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Research Focus @ Development Centers in India

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

Symantec Response Lab gets access to some of the most comprehensive

sources of Internet threat data in the world through the Global Intelligence

Network

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Shantanu Ghosh,Vice President — India Product Operations, Symantec Software

India

Symantec innovates in three key areas: build, buy, and partner.  Our broader

strategy of open innovation focuses on delivering the best solutions to our

customers — whether those solutions come as a result of building them

internally, developing them with technology partners or acquiring them outright.

We believe that it is critical to take a two-prong approach to innovation: we

need to continue to enhance today's solutions so that we can meet current

customer demands, while at the same time focus on developing new products and

services to meet future customer needs. Innovation is one of our core values and

we strive to build a culture of innovation within Symantec by sharing our vision

with employees and developing a rewards system that encourages innovation. We

believe our internal R&D efforts, coupled with newly acquired technologies, help

to strengthen our businesses and improve our competitive positioning. In India

we have R&D centers in Pune and Chennai. Talent at each of these centers plays a

key role in driving innovation at Symantec.

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The Pune R&D facility hosts a Symantec Response Lab which establishes some of

the most comprehensive sources of Internet threat data in the world through the

Global Intelligence Network. This network captures worldwide security

intelligence data that gives Symantec analysts unparalleled sources of data to

identify and analyze, to deliver protection and provide informed commentary on

emerging trends in attacks, malicious code activity, phishing, and spam. . This

analysis contributes to the development of real-time updates to Symantec

products that protect computers at homes and in workplaces around the world.

Contribution to the world



We believe our internal R&D efforts help to strengthen our businesses and

improve our competitive positioning, which is why we invest 15 percent of annual

revenue into R&D. Symantec has a global R&D strategy with teams of engineers

worldwide focused on core product development, pure research and on tailoring

our products to meet regional requirements. As a global company, Symantec seeks

the top R&D talent on a worldwide basis in order to maintain and extend our

technology and product leadership. R&D teams are responsible for ensuring

Symantec's long-term success and customer loyalty through innovating next

generation technologies. Unlike other organizations, our R&D engineers are

physically embedded with Symantec business units to remain closer to product

engineering and customer feedback.  This approach ensures innovation happens

across the company. Symantec's India R&D centre is a very integral part of our

global R&D network. I am proud to say that almost every product line of Symantec

is represented at the Indian R&D facilities.

Roadmap for future



Information is the lifeblood of modern business, government and the economy.

It is the most powerful but most vulnerable asset businesses have so it needs to

be protected at all times.

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Symantec's R&D teams in India are continuously innovating to secure and

manage that information in a holistic way, in a way that uses resources

efficiently. Symantec is developing innovative ways to solve real-world problems

in security, storage and management.

Symantec has a global R&D strategy with teams of engineers worldwide focused

on core product development, pure research and on tailoring our products to meet

regional requirements.  Besides others we are look at the Pune and Chennai R&D

centers as a strategic R&D and engineering resource for Symantec.  Our global

development teams, including members based in Pune and Chennai, work on a broad

range of the company's most important technologies and products in conjunction

with other members based around the world. Teams will continue to work on all

product categories including enterprise solutions, consumer products and service

offerings.

Our research in image processing entails translating gestures to

meaningful commands, and assigning security policies linked to images

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Sudhir Dixit, Director, HP India Labs

HP Labs, has 7 sites worldwide — Palo Alto, Briston, Beijing, Bangalore,

Israel, St. Petersburg. We went through a transformation in March 08 where we

decided to undertake fewer projects but make sure that each project is

considerably bigger and has better impact on the ecosystem. Currently,  21 large

projects are underway across research areas that spread across information mgmt,

analytics, digital communication,  cloud computing, etc. The motto for the

Indian center is to create new techs aimed at addressing the needs of the next

billion customers of HP.

Current projects in our India center is currently focused on what we call

Emersive Interaction. In developing markets like India, adoption of computers

has three major roadblocks; interface with the computer system, lack of

compelling services that come bundled with the system, and high costs. HP Labs

focuses on the first challenge and is working on improving Human-Computer

interaction, via touch and speech, towards creating a natural and intuitive

mechanism of interaction through communication and services. We also strive to

'simplify web access for the next billion' using techs like touch-based

authentication, aimed at developing tools for the non-tech savvy user.

