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Bangalore dreams of a second Silicon Valley
Inside India: R&D with Microsoft, TCS and SAP...

By Steve Ranger

Published: Monday 02 April 2007

Away from the giant gleaming campuses that house thousands of IT workers across Bangalore, it's possible to find smaller, more thoughtful operations staffed by academics and top technical experts.

While India may have built its reputation on low-cost IT services, now companies want to tap that skills pool for R&D know-how too, both to improve their existing products and give them the chance to tap into the booming Indian market.

Special Report: Inside India

In February silicon.com's Steve Ranger visited the Indian tech hotspots of Bangalore, Mumbai, Pune and Hyderabad. Click on the links below to see photo galleries of the cities and companies visited.

♦ Satyam's IT campus
♦ Hyderabad's tech parks
♦ Bringing tech to rural India
♦ High-tech on the streets of Pune
♦ Pune - the new Bangalore?
♦ Boom town Bangalore
♦ Bangalore's Electronics City

While there has been criticism from some quarters about the level of innovation and entrepreneurship in the Indian technology industry, a number of companies are basing research and development teams there to take advantage of the giant talent pool.

The feeling in Bangalore is like "early Silicon Valley" according to Kentaro Toyama, assistant managing director of Microsoft's 50-strong research lab in town.

The lab is one of five Microsoft has across the globe, Toyama explained: "Our mission is the same as the other four research labs: to do the best computer science research that we can and see where we can have an impact on product groups and business groups."

The lab is working on a range of projects, from cryptography, multilingual systems and mobility to technology for emerging markets.

He said: "We hire people that are good and we give them a free rein to follow their curiosity. A lot of that work may never see the light of day but if someone isn't doing it we will miss opportunities."

As for siting the lab is in Bangalore, Toyama explained: "You need to have access to the communities that you want to impact. There's a very robust research lab ecosystem here - quite a few of the large multinationals have research labs.

As a result, Bangalore enjoys a network effect and critical mass of researchers that makes it easier to recruit people to the city.

One project that has come out of the Bangalore lab's emerging technology group is something called multipoint.

In India between five and 10 per cent of schools in rural areas have PCs, which tend to be shared between five or six kids. And a dominant child tends to take over controlling the mouse and thus gets the most out of the PC use.

Toyama and his team came up with a simple innovation to make it possible for more kids to interact. The technology allows more than one mouse to be used at once, and the team found that for some kinds of learning experiences, by using the technology the students are able to learn as well as when they had their own PC.

"This is an example of a technology that comes out here that has a direct impact on the company," he said.

According to Toyama, there is plenty of potential for India to produce new ideas: India has a very good education system for top students and the country is producing very talented students with a background in mathematics, he points out. "This is an area where there is untapped potential in India that is just being realised."

And he added: "One thing that is an interesting component, that's different to Silicon Valley, is that the country is going through a change from developing to developed country and there is a sense of mission - and [entrepreneurs] are contributing to the growth of the country. That adds an additional tone to the optimism."