth of home-grown companies.

Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber and Airbnb together accounted for at least $1 billion of Accenture’s $32.9 billion in revenue for the year ended August 2016 (Accenture follows a September-August fiscal), said an executive familiar with the development who declined to be named.

Mumbai: The Securities and Exchange Board of India (Sebi) is looking to increase its oversight of the boards of stock exchanges by having a greater say in the appointment of public interest directors, said three people aware of the matter, including an official with the regulator.

To this end, the Sebi board, when it meets on Saturday, will propose amendments to the Stock Exchange and Clearing Corporation (SECC) regulations pertaining to appointment and remuneration of these directors and also ownership and governance norms, these people said.

Mahindra group realty firm Mahindra Lifespace Developers today announced a partnership with State Bank of India (SBI) to set up a platform for providing quicker and convenient financing of home purchases. The establishment of a market-focused platform will provide information and bespoke home buying solutions for customers across India, the company said in a statement.

Mahindra Lifespace Developers Ltd has projects in Mumbai Metropolitan Region (Mumbai, Thane, Palghar, Alibaug and Boisar), Pune, Nagpur, Ahmedabad, Nashik, the National Capital Region (New Delhi, Gurgaon and Faridabad), Jaipur, Hyderabad, Bengaluru and Chennai.

India’s stock markets fell on Wednesday after the Reserve Bank of India kept key policy rates unchanged, with the repo rate at 6.25%, against expectations, and toughened the policy stance to ‘neutral’ from ‘accomodative’.

BSE Sensex was down 0.59% to 28,169.35 points, while NSE Nifty was down 0.39% at 8733.9 points, after remaining lacklustre for most of the trading session earlier ahead of the monetary policy review.

The stock of consumer goods and cigarettes maker ITC jumped as much as 5.6% intraday on Tuesday before ending with marginal gains after the government sold a 2% stake in the company held via Specified Undertaking of Unit Trust of India (SUUTI) in three block deals.

With this, the government holding in ITC through SUUTI has come down to 9.17%. The government’s stake sale comes at a time when ITC’s shares are trading at lifetime highs, having gained 14.6% since the beginning of 2017.

MUMBAI: Private sector lender HDFC Bank said that it has gone live on Bharat Bill Payment System (BBPS) for HDFC Bank’s Net Banking for customers.

BBPS is a centralized system created by National Payments Corporation of India involving banks and non-banks, which allows agents to access bill payments services in an interoperable manner. Customers can now pay their utility bills like electricity, gas and water bills instantly without registering the biller.

NEW DELHI: The Nifty50 came under pressure around its crucial resistance level of 8,800 on Tuesday, but the momentum is still on the upside and there was plenty of action in individual stocks.

While the S&P BSE Sensex slipped nearly 100 points on Tuesday, over 200 stocks on BSE and nearly 100 stocks on NSE generated buy signals on the technical charts based on ‘Stochastics Oscillators’.

NEW DELHI: Bharat Sanchar Nigam Ltd (BSNL) has awarded a contract worth Rs 1,000 crore to a Larsen & Toubroled consortium to set up more than 35,000 public Wi-Fi hotspots by March 2018. “We have decided to roll out phase through our own capex (capital expenditure) model to deploy 35,500 Wi-Fi hotspots across the country by March 2018,” BSNL Chairman Anupam Shrivastava told ET.

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