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Paper in the digital enterprise



The idea here is to 'digitize' the paper. We are working on a mechanism to

enable you to annotate on paper, in other words, creating an intelligent paper

workflow. Imagine a scenario where you have a printed/written paper document. We

are working on a technology where you can 'write' a command on the paper in a

certain format and when you feed it to the printer, it performs the task ordered

by you. In course of time, we are planning to integrate this with HP's Cloud

print offering, which is a printer-agnostic mechanism of printing through a

smart phone. HP understands the fact that specifically in emerging markets,

adoption of mobile technology is far more rapid than PC penetration, and hence,

using the a mobile device as a scanning device is on our roadmap for the future.

Multimodal interaction



Imagine a scenario where a home PC is a shared resource for the household

and is integrated with the other appliances. We are formulating a gesture

recognition mechanism where 'commands' can be 'waved' or signaled to the display

screen, and when integrated with voice commands, it serves as a annotation

mechanism for interacting seamlessly with your computer system. The biggest

challenge here is to eliminate ambient signals like face and head movements and

record only the hand gestures. Similarly, if you have closely observed

Interactive Voice Response systems in outdoor environments, the ambient noise

interferes with the input command. We are working on technologies to cut out the

ambience noise.

Specific competency areas



We have experts in the area of Image Processing — feature extraction, face

recognition, gesture recognition, experts who can pre-store images and find

meaning in them, translate gestures to meaningful commands, and at some stage,

assign security policies linked to images. For instance, in a home environment,

you might want the head of the family to assign channel preferences for each

member of the family, so his/her gesture has to be separated from the others.

Similarly in the area of Speech, we have researchers who are working on

recording the relevant voice and ignoring for instance, the blabber of a child.

Besides these competencies, we have researchers who are focused on acquisition

of resources, and 'temporal synchronization of information' — integrating

speech, gestures and other interaction mechanisms.

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Though we start out our R&D projects with the aim of serving the broad

ecosystem of PC/laptop users, or rather urge the ones who are reluctant to use

them, along the way we realize that some components of the research make a lot

of sense to the enterprise segment which HP caters, and so there are few

projects that get integrated into the product lines.

This is an ongoing process, and every project we undertake invariably has

something in it which among the groups in HP, adopt and integrate into their

product lines.

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Most of our researchers are part of Open Source communities and constantly

interact with the ecosystem in sharing knowledge and code

Pradeep Bardia, Director — R&D Labs, Tandberg

For the last 18 months, the Tandberg India Development Center has been

building complete global products, focused on High Definition Video

Communications. Unlike other Research and Development centers, Tandberg does not

look to India to manage a slice of the pizza, but gives complete product

ownership from start to finish. Tandberg's biggest learning in the area of HD

video communications has been the constant challenge to achieve the best video

quality — subjective and objective video quality, which in turn relates to

lighting and color configurations. The Bangalore research facility of Tandberg

has a video lab which has the ability to test ideal lighting conditions, and a

complete studio setup with ability to design advanced intelligent auto focus

capabilities for superior video output.

What is vital for the product line of Tandberg is the ability for the product

to be intelligent and analytical when it comes to identification of subjects.

For instance, we are beta testing a feature called Best View which scans the

room and identifies the number of 'heads' in the room, analyses their position

in the room, understands the lighting scenario in the room, and zooms in

automatically for the best possible and realistic view.

In the weeks to come, our research teams will be incorporating face detection

capabilities where faces can be identified and tagged with name and designations

by scanning the database of already saved faces. This will enable a Tandberg

user to automatically view the name of the person on the other end without

having to go through the so called 'introduction' session. Currently, two

interns from IIT Delhi are focused on improving these face detection

capabilities.

Another area of research has been surveillance and motion tracking. Aimed at

energy conservation, a Tandberg device would be in sleep mode until an

individual enters the meeting room and having tracked his/her movement or

presence in the room, the device wakes up and switches on automatically. Taking

this capability a step further, research is also underway for capabilities like

automatic zooming of an object that is being pointed at by any meeting

participant.

