Can The World Do Without India, The Answer Is a Resounding NO!
posted in Outsourcing News and Top Outsourcing deals, Nearshore Outsourcing |Source: Business Standard
Having established itself as a global BPO hub and aiming to become a KPO hub, from the look of things, India is ensuring technology research is the next big thing.
Which is why, there is a big smile on Srini Koppolu, President and Managing Director of Microsoft India Development Centre. He is absolutely delighted that Wal-Mart is urging its top 100-suppliers to use a Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) microchip, which is becoming increasingly important for product security and identification in the retail industry.
Razor blades giant Gillette has also adopted and deployed RFID chips to stop shoplifters from stealing its blades. So successful is the technology that: “Even Benetton is planning to weave RFID chips into its clothing products, to track them worldwide,” Koppolu says excitedly.
Admittedly, a good deal for manufacturers and retailers, Koppolu is delighted, because he is one of the strongest expounders of RFID technology. And, the Microsoft veteran waxes lyrical, responding animatedly when one gets him talking about work the India centre is doing on RFID.
“What if merchandise could talk? What if a shirt or hammer or CD player communicated automatically and not just when its barcode is scanned? Imagine every item talking about itself as soon as it pulls into the warehouse.”
You may well ask: “Products talking?”, and whether Koppolu is ‘Crazy kiya re?’ No, he isn’t, far from it! Just very innovative and having kick-started the RFID project from Microsoft India Development Centre, he is keen to inform everyone that there is more to come. “The best part will be when products pass their expiry date and start to scream, ‘I am too old, replace me’.”
However, Koppolu wasn’t always an IT innovator and like many another IT professional aspirant, he went to USA to do his Masters in Computer Science for ‘purely better job opportunities’.
Before the first semester was up, he was writing line after line of software code and spent 10-years in Redmond, before returning to India in August 1998 like a number of other IT professionals. “Not because, I was homesick but because, I was convinced that India was ready for a global research outfit”.
Shifting roles from being a Microsoft Technical Manager to an Organisational Leader, his vision has seen, the sprawling 42-acre Microsoft India Development Centre, become a key part of Microsoft’s future strategic direction.
Technology research is fast becoming the next frontier for India to explore, with even Hewlett-Packard (HP), the technology giant acknowledging and estimating that innovative R&D (Research & Development) has an addressable market of nearly $1.1-trillion. This is why it invests nearly $3.5-billion annually on R&D, and a major portion of it is outsourced to HP labs in India.
Analysing why India is becoming so important in the field of innovative technology research, Ajay Gupta, Lab Director at HP reasons: “The R&D emphasis is on countries like India, Russia, and China, because the next billion customers will be from these BRIC countries.”
For those who are not aware what BRIC stands for, it is a term derived from the first letters of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and which Goldman Sachs investment bank used in a 2003 paper, wherein it argued that the economies of the BRICs are developing rapidly and would by 2050 eclipse most of the current richest countries of the world.
Confident of Indian technological innovation, HP Labs in India have staked out areas like mobile and personal computing, networking the paper world, and sponsored services. Their confidence is not misplaced, as Dr. S. Ramani, Director for Science & Technology, and his team have developed 2D (two-dimensional) barcodes for the prevention of data forgery or printed text manipulation.
Thereby, before digital signatures can be printed on paper documents, the document has to be made machine-readable with the help of 2D barcodes, where the data and a digital signature are encoded.
According to Ramani, potential savings for 2D barcode paper documents are substantial. “Forgery is rated among the top three sources of fraud in India and only 50% of instances are identified through internal audits,” he points out.
Already, the firm is in talks with several government institutions and agencies for deploying machine readable documents. “A pilot project is underway to issue secure documents such as experience certificates or identity cards to employees,” he adds.
Enthusing, Ramani asks one to imagine how these documents will enable any citizen to get an authenticated government document from an Internet kiosk, or even in their own homes. How? The request for a document is transmitted from an Internet kiosk to a central document issuing authority, where it is processed and a digitally signed, bar-coded document is returned to the kiosk.
