MNCs join hands to catalyse Indias innovation ecosystem BANGALORE: Some 40 MNC research & development centres in India have come together to fast-track the process by which software architects are created. The intent is to build a pool of 5,000 architects by 2016, a move that could catalyse the technology innovation environment in India. Among the companies involved are Honeywell, EMC, SAP, McAfee, eBay, Symantec, Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, VMware and Zinnov Consulting. Indias extensive engineering talent has encouraged numerous MNCs to establish R&D centres here, and many of these centres are today the biggest outside their headquarter facility. Initially, most of the work that happened here was basic engineering support, but since then, teams have moved on to having independent engineering accountability for certain modules or components of a product, or the product itself. But still, only about 8% of product teams in India have moved to a position of driving all aspects of a product, including handling its P&L (profit & loss) responsibilities. For this stage and for higher stages, you need software architects. They are the people who make software and hardware design choices, lay down the technical standards, and the tools and platforms that developers must use. At the highest level, architects translate a companys business vision and strategy into a technology vision and strategy. So far, the story of India R&D has been to ask the headquarters for work. But now we are saying, this is what the market wants and heres how it can be done. And thats where we need more architects, said Niranjan Maka, MD of VMwares R&D unit in India. Vijendran Venkoparao, GM at Robert Bosch Engineering and Business Solutions, said projects where the India centre had total product ownership were a very small part of the total projects done here. Besides, the quality of work done here is nowhere as high as in our headquarters, he said. Pari Natarajan, CEO of IT and R&D consulting firm Zinnov, which has played a key role in bringing the group of MNCs together, noted that the problem of inadequate architects was not a company specific problem, but an ecosystem problem. Normally architects emerge out of the experience of doing bigger and bigger projects. We are trying to make the process faster, he said. There are three elements to the programme. Companies that already have architects will select the best among them and send them out as role models to other companies to create excitement around the architects profession, and educate engineers on the technical career path (many young engineers today seek to jump to the role of managing people instead of trying to rise up the technical ladder). The group will hold tech talks on subjects seen as favourable for India, including analytics, cloud computing, internet of things, mobile internet and 3D printing. The third element is a training programme in partnership with Jed-i, a venture by two former professors of computer science at IISc, Bangalore, that seeks to instill a passion for engineering, design and innovation. Participating companies will provide their experiences on top of this core curriculum, Natarajan said. EMC India already has an internal programme, which it calls school of architecture. The first batch of about 20 people was picked from among those high up the technical ladder, and put on an 18-month classroom and experiential learning course. Promising people are sent to the US headquarters for one year where they interact across levels. We invest a lot on them. One person returned so much more mature, hes now responsible for a suite of products, said Niranjan Thirumale, CTO of EMC India, which intends to share its learning curriculum with the industry. For any queries related to Software Product and Animation please log on to : locustechsoft #locustechsoft
Posted on: Thu, 16 Jan 2014 09:02:08 +0000
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