Of the total 1600 employees of Tandberg, 500 are dedicated to R&D, and a

group is dedicated exclusively to identifying technology and defining technology

trends. This enables the rest of the team to follow predictions and incorporate

these future technologies into their ongoing research. Global interaction trends

show us that wi-fi capabilities and touch screen interfaces are technologies

that can be integrated into Tandberg's products and our R&D teams are working on

integrating these capabilities. Another area of keen interest is to incorporate

social networking capabilities with video conferencing.

Tandberg promotes open development and most of our researchers are part of

open source communities and constantly interact with the ecosystem in sharing

knowledge and code. There has also been a deliberate thrust by Tandberg to cater

to small and midsize enterprises and this is reflected in our upcoming product

line which has offerings across the spectrum — from high end room products, to

personal devices for single office environments to crossover products.

The Tandberg Bangalore center has complete ownership of products from start

to finish, and we can confidently say that this center handles the upstream R&D

that goes into Tandberg's global product offerings. Ideally, we would love to

handle the downstream activities like assembly and supply chain but sadly, the

ecosystem for the same has still not matured in India. We are however clearing

out these building blocks by interacting with embedded systems vendors, testers,

etc to see if we can achieve downstream competency in the months to come.

Ramco is using the Cloud for multi-tenant apps that are ideal for

enterprise environments where data partitioning is necessary

Shyamala Jayaraman, Vice President — Technology, Ramco Systems

Research at Ramco Systems is carried out with the solo aim of improving the

product line, which are essentially the enterprise application offerings of

Ramco. The three main areas of research for Ramco are; the software development

platform that we have built, called Virtual Works, our business intelligence and

business analytics tools, and research towards improving the performance of

enterprise apps. The thrust is on strengthening the Internet-based architecture,

moving towards a SaaS enabled Cloud model, improve and optimize the code, and

design and architect frequently to enable better efficiency. The core of our R&D

is the way we do coding — Ramco uses something called Model-based development,

which is quite a contrast to the way code is usually generated for enterprise

applications. Instead of 'hand coding' for each project, Ramco reutilizes a lot

of previously written code, through our model-based coding automation process,

and Ramco's model is aimed at making 'modeling' a new code development paradigm.

All of Ramco's code uses .NET and J2EE.

This year, we have decided to go the Cloud way with R&D emphasis on Cloud

based offerings. Ramco segregates the Cloud into two — the Internet-enabling of

applications and application development using the Cloud and optimizing

available computing resources. Secondly, Ramco is paying emphasis on using the

Cloud for multi-tenant applications that are ideal for enterprise environments

where data partitioning is necessary and contributes towards 'prioritizing'

processes.





The India center contributes to our global R&D at a high level. The
individuals in the Indian center excel in computer science and have had, in

general, good academic and professional backgrounds. The workforce in India

has proved to be very competent and a very important part of the R&D efforts

at SolidWorks. The team has taken on similar workloads and projects as each

of the other global offices. Specifically, they have made significant

contributions in translators, routed systems, and some of the key components

of the SolidWorks Professional product. A major focus for the 2010 product

line is optimizing core functionality and providing the highest reliability;

India will continue to make an impact in that initiative for the 2011

release.?

Austin O'Malley, Chief Technology Officer, Dassault

Systèmes SolidWorks Corporation


After 10 years of active R&D, Ramco is in the process of making its suite of

enterprise applications flexible and extendable. Most of our solutions are

installed in environments where a single app caters to thousands of customers

and keeping up with the growth of businesses and in turn the app usage is a

challenge that our R&D is addressing. Ramco has also realized that enterprises

still choose traditional on-premise ERP solutions — this besides the need to

serve existing customers of Ramco who have already installed these offerings. A

section of our R&D is dedicated to making these on-premise tools mobile-enabled

— being able to transact via mobile gateways in order to interact with the ERP

system, is one of areas of research Ramco will be focusing on in the weeks to

follow.

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