PDF: 2962 pages, 5.2 MB - Bay Area Council Economic Institute

Global Reach
next-generation call records, billing, and customer service system that will serve 70 million
customers nationwide.
Oracle life sciences applications have been used by SINO Clinpharm, D&O Clinical Research
Organization, and others, to manage and audit clinical trial data, assure regulatory compliance,
and shorten time to market for drug treatments. India has been an early adopter of distributed or
grid computing—networking clusters of servers to increase computing power and build in
redundancy and security across an enterprise, in order to achieve scale. As of mid-2007, Oracle
had signed some 70 grid computing customers in government, manufacturing, retail, banking,
utilities, telecom, and health care.
The predecessor company that became Cupertino-based utilities and security software
maker Symantec, Veritas Software, entered the Indian market in the early 1990s, first
outsourcing some product development for its Unix-based data storage and management
software and then moving that work in-house at a Pune R&D center in 1992. By 1999,
Symantec had expanded its product line through acquisitions to include Norton utilities and antivirus
software, and WinFax Pro software for formatting, sending, and receiving faxes via the PC.
It entered a sales/distribution tie-in for India with Godrej Pacific Technology Ltd., a joint venture
formed by regional Asia distributor Tech Pacific, and it eventually launched a wholly-owned
Mumbai subsidiary.
A convergence of Y2K compliance requirements, an increasingly sophisticated Indian computer
market with emerging network needs, and a proliferation of computer viruses hosted from Asia
all prompted Symantec to broaden its India presence. The new Mumbai office focused on sales
and marketing through a team of 25 value-added resellers and on technical support.
In 1999, Symantec signed contracts with PC manufacturers HCL and Zenith Ltd., to include its
software in their computers. In 2001, Symantec entered into an alliance with Wipro Infotech, the
Wipro Ltd. IT services and consulting unit, which had been slowly building and marketing a
security practice targeted at financial and software firms, data centers, and multinationals
upgrading their overall IT in India.
Symantec also hoped to tap into India’s potentially huge small office-home office (SOHO) market.
A 2006 Gartner Research study identified 1.9 million small businesses with computers, plus
some 30,000 mid-market enterprises, operating in India. Roughly 70% of the personal computers
and servers in India ran on the Microsoft Windows operating system, as did Symantec software.
Symantec saw an opportunity to use India as an R&D platform to diversify its product line and
develop small office, Linux and Unix versions of its existing storage, backup, and security suites.
The captive R&D center in Pune grew to a workforce of 1,100 employees—at that time 20% of
Symantec’s worldwide development staff. Its mission evolved from translation, quality assurance and
other product engineering to include product innovation. Symantec began sending senior engineering
managers out into the field to meet with customers and identify product opportunities that could be
engineered in India. The center branched into product R&D for the disaster recovery market, and
began working with Wipro on storage and productivity solutions for SAP enterprise software.
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