Unearthing specific consumer needs in emerging economies definitely aids innovation for R&D majors. For instance, how does one evaluate the language skills of hundreds of contact centre employees? How does one rate an individual’s ability to understand English spoken in a myriad international accents?
However, for a burgeoning outsourcing industry like India’s, it comes with associated problems. In an effort to solve the recruitment problems for its BPO arm, IBM Daksh’s India Research Lab researchers came up with a web-based interactive tool called Sensei (Japanese for teacher).
Aptly describing it, Om Deshmukh, a researcher says: “Sensei checks and rates the grammar, pronunciation, diction and comprehension of voice-based call centre agents by requiring them to respond to simulated situations — then automatically rates their performance and highlights areas for improvement.”
Similarly, HP Labs in India identified power outages as a key factor limiting computer accessibility and utility in rural areas. To counter the problem, it designed a community PC that is able to run on car batteries.
While, most Indian R&D outfits have yet to come up with significant innovations in their product lines, Indian development units contribute more than just a trickle to the process. Intel is probably the best epitome of this practical emphasis, with its India Development Centre, its largest non-manufacturing site outside of the US. Taking a highly discipline approach, Intel is extremely careful about selecting projects it backs from India.
“We do no research that can be classified as cheap,” insists Rahul Bedi, a Director in Intel’s India office. Most of Intel’s latest chips and processors have been designed extensively by its researchers in its India Development Centre in Bangalore, where it employs 3,000-staff of which close to 2,900 are devoted only to R&D. Intel India is responsible for conducting over 800-invention disclosures and has filed 50-patents to date.
As academicians increasingly embrace the corporate world, there seems to be no dearth of professionals in the field of R&D. For instance, P. Anandan was an Assistant Professor of Computer science at Yale University for four years, and best recognised for being the developer of video stabilisation technology for ground and airborne video surveillance.
In a research career spanning two decades, Anandan conducted pioneering research in video motion analysis, before joining Microsoft Research India as Managing Director of, commencing operations in January 2005. “I worked for months out of makeshift offices in Bangalore and struggled to get employees onboard who had Ph.Ds,” he says.
For Microsoft Research, innovations for markets like India have revolved around developing computers for an illiterate population. Kentaro Toyama, principal researcher along with his team has developed a prototype of a system that connects illiterate domestic workers with families, who require their services.
“The system typically comprises pictures, video and voice commands to tell rural women what jobs are available, how much the jobs pay and where they are,” Toyama explains.
However, while these women understood how to use the technology, they found it difficult to comprehend why a computerised system was better than traditional word-of-mouth methods.
“We created a video showing a woman complaining to her spouse that she needed another job, and using the computer to find it,” which Anandan says, clicked instantly. The toughest part is system implementation, since most women who do domestic work do not own computers, rues Toyama.
Currently, fine-tuning a software called Business finder, there is 27-year old Sumit Mittal, a young researcher, who has opted to return to India after completing his MS from Rice University, Texas.
Another next-generation, real-time, presence-based mobile technology developed at IBM’s IRL, offers mobile phone consumers the ability to locate and use the nearest service vendors, whether plumbers, electricians, carpenters or doctors. Mittal, together with his team invested a half-year in making these ‘yellow pages’ available to mobile phone users.
“It provides a uniform search capability for both ‘mobile’ businesses and vendors, such as, taxis and plumbers, as well as ‘static’ businesses and vendors including stores and gas stations,” says he.
Already, an IBM business development team is marketing the service as a ‘great value proposition for micro-businesses such as plumbers and mechanics with little or no market reach’.
IRL researchers claim, the technology could either be hosted by a telecom service provider, “as a differentiating value-added service to its consumer base”, observes Mittal, or cut across different operators.
On the surface, Indian innovation has never been stronger. Globally, multinationals spent close to $200-billion on R&D last year, with the choicest cut spent on computing and communications. Take for example, Microsoft, which spent $6.6-billion last year, whereas, IBM and Intel spent a little over $6-billion each, and Cisco Systems and Hewlett-Packard spent almost $4-billion each. A major portion of these amounts went into making incremental improvements and drumming up new ideas for fast marketing.
