PARC Technology: High Calibre embedded product design for Global Giants
Date: Thursday , January 08, 2015
PARC Technology, a high-end embedded product design company, was founded by Aijaz Ahmed, a hard-core technologist with hands-on design experience in Hardware and System Software. While working as Chief engineer for a giant electronics enterprise in Japan, one of his DEO sparked his dream of setting up his own company. Despite earning an attractive pay packet during his tenure in U.S. and Japan, Aijaz realized that his passion lay in leveraging his deep design expertise and start a product design company back in India. Thus came PARC into being in Bangalore in 1997 as an STPI unit. As the name indicates, PARC began its journey by architecting PCs, handheld laptops, palmtops and notebooks. PARC instantly got the opportunity to be the exclusive design house for a Japanese electronics giant by leveraging Aijaz\'s past experience. Sensing several opportunities in India, PARC became an independent vendor to other clients in 2000 and started activities in India. Today, after 17 years of existence PARC has developed deep domain expertise in five verticals namely
-Consumer Electronics (setup boxes, hybrid boxes, digital video recorder with their own middleware and software stack) -Security & surveillance (static, mobile multi-camera with innovative features like image stabilization, object detection, image stitching) -Industrial design (Real time high-end Data acquisition Products, ASIC validation & referential designs, handhelds, power managed devices) -Medical products (Medical electronics devices with special features) and -Green energy solution (power savers with wired& wireless connectivity)
A Self driven 17 Years old enterprise
Initial efforts to raise funding from VCs in 2000 was not successful due to the complexity of the domain, and the difficulty in making others understand product development, IP Creation concepts. Nevertheless, PARC being one of the three companies in India with vast expertise in such a niche segment succeeded in gaining multiple big name customers like Intel, TI through sheer word-of-mouth publicity. PARC has managed to garner business through minimal marketing effort and scanty sales team largely on account of \'word of mouth\' publicity. Client acquisition has often been as an outcome of internet and even telephone directory search by prospective customers seeking PARC\'s unique proficiency. By providing high-calibre, precision designs and frugal engineering, the company with minimal marketing has turned their customers into advocates. PARC has since then acquired marquee names like Intel and Texas Instruments converting their \'Ideas to Realty\' and across geographies like India, South Korea, U.S., Japan, Europe, Germany and UK. PARC\'s hardcore design experts while perfecting development of boot loaders & device drivers, PC & board design, system software, middleware and applications for existing and fresh platforms, has collected as many as 30 IPs.
The variety of experience accumulated over 30 years of design career, multi-disciplinary design expertise and higher feasibility of designing ahead of time makes PARCs\' team experts in image processing, control systems, embedded wireless connectivity, handhelds and UI products with Single/Multi speed multiprocessor designs. The team has demonstrated experience of understanding and designing complex technology solutions and services. \"This enabled USA rewarding 17 years of deeply interesting work and win against huge competitors without full-fledged marketing team,\" says Aijaz Ahmed, Founder & MD, PARC Technologies. As an example of variety and complexity managed by the team, when a giant manufacturing company in Europe endeavored to pioneer an economical flexible industrial robot and needed assistance with building its proof of concept, according to the customer in several years PARC was the only company to even understand the complex requirements of the customer and raised to the challenge of building a POC.
PARC has helped numerous customers solve their design challenges and problems by providing complete end to end support starting from design, through the development & testing, establishing \'proof of concept\' prototypes; carrying out preproduction runs and helping tune the design through the production phase. PARC has always focussed building long-term customer relationship by taking full end to end delivery ownership.
Honing Raw Talents
PARC as Technology Company has teams that are competent in handling a range of platforms and technologies. Engineers join straight out of college and then work like a close knit team in a collegial environment that values learning, knowledge and deep technical experience across technologies and platforms.Every six months, the technology and platform focus is changed to help them build a wider knowledge base. Average life of a fresh talent is a little over 3 years.
Growth by Leveraging IPs
The company has recently started licensing their IPs to customers. Currently working in a joint development IP model with a Korean company, PARC is designing innovative products in non-intrusive medical devices vertical using Nano filter, some of these are world\'s first and are on either in the lab or on the verge of commercial production. PARC is focusing on growth into a technology design and development powerhouse and has started engaging with industry veterans and professionals with deep management experience to bring in core business strengths. Business reorganization currently under implementation and multiple disciplines within defined verticals should lead to tripling the current employee strength next year. Among the 3 business models planned out by PARC, two of them have already been launched successfully and the final services model is being placed at this moment.
Moving Forward
After achieving technical depth, PARC is now wholeheartedly focused on growing the business and soaring to greater heights. PARC feels the eco-system for IP development, R&D, engineering and development for their \'Make in India\' needs a lot of sensitization to the People in Power. What with a leading bank asking us to come as a HR company instead of an \'embedded\' (they did not understand embedded products) company when approached for a working capital arrangement facility and the tax authorities treating R&D establishments as trading houses. Clearly the orientation and eco-system needs a overhaul for companies like ours to survive.
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