Category — Information Technology

California-based Juniper Networks is planning a major expansion to its research and development center in Bangalore, India. The company will add 750 seats and 450 equipment racks at a new site (Prestige Exora Business Park) in Bangalore over the next two years. The company currently has 1,800 staff members and 300 employees of development partners located in Bangalore.

Its operations in India are responsible for a full spectrum of activities including hardware and software development, test engineering, field trials, program management, quality assurance, technical documentation and product line management. It also provides 12-hour-a-day global customer support covering all Juniper products and operates a Finance Shared Services Center, which delivers functions to Juniper Finance organizations across the world.

“This expansion reflects our ongoing commitment to increasing the depth of experience and expertise in the India region, which is becoming increasingly important not just as a source of engineering talent but also as a fast-growing market for Juniper Networks,” said Sridhar Sarathy, managing director of IEC at Juniper Networks.

This week, Infosys co-founder and billionaire Nandan Nilekani stood watch as the first step of the “Unique Identification Authority of India” database of every Indian citizen took its first step to reality in the field. Nilekani retired from Infosys to take on this role last year and the position has the rank of a Cabinet Minister.

Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress party leader Sonia Gandhi traveled to village of Tembhili (population 1,500) in Nandurbar district of western Maharashtra state and handed ID numbers to 10 people, including three children. Using including an iris scans, finderprints and other biometric methods, the system will log details of India’s population of 1.2 billion people into a central database. Every Indian will be issued a 12-digit ID number which they will use to receive welfare handouts, to apply for other documents like passports and even to open bank accounts. The whole process may take another four years.

India hopes that this will prevent corrupt officials from faking the names of people seeking welfare benefits or access to education – potentially saving billions of dollars. Corruption continues to be a significant problem in India and poor, rural citizens are often denied the benefits budgeted for them, such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, which promises 100 days of work to any Indian.

My friends Vipul P Jain in Mumbai and Narendra Kale in Chicago run one of India’s most interesting boutique outsourcers, Kale Consultants..

Rare among Indian IT companies Kale has designed software products for the banking, hospital and airline businesses over the years. I first met Narendra my friend Vipul hire the company to create the first computer software installation in India, for the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi.

The company went public in the late 1990s and this week it announced that Spain’s Accelya Holding World is buying a controlling stake, see the Financial Times story today.

Although India is  noted as producing some of the best creative technologically-oriented talents in the world today, too few young professionals concentrate their education toward civil engineering. This bottlenecks the nation from realizing its full economic potential. India is challenged by inadequate roads,  as well as an electric  power system that creates the need for individual office buildings to install their own generator-powered electricity.

Money is not really the problem since the government has plans for a $500 billion infrastructure investment through 2012 and more beyond. The problem stems from a lack of qualified home-grown civil engineers. During the British Raj and for years later, civil engineers were among the most respected tecnical professionals in India.  The first engineering college in India, now known as IIT Roorkee was established primarily to educate “overseers”, highway engineers, dam builders, soil specialists and all the flavors of civil engineering.

This once-enviable profession  no longer pays as well as writing software programs for the world’s leading companies.  So, what’s a modern-construction yearning society do do?

The Indian government acknowledges a critical shortage for civil engineers. Therefore, India has set on a path creating an additional 30 universities and is examining permitting foreign educational institutions to set up campuses in the country.

Foreign investment in India’s current infrastructure needs is also being called upon since no amount of emphasis upon home-grown talent will be appropriate. Kamal Nath, minister of road transport and highways, recently said the government plans to finance a highly ambitious road-building campaign through raising capital from overseas investments that include soliciting pension plans as well as securing long-term investments.

Kamal Nath, Union Cabinet Minister of Road Transpost & Highways

Plans are also underway soliciting foreign construction company participation in development projects that have been compared to the post-World WarII U.S. Highway construction boom.

This bodes well for American, British, Canadian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese engineering and construction companies if they can invest the time and effort to understand how India functions

Engineers in India, working for Indian and foreign companies, are starting to produce innovative products and technologies that have impact beyond its borders.

One such development is a system that uses thermal sensors and algorithms to calculate the number of people entering a store at a given time and when they are likely to leave. The system, designed at Tesco plc’s Service Center in Bangalore, helps managers keep an efficient number of cash registers open so check-out lines do not get too long.

Another invention, called Multipoint, targeting the classroom,  gives multiple students a mouse cursor to use on one computer screen. Previously, the result of one computer in a classroom, even at a rural school, was one student, usually an upper-class male, using the computer more than the rest of the class. Microsoft Research is now considering the system, , for commercial development.

These stories are becoming more and more prevalent; it is an encouraging sign for anyone considering opening or expanding an India R&D center