Symantec Response Lab gets access to some of the most comprehensive
sources of Internet threat data in the world through the Global Intelligence
Network
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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 |
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.