Big Daddy makes India Proud

It’s a company that breaks post-industrial era notions of a number
crunching Orient that is hard-working but does not have the energy for big time
innovation. Of an Eastern corridor that can copy and code, but cannot invent and
create. More specifically, it’s a company that is fast putting India on the
Intellectual Property Map of the world. The company is IBM India and the
specific arm of the company we’re referring to here, is the Exports Division
of IGSI (IBM Global Services India).

What exactly does IGSI Exports do? Funny question to ask really, about what
is certainly among the most high profile MNCs in India. Nevertheless, it is a
domestically low profile, rarely written about, yet extremely important division
in the IBM scheme of things. A part of IBM India is the service delivery arm for
IBM units and customers worldwide. More importantly, it ‘owns’ certain IBM
technologies and provides product development and research support to IBM Labs
throughout the world.

Says Dr Uday Shukla, head of IGSI (exports), "We are the largest IBM
global resource center outside the US. And we are three times as big as the
second-largest IBM GRC in Mexico." This makes it bigger than all the other
IBM GRCs across the world including several centers in Eastern Europe, Latin
America, Australia, Canada, Vietnam and China.

Innocuous beginnings

When IBM returned to India in partnership with the Tatas, it set up a
Software Development and Support Center (SDSC) at TISL (Tata Information and
Systems) in 1993. The idea was to tap local talent for largely onsite work. In
the next couple of years the SDSC had grown enough to form three separate units–the
Systems Group, the Advanced Technology Group that began working with IBM Labs
worldwide and the Application Group which handled app related work for IBM
internally.

A series of developments in 1997 really turned the tide. This was the time
when IBM’s Global Liaison Group had just identified the impending Y2K problem.
The company had by then realized that India was a source of good and cheap labor
and decided to make India the hub of its Y2K rectification services for its
customers worldwide as well as for its own internal needs.

Soon after came SDSC’s certification as a SEI-CMM Level 4 center. As a
result, when the Tatas and IBM split, IBM India was born. IBM Global Services
India was also incorporated with two divisions–one to handle domestic service
delivery and the other to handle the Exports business for IBM from India.

At the same time the Application Group began offering services to IBM
Customers in various industry verticals including telecom, manufacturing and the
entire gamut of finance and banking industries. From then till date, IGSI has
now grown to 3000 people after a series of restructuring exercises. A vision of
how the behemoth works:

Owning technologies

One of IGSI’s core divisions, the India Software Lab (ISL) began at a very
small scale. Says Pankaj K Sinha, manager, IBM’s networking group and Hursley
dedicated Development Center, "By 1997 we were working for various labs
worldwide, providing support and testing. Initially, the work that came in was
outsourced by other IBM labs, but slowly we began to own some of the
missions."

"The first mission the company owned was IBM’s OS2," says Vijay K
Sukthankar, manager of IBM’s Linux development activities in India. "The
project began in Austin and was transferred here. We hired about a 100 people at
a time from India while a few came from Austin to provide the training. Our
mission was to support OS2 world-wide, from India." Work expanded as IBM
became increasingly aware of the capabilities of Indian software programmers.

Today, ISL has 550 people and among other things, owns IBM’s MQ series and
its transaction processing software–the TX Series. ‘Ownership’ is a big
thing at the Big Blue. It means that the India center is completely responsible
for all development, support and testing functions and all new releases are
created here. Says Sinha, "The product can be released to handle
interaction with various local translation centers. Also, once it is GA-ed
(IBM-speak for made generally available), we take care of the fixes and Level 3
support." The Linux Watch Pad project came out of ISL’s Linux Technology
Center. 

Linux Watch Pad: Making the Penguins Fly Once in a while, a projects captures popular fancy. IBM’s ‘Linux on a Watch Pad’ project is one of these. Announced in August of 2000 by the Thomas J Watson Research center, the idea behind the project was simple–it was a research prototype meant to demonstrate that the Linux operating system (OS) could be used across the spectrum — from large Mainframes to small watches. The message was even simpler: Linux is the default OS that everyone should use.  Broadly, the project has a hardware component based largely at IBM’s Tokyo Research Lab, a display unit developed at the Zurich Research Lab and embedded software–which is where IGSI came in. The Linux Technology Center at IGSI’s Software Labs, working along with the Thomas J Watson Research Center in the US, was responsible for the porting of the Linux kernel and for writing device drivers for various devices on the Linux Watch. These devices include an LCD and a touch screen display, a roller wheel and serial drivers. IGSI also provided IrDA or Infra Red Device support for the latest X Windows Graphical User Interface for the watch. As it stands now, the Watch Pad specs look like this: Size 65 mm x 46mm x 16 mm Weight  43.4 gms without a wrist band CPU High Speed, low power 32 bit MPU (18-74 Mhz) Input Devices Touch panel, a winding crown switch, button Display 320 x 240 monochrome liquid crystal display Memory Low power DRAM (8 MB), Flash memory (16 MB) Interface Bluetooth (v1.1, voice enabled), IrDA (v 1.2) and RS 232C Power Li-Ion battery OS Linux kerner version 2.4   GUI: Microwindows Good News News            It won the Best of PCs award at PC Expo Award in Japan in the year 2001. The better news is that Citizen Watches is working with IBM to improve the features including both packaging and component design. Good News: It won the Best of PCs award at PC Expo Award in Japan in the year 2001. The better news is that Citizen Watches is working with IBM to improve the features including both packaging and component design.

