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Features

IBM India Lab: The Innovation Powerhouse

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DQI Bureau
New Update

Set up in 1992, IBM's India Software Lab (ISL) with 2,400
employees, has come a long way. Incidentally, IBM India showed the largest
growth in terms of manpower in 2006, growing by 16,024 with a headcount of
52,000 employees. The lab has managed to transform itself to live up to the
product requirements of IBM's global customers. Apart from this, IBM has 165
small development centers for IBM Software Group around the world. ISL primarily
develops products for its software group across the application infrastructure,
software development tools, data/information management, collaboration and
productivity tools.

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Lab Focus Areas

ISL develops solutions centered on enterprise application integration, business
intelligence, RFID, security and privacy and content management. On the services
front, the lab also provides consulting, education and support for IBM
middleware to clients, IBM business partners and sales teams on middleware. The
Lab's services team boasts of enabling over 600 clients worldwide and
supporting more than 90 of its business partner. The lab is also engaged in many
IBM middleware-based large IT deployment projects.
Harish K Grama, VP, IBM India
Software Lab (extreme right) and Kalpana Margabandhu, program director,
IBM Application and Integration Middleware Division, IBM India Software
Lab (lady on extreme left) with the Lab team
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The man at the helm at ISL is Harish Grama, VP, IBM India
Software Lab who heads a team of 2,400 engineers working on cutting edge
products and technologies. Highlighting the importance of the Lab, Harish Grama,
says "ISL develops one third of the applications developed by IBM globally,
and has become the 7th region and no more part of ASEAN."

ISL develops one third of
the applications developed by IBM globally, and has become the 7th region
and no more part of ASEAN

Harish Grama, VP,

IBM India Software Lab
IBM:
Vital Statistics

  • A network of over 60
    software research and development laboratories worldwide that develop,
    test and support a wide range of emerging and established technologies
    spanning software and services

  • Invests more than $5 bn
    in R&D annually

  • Has a laboratory
    population of more than 28,000 researchers and developers, with more
    than 20% working directly with clients

  • In the last 13 years,
    IBM has garnered more patents than any other company

  • Works closely with a
    network of more than 100,000 business partners worldwide

  • In 2006, the company
    conducted more than 10,000 engagements between its researchers,
    developers and clients, a 55% increase from the previous year
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Apart from these, ISL is also actively pursuing some of the
emerging technologies that include technology development projects such as
extensible markup language (XML), RFID, service oriented architecture, Web
services, MDM (Master Data Management), virtualization, autonomic computing and
grid computing. ISL also happens to be the lead lab for MDM.

Open Standard Initiatives

Locally, the lab is very active in collaborating with academia. From the
broadcasting of the Open Standards based software technical sessions via
satellite to over 10,000 students of the local technical university, to
researching collaborations with leading technical and science institutes through
the IBM Center for Advanced Studies (CAS), we are engaged on several fronts in
building the requisite skills ecosystem in the country.

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Suparna Bhattacharya: Senior
Technical Staff Member at the IBM India Software Lab
Development
@ India Software Lab

  • Two rational software
    products are driven completely out of the lab

  • Working on emerging
    technologies and developments such as Web Services, RFID, SOA, Master
    Data Management, Viper, Web services, WebSphere Application Server,
    Autonomic Computing, Virtualization

  • Works on Open Standards,
    Open Source and Open Innovation

  • Provide expertise to
    clients and help them become more innovative and competitive
Young Achiever

It was IIT Kharagpur's
first tryst with IBM which came for campus recruitment in 1993 and
selected Suparna Bhattacharya, an Electronics and Communication
Engineering graduate from the institute. Since then, there has been no
looking back for Suparna.

She works as a senior
technical staff member at the IBM India Software Lab's worldwide Linux
Technology Center. Incidentally, 26% of the total employee population at
IBM India consists of women and it runs a program Women in Technology
Initiatives to support the advancement and recognition of IBM's female
technical talent.

Suparna is also credited of
being one of the main contributors to the file system aspects and
productization of DB2-Datalinks, a technology invented at the IBM Almaden
Research Center for linking database and file system data with referential
integrity and consistency guarantees. She got introduced to Linux Kernel
and Open Source seven years ago and chaired various sessions at the
international Linux Kernel summits. Besides technology, she is also part
of the core team responsible for SEI CMM Level 4 and 5 attainments for IBM
India as well as Integrated Product Development rollout for ISL. She has
co-credited with a US patent number 6728716 titled Client-server filter
computing system supporting relational database records and linked
external files operable for distributed file system. Her co-inventors
included Inderpal Narang and Karen Brannon.

ISL closely works with the Linux open community globally to make
Linux more robust for enterprise adoption by focusing on the performance and
scalability aspects of Linux Kernel. Some of the other ISL initiatives in the
open space are Apache's Geronimo project-based Gluecode Development Center,
serving the needs of the low-end application server space, ODF (Open Document
Format) which aims at helping businesses edit and save their information in an
Open Standards based format.

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Talent Attraction and Retention

Cheap labor pool is the last thing IBM has in mind. Emphasizing this point,
Grama says, "The ISL is one of the largest outside of the USA. IBM has
never played the cost arbitrage game and whenever it decided to set up its
software labs outside of US, it was driven by the need to go where the talent
was." Getting adequately qualified and fresh talent pool of engineers is an
area of concern for most companies and ISL is no exception. As Grama puts it,
"Out of every 100 applications, only three get selected." To get over
the employability factor, IBM has entered into collaborations with several
universities in Karnataka and elsewhere to groom the talent and hire them once
they pass out.

Major
IBM Labs

Beyond Product Development

It is not only the hardcore product development that the ISL is involved
with. ISL was instrumental in initiating the project Aksharam to develop a
collaborative IT platform for helping secondary school teachers to improve
teaching effectiveness. For this, the emphasis was on rural and semi-urban
population, and targeted the geographically spread teaching community to share
teaching aids and content with each other. ISL is also closely involved in
promoting growth and development for the community through its local skills
development drive. The lab also conducts technical education sessions via
satellite for over 8,000 students at Visvesvaraya Technological University in
Bangalore. These are aimed at promoting research and collaboration with leading
technical and science institutes.

Sudesh Prasad

sudeshp@cybermedia.co.in