Chirag Dalal has a twinkle in his eye, which gives away the number of thought tracks running in his head at any given point of time. As a Senior Engineer at Symantec Corporation, Dalal has developed solutions that help organizations prioritize and store data, the way they want. The solution understands the intent of a particular application and helps deal with provisioning of storage to servers making large-scale storage deployments and Storage Area Network Management easy.

Starting with his first patent application in 2002, Dalal says, “It was definitely a great feeling. I remember sharing it with my friends and colleagues and feeling really a sense of deep accomplishment.” Accomplishment apart, it’s also the recognition that comes with innovation that motivates him to perform better everytime. He believes it changes the way one works and thinks.

For Dalal, the motivation is to work on increasing the ‘innovation’ quotient in the products and solutions, to build upon on the strategic value in the products/services thus reducing the end user pain points. There is a strategic importance to the value-add the innovative features hold for the end-user and that is a vital area to stay focused on, says Dalal. In fact, it is important to find the innovation element in your day-to-day work. Most often, people don’t realize the innovation they do in their day to day life, this realization needs to come about. This is exactly what has helped him innovate.

The realization that innovation cannot be from just within. A lot has to do with the products and solutions you work with, the work culture and the benefits of being a market leader in both the storage and security space. “Our products and solutions are always scaling new heights, defining new standards in innovation and value. This leads to thinking in a very different angle as compared to the thought process required to catch up with the competition.”

“The journey never ends – once you begin, from that point onwards, all new product innovation that we bring in poses one important question – and that is, how can we patent the innovation to protect the IP for the company?” Dalal sums up.