Globalization and Offshoring of R & D .. further notes
A recent Hindustan Times headline proclaimed how "India centre engineers played key role, filed 40 patents for Vista" The article said:
While Bill Gates and his global team celebrated the launch of Microsoft Corp's much awaited Vista operating system in the Times Square and elsewhere in the world, the city of Charminar had its own reasons to exult.
Some 330 engineers in Microsoft's India Development Centre at Hyderabad engineered some of the most important features of the software — and filed 40 patents to prove that. Chief Executive Officer Steve Ballmer had during his visit to India in November taken time off to party with the engineers based in the Hi-Tec City complex. Five years ago,when Windows had launched Windows XP with 40 people involved from Hyderabad, it was a case of developing individual technologies in parts (for e.g. Internet Explorer) in India and integrating them with the global team from Redmond.
Well, articles like this just reinforce the point I was trying to make in my earlier blog on how large organizations are globalizing research and development, leveraging skills and talent cutting across ‘time and space’ boundaries.
On a similar note, the recent Computerworld article on how ‘Microsoft, Infosys team on software engineering research’ makes a similar point:
“Infosys and Microsoft Research Lab India have already identified some areas for their joint research. The companies will, for example, work on tools and methodologies related to systems integration, said Sriram K. Rajamani, research manager at Microsoft Research Lab India, who heads the RSE group. Another area identified for research is tools to measure the performance of enterprise software even before it is built, he added.”
If Microsoft goes global, you can bet Google is there too. A blogger observes how "Google has opened 30 R&D Centers in 3 Years(Wow!!!) which span across Europe, Russia, Eatern Europe, Israel, US, Canada, Australia, India, Japan and China"
Of course, not everyone sees the writing on the wall. James McGovern, blogs about the Chinese angle, while Sharad Sharma is a more vocal in lamenting about how India shoring of R&D is going through a “trough of disillusionment”
In my mind, the "India vs. China" arguments is moot since global business leaders care more about results ("what" and "how") and less about the location ("where"). The debate should be about the merits of offshoring R&D. The way I look at it, Globalization of R&D is enabling software and services companies to provide better solutions at a lower cost in the least time to market, leveraging a global skill pool. Now, isn’t this at the heart of offshoring too? Why get constrained by time-and-space boundaries, When ideation can happen anytime, anywhere?
Given my past association with Infosys’ research collaboration with Microsoft [at SETLabs], you will continue to hear more on my two cents on this topic.
Comments
I really like what Infosys does and the way it has structured its processes and mastered the mechanics of global outsourcing through it's much touted global delivery model.This of course helps it in scaling up as well, as is seen in the last few years.
However, I believe that being one of the benchmark companies in India and with the kind of resources in terms of infrastructure, money and people that it has , except for the one banking product, Finacle , it has not really delivered any other "product". With the vast experience in practically every industry vertical I think it should be in an enviable position to have the domain knowledge of these verticals and instead of only doing projects, create a product based solution for that entire sector. I think that would be another step up the value chain. For example, the telecommunication sector has probably seen some the biggest changes in the last decade, document management/publishing has also changed significantly and these areas could very well provide some opportunities to offer new and innovative product based solutions to make sense of the new world order.
Posted by: kabir | July 22, 2007 08:05 AM