There was a time not long ago when India was looked at as a destination for cheap labour. Companies saw the subcontinent as a locale solely to outsource their low end/low value activities for a lesser cost. This resulted in large numbers of young talented engineers leaving India to places like the Bay area, which were considered the hub for high-end R&D work, and yes, a one way flow of talent ensued. We have since moved into a world where global engineering and diverse pools of full-lifecycle engineering talent are located diversely across the globe. In India this new world means that the expectations, possibilities, and level of engineering have changed dramatically. We now see India as an integral location for driving major Engineering efforts and innovation in our global portfolio of talent pools.

The Indian IT industry has undergone a sea change from those early times. The trend began a few years back as major global companies like Sun, Intel, TI etc realized that India is an ideal destination for expanding high end R&D work. There are many factors that are responsible for this. Costs are an obvious advantage, but global companies cannot (should not) allocate mission critical, high end R&D work based on just costs. Other, more balanced motivations have been the fact that India has an abundance of high quality technical talent particularly in software engineering disciplines, that combined with lower infrastructure and people costs are a huge pull for global companies. One other trend I see that has contributed to more product development in India is the small but surging migration of talent from the U.S. to India. Senior engineering talent moving back to India helps bridge cultures, bootstrap new projects and helps build both technical and remote/cultural teaming skillsets in the local organizations. There is no better example of this phenomenon than Sun’s India Engineering center in Bangalore.

Sun is driving major innovation and projects in Bangalore, particularly in software areas related to Java, Web Services, Operating Systems, and SOA-related infrastructure. The IEC was established in May 1999 to enhance Sun’s engineering capabilities worldwide. The IEC has since then become the fastest growing engineering facility for Sun worldwide and is now the largest such site outside of the US. The IEC is a high end R&D center and is a Sun core engineering site on a global basis. This basically means that most of the people employed in Bangalore work on the full lifecycle of high-end R&D with teams expanding into new areas related to hardware, software, and market development engineering. This exemplifies the key role we think the IEC plays in our global engineering strategy. It further validates Indias position as an emerging destination for R&D work of the highest quality.

The Sun IEC at present has an employee strength of over 500 and we expect to recruit another hundreds more professionals in the very near future. Most of these employees are engaged in the active creation of technical intellectual property for Sun worldwide. A number of patents have been filed based on work done at the IEC and a few have also been granted. The areas of focus, as related to our product efforts, are mostly on Software infrastructure middleware, algorithms, operating systems and so on. The India Engineering Centre is focused on building competencies in product development, testing, sustaining engineering and engineering services. Today, the IEC has ownership over key components and technologies of the Java Enterprise System including J2EE Application Server, Proxy Server, Portal SRA, SunMC and so on. The strategy is to grow the competencies and global engineering skillsets that allow the IEC to own whole products and product lines entirely. The IEC is continuing to execute on this strategy through reliable delivery of high quality components and services.

A key requirement when working on leading edge technologies is the need for an organisation to continually nurture creativity within the development team. At Sun this is a core area of focus. There are many factors that helps nurture creativity in the IEC. One of the most important is the fact that Sun is a recognized innovator and technology leader. The Sun brand is strong in terms of innovation—SPARC, Solaris, Java, Web Services, Service-oriented architecture, adaptive computing, TCP/IP, NFS, and identity-based standards like Liberty all happened within Sun.

Clearly the biggest showcase technology out of the IEC that has made the most difference to Sun R&D is the Application Server. Today, we have over 70 engineers working on Application Server technology in India and this number is growing. The folks work on several versions of the product and several functions—Application Server 7.0 EE (high availability version) was entirely developed and released out of India (Sept, 03). This release is now running mission critical applications at Telstra, Vodaphone, S&P and other Fortune 500 firms. Now the team owns version 7.1 entirely and will continue to own whole releases going forward. In addition, Appserver has all functions—Architecture, Development, Quality Engineering, Quality Assurance, Sustaining, Docs, Release Engineering, Program Management, Labs all present in India and work together to make a successful release possible.

Our employees, including the talent in India, count on the IEC to be a very creative place to work. At the IEC we have built on our cutting edge innovation with technical product engineering & sustaining work first, rather than less backoffice business support services. We hire top-notch engineering folks that have a bent for creativity and thinking outside the norm. We have incentives and recognitions for patent filings, innovations and creative solutions to solving customer problems. Our team collaborates on engineering the next generation of network computing technology & bringing it to market.

There are many more things that we do within Sun that makes it the place for technical achievement and creativity. One our greatest assets has been our hiring practices. Sun’s hiring standards are among the highest. We are interested in the most talented folks, in strong skillsets and experience and in particular the right mindset. Sun engineers are focused on developing deep competencies built over several years of working on key software and hardware projects with the reward coming in terms of delivering path breaking technologies that solve real customer problems worldwide. We have had a consistent track record of innovation and excellence and this culture thrives in Sun more than anywhere else. We have the same environment and culture here in India as we have in the San Francisco Bay Area. And this environment is linked with innovators in the Bay Area & beyond so that our engineers are tapped into innovation everywhere.

Engineers in India work on cutting edge products (Sun’s Java Enterprise System for example) file a good number of patents and have ownership of the entire product lifecycle in the case of some products. We hire engineers at all levels from fresh graduates to senior architects who have over 15 years of product technical experience.

More importantly, we have a strong program of assimilation, training, hands on projects, mentoring programs and tight interactions with global teams that provide valuable experience to engineers in India in a short period of time.
In addition, there is a strong trend emerging of skilled senior engineers moving back from the U.S. to India permanently and this is a welcome addition in terms of unifying cultures and developing deep skillsets.

Overall, this is an emerging trend that is going to be key to India’s success with respect to getting more high-end work coming into the country.

Today Indian talent do not need to go to the Bay area to work on leading edge stuff. They can do that directly in India and as a result we are seeing many Indians move back from the United States to India. Sun’s IEC in Bangalore is a great place to land for those joining the trend.

Finally to put it in perspective, people traditionally looked at India as a source of business process outsourcing. But today it cannot be typecast in that mode anymore. What I see from our organization is a truly global engineering approach where we have a “jewel” in the significant R&D contributions from our India team. It is not BPO outsourcing for us, but high end R&D work related to creating intellectual property that’s changing the world for the better.

Today India is proving itself as a nation with resources, infrastructure and people capable of delivering the entire lifecycle of large-scale high-end development projects from inception to design to development to deployment to sustaining of products for the global technology market.

At the end of the day India has the talent and the infrastructure. And Sun’s India Engineering Center is a prime example of how India takes its place as a first class technical R&D player in the new global engineering marketplace.