Tech Roundup: Tata Says Hello US, Arista Gets Heavy Hitters, Sirius XM Debt, More

(MoneyWatch)  US looking to outsource for India-- Life has a strong sense of irony, and we're seeing it in full force as various U.S. states compete to get India's Tata Consultancy Services to set up a campus in their location. This isn't the first time an Indian company has put a facility in this country. For example, there was a funny situation where one company outsourced its call center to an Indian firm, which, in turn, put the center in Ohio because the workers sounded -- like Americans. What goes around comes around. Literally. [Source: BusinessWeek, Fortune]

Arista Networks recruits heavy hitters -- Recently Sun Microsystems heard that some big names behind MySQL, which is acquired not long ago, were on their way out the door. But they didn't close it behind them. Now Sun co-founder and chief architect Andreas von Bechtolsheim, who developed the company's first workstation and overhauled the product line a few years ago, is also leaving. His new port of call is Arista Networks (called Arastra until earlier this week), which reputedly has a blazingly fast network switch that costs a tenth of the equivalent Cisco offering. The networking company didn't stop there. Supposedly it has recruited as CEO Jayshree Ullalan, who until May headed Cisco's corporate switch business, and will be welcoming Stanford professor David Cheriton as chief scientist. Bechtolsheim and Cheriton have picked well before, being early, and now-wealthy, investors in Google. [Source: BNET Industry Technology Blog, New York Times]

AT&T hopes those iPhone users talk a lot-- AT&T was apparently a little surprised when it added up its costs of iPhone madness: $900 million paid to Apple. Like regularly happens in the cellular industry, a carrier takes a bath on subsidizing hardware and works to make it up in services over the long haul. About 40 percent of the iPhone subscribers are new to AT&T and churn has dropped a little. Call it the price of success. [Source: New York Times]

Motorola going green in Wi-Fi-- ABIresearch has ranked Motorola at the top of its new "Green Wi-Fi" vendor matrix ranking, based on the green features of many of its products. That leaves the question of whether anyone -- outside of the company involved -- could care less. Yes, the environment is important and, yes, consumers care, but with the incessant din of the green tract touts, who is going to hear much longer? Maybe they'll take some interest in the greenest hearing aids. [Source: ABIresearch]

--and all the Sirius XM investors at sea-- Early gossip mogul Walter Winchell used the catchphrase "Mr. and Mrs. American and all the ships at sea" in his radio commentaries. On the radio front, it's currently Sirius XM Radio investors who are at sea. Stock has gone from just under $4 in December to just over 30 cents recently. There's a billion dollars of debt that comes due next year in a market in which banks don't even like lending to each other. Maybe the company's catchphrase should be spelled in three letters: S, O, S.[Source: BusinessWeek]