The strengths of the software lab however, lie in Middleware, for which it
has a collaboration with UK-based Hursley Lab. The Lab has a Hursley Dedicated
Development Center in Bangalore with about 160 people. A dedicated group for
support and development of the Lotus Smart Suite set of products is based out of
Pune.

One of the major achievements in recent times was IGSI’s involvement in the
WebSphere project, its application server and commerce suite as well as the
WebSphere MQ Series.

Technology group

This is one division that is closer to hardware than any other group at IGSI.
Says J Raghunath, manager, technology group. "Right from day one, we
started off as a Hardware Design Group (HDG), and in fact, were known as HDG
till we recently renamed ourselves the Technology Group." Under the TISL
partnership, the group began with board design, moving on very quickly to chip
design. Says Raghunath, "In short, design, manufacturing and infrastructure
comes into play." Given the state of India’s infrastructure in this
arena, the company soon abandoned boards altogether. Today, the group is largely
involved in ASIC design and firmware/microcode development for various IBM Labs.

According to Raghunath, the group provides ASIC solutions right from the
concept to the end product. The design group specializes in many skill areas
including ASIC methodology, logic design, functional and formal verifications,
synthesis, timing analysis and physical design. The technology group’s ongoing
project list is impressive. This list also includes work on the Giga Processor
for the next generation of IBM pSeries (RS/6000) and iSeries (AS/400) systems
where the India group worked on the verification aspect of the project. There is
also a project attempting petaflop performance —called the Blue Gene project.
IBM claims that when it is ready in about five years time, the Blue Gene
computer will be 1000 times more powerful than the Deep Blue (that beat Gary
Kasparov in 1997) and about two million times more powerful than today’s
top-of-the-line desktop PCs. The technology group at India is working with the
Watson Research Lab in New York on certain elements of this project.

The TIC carrot

This is where the fun really is. A core group of six to seven people headed
by Albee Jhoney scans emerging technologies, identifies those that may emerge as
threats or opportunities for IBM and invites relevant people from within the
company to ‘incubate’ the technology. This could range from e-business
infrastructure products and tools to wireless technologies.

Says Jhoney, "The core group does what is called first level scanning.
Besides, we get a lot of inputs from business unit heads who see or hear
something interesting about a new technology." Having identified the
technology to be incubated, the TIC sends out invitations to all divisions
within IBM India. People are then sent on a 3-6 month deputation by their unit
heads to TIC with one sole directive–learn more about this stuff!

IBM India: The Big Picture What does IBM India look like and where does IGSI fit in? IBM India has two major divisions–the sales and distribution group (consisting of the servers and storage division, the personal computing division and the software group) and what is knows as IBM (Global Services) India. The latter consists of a domestic service delivery arm that provides software solutions and services to Indian customers and IGSI (Exports) that provides support to IBM units and IBM customers worldwide. Equally important, it provides product development and support to IBM Laboratories worldwide.  IGSI (Exports) in turn has three groups–IBM India Software Labs which has multiple projects going on at any point of time including the now famous ‘Linux on a Watch’ program; a Technology Group that is largely into ASIC design, firmware and microcode development; and the Technology Incubation Center which is a melting pot that identifies new technology areas, does pilot projects to see which of these are viable and is generally responsible for IBM’s entry into new technology fields. Over and above all this is IBM’s core R&D division that spots talent and ideas across all groups and is responsible for generating IP from India.

It’s not all desk riding however. The group is expected to come up with
pilot projects and focused research. "For instance," says Jhoney,
"a couple of years ago, Dr Shukla went out on a business meeting and came
back saying we have to look at life sciences." Within a year, a TIC member
had begun to educate himself on this domain area and a core life sciences group
has been formed. TIC then tied up with Delhi-based India Research Lab for a
small wrapper development project meant for life sciences professionals. Today,
it is responsible for building competencies in genomics and proteomics.

Crowning glory

Last year, IBM Worldwide was awarded 3411 patents by the US Patent Office—
more than the number of patents awarded to 12 of the largest IT companies in the
US put together. This was the ninth year in a row that IBM topped an avidly
watched patent listing. More importantly, more than a third of these patents are
already being applied to IBM product and service offerings. Says Dr Rajendar K
Bera, deputy general manager, research and development, export services at IGSI,
"About two to three years ago, somebody asked us whether we could generate
Intellectual Property here in India." At the time, IGSI was one of the most
rapidly expanding global resource centers of IBM worldwide but had absolutely no
contribution to IBM’s Intellectual Property (IP) generation. In the three
years since that talk, ideas generated by Indians on their own initiatives led
to the filing of nearly 85 patents.

What is unique about IGSI, is the manner and the speed at which innovations
have come. According to Dr Bera, IGSI today has close to 50 inventors who’ve
worked in 15 different areas. More importantly, in almost half of the patents
filed to date (40 of the 85) — 90% of the work was done by Indians without any
handholding.

One of the reasons for this proliferation of IPs is IBM’s unique talent
spotting and mentoring process. Also, the company’s ability to assure all its
inventors that none of their ideas will be poached upon. According to Dr Bera,
the IBM policy dictates that no mentor can stake claim to any invention done by
his subordinates. As part of the R&D group one of Dr Bera’s jobs is to
conduct seminars three days a week with subjects that could range from Quantum
Mechanics to computing to the Theory of Relativity. It is usually a small group
of not more than 15 people and all participants to the seminar are ‘by
invitation only’.

Says Dr Bera, "These are people who will become very famous one
day." Neighbors envy, owners pride?

Sarita Rani in Bangalore