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

Global Reach
Tapping the Universities
Since 2006, Autodesk has opened a Center of Excellence (CoE) in Architecture Design at the
University of Mumbai’s Sir JJ College of Architecture; a CoE for Innovative Design and Research
at IIT-Madras, focusing on the small and mid-sized business market; a Digital Innovation Lab at
IIT-Kanpur, geared to the mechanical, civil, and aeronautical engineering sectors; and a CoE for
Digital Innovation, plus a research chair for design education innovation, at the National Institute
of Design (NID), equipping three NID campuses with software and developing design curriculum
and standards. Supporting these efforts are Autodesk’s Global Student Community Portal,
launched in India and four other countries in 2006 to provide free access to software, technical
help and an online student/designer community.
In October 2006, Autodesk rolled out its Education Solution Sets (ESS) 2007 package of software,
tools, courseware, and training for the broad academic community across India. Offered
on a multi-year subscription basis, the ESS package addresses two important challenges, providing
automatic updates for users while ensuring greater intellectual property protection.
VMware of Palo Alto enjoys a dominant position in the nascent market for virtualization,
a software solution that enables individual or networked servers or PCs to run
multiple operating systems and applications through a single interface. Virtualization of
data centers can increase efficiency by 50-70%, provide immediate backup redundancy, reduce
power consumption and prevent overheating. VMware cites the case of one IT services company
in India that has deployed virtualization to manage a data center of 1,300 servers with an IT staff
of three.
VMware, acquired in 2004 by information management and storage solutions firm EMC Corp.,
reportedly holds in its customer base up to 80% of the market, including all of the Fortune 100
companies, and it earned $1.33 billion in 2007. But several big competitors, including Microsoft,
Red Hat, and Symantec, have entered the market, and an open source virtualization product,
Xensource, is driving down prices.
VMware established an India development center in Bangalore in 2004 and has more recently
opened a second R&D center in Pune. These are part of a larger network of similar facilities in
Silicon Valley, Massachusetts, Colorado, Bulgaria, Denmark, China, and the UK. The company also
has India sales and support offices in Chennai, Delhi, and Mