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TCS taps foreign colleges for tech edge
By siliconindia staff writer
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Tuesday, 02 March 2004, 20:30 IST
BANGALORE: If MNCs can tap Indian brainpower in universities by setting up corporate-academia alliances, why can't an Indian company do likewise?
India's largest private sector software company - TCS - is doing what perhaps no other IT company has dared to do. It is collaborating with researchers in foreign universities, for IP creation in cutting-edge technology, reports Economic Times.
TCS is doing this through Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC), probably the first R&D centre set up by an Indian software company, way back in 1981.
Tie-ups do exist with Indian universities, but the foreign collaborations have been recent, and very low-profile. Mathai Joseph, executive director, TRDDC and executive VP, TCS said that they spend about $1.5-2 million every year funding research in north America alone.
TCS is doing collaborative R&D work with the Mechanical and Industrial Engineering department of UIUC (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign) which focusses on application of mathematical modelling and optimisation to industry problems.
The research team formulated and solved an issue which arose in one of the TCS client projects.
In future, this research group plans to look into application of advanced mathematical techniques to various areas in business intelligence, such as forecasting and asset allocation.
Another TCS funded programme, at the University of California, Riverside is in the area of networking - VoIP, streaming data etc, all of which may lead to quality improvement in the technology. "TCS employees can and do participate in the academic research.
At the end of it, TCS gets the first right of refusal for the IP created," says Mathai. The focus of yet another piece of research, happening at TCS-UWM (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) is on investigating new ways of building business applications that will result in higher quality, agile and easy-to-maintain applications that can be built relatively quickly at significantly reduced cost.
There's been good progress here and Mathai is confident about the prospects. A prototype tool to model workflow templates has already been created.
Moving to Europe, TCS has tied up with King's College London and the University of York, UK, where it funds a project to formulate the precise UML for real-time applications.
Then there's research happening in Denmark, at the University of Aalborg. Here, research at the Centre for PersonKommunikation (CPK) comprises a study programme to be followed by two students from TCS, India, leading to a PhD degree in mobile communications.
The students will also participate in the upcoming IEEE 802.20 standards. Apart from these two students, there will be a dedicated team built up for pursuing 802.20 activities.
Will TCS gain monetarily from these R&D efforts? If any one of these research projects delivers IP that can be monetised, it can lead to a windfall gain. After all, Apple Computers, Google and several startups were born from university research labs.