With eight laboratories on three continents, IBM has around 300-scientists at its India Research Laboratory concentrating on areas, such as, automatic speech recognition, relational databases and disk storage.
In the recent past, researchers were judged by their patents and papers and still are; however, today they can be found rolling up their shirtsleeves and working side by side, alongside company consultants, designing and delivering services for larger corporate clients, reflecting IBM India’s transition into ‘services science’.
As India’s services business is fast commoditising, as in the case of hardware before it, IBM realizes it must also add intellectual property to its India offerings. “Putting researchers on the case is a great way to charge clients a premium,” says Ambarish Dasgupta, Executive Director at PriceWaterhouseCooper, a research and consulting major.
Usually, it is the norm for firms to invest development dollars, in order to stay ahead with products their customers use. To a certain extent it is simply a matter of protecting the cash cow i.e. the virtual computer at IBM, printers at Hewlett-Packard and desktop applications at Microsoft.
“If you’re a technology innovator, the moment you get ahead of the pack you have to research,” says Dr. Daniel Dias, Director, IBM India Research Lab. “That’s to make sure nobody can catch up.”
However, Dasgupta, is wary of spending so much on R&D. Typically, firms that devote 5-10% of their revenues on ‘improving products to keep an advantage over competitors’, “They are doing something to maintain business,” he castigates, “and India lends a fertile and cheap bed for this.”
Something, India should bear in mind, if it has to fight for its place as a strategic investment for technology companies. Starting out with only 20-professionals, Microsoft India Development Centre has now swelled to 1,200-employees.
Koppolu admits: “The first three years, it gave nothing but sleepless nights. Today, the centre has matured into the second-largest outside Redmond and is a platform for taking up key software development works.”
This is India’s new face. Welcome, to India, the global hub of cutting edge R&D!
INSIDE INDIA …. INNOVATINGLY INTERESTING FACTS
Some India Specific Original Solutions
From HP Labs - Print what you see!
Want to download broadcast data and print it in real-time? TVPrinCast has run trials for key corporations, as well as, integrated it into the SatCom-based training programme for gram panchayat members. It can provide reading material, classroom notes, test papers and updates simultaneously during the live broadcast of a television programme.
In other words, the technology augments the TV viewing experience with a printer. HP Labs estimates that it could double up as telemedicine channel, public information dissemination tool, and even provide printable practical guidelines for epidemic prevention in remote areas.
From INTEL - Faster, Smaller!
Intel’s Penryn processors are expected to push desktop PCs to run 40% faster than the latest Intel Core 2 chips. Intel’s latest processor architecture will allow consumer electronics vendors to make simpler designs for digital home products.
By 2008, it will sell chips as a common foundation that spans products from PCs to consumer electronics, including laptops, televisions, set-top boxes and other networked media players.
All this will be made possible by shrinking its chip features from 60-nanometres to 45-nanometres. Intel India Research Centre’s role in producing the next generation silicon wafers and smart chipset processors is undeniably high.
From MSR - Warana Unwired!
Microsoft ran an experiment replacing a PC-based system, for helping Warana village, with a mobile phone-based system. The new mobile system replicates almost all PC-based functionality. The project is up and running 24-hours and Microsoft has recorded farmers using data at odd times like 3:30 in the morning. Microsoft now wants to scale up the project to include nearly 54-villages.
Microsoft researchers replaced the client PCs with SMS-enabled phones. A smartphone was attached to the server through a USB port to a PC server, thus creating an SMS gateway. This promises to save nearly $22,000, primarily arising from the maintenance costs of PCs.
From IBM India Research Lab - Bank on it!
HDFC Bank receives millions of customer emails. The system requires customer care executives to manually click open each email and respond to it. IBM India Research Lab has developed software that allows the bank to categorise the emails without opening them manually.
The software scans the email for keywords (say ‘good service’, ‘change of address’, ‘lost ATM card’ and so on) and groups the email. It also exploits the context information, so it’s easy to find out how many times a customer emails, and whether his problems were addressed or not.
IBM is now planning to market the software to other banks for smart customer information management, targeted marketing, fraud detection and prevention and legal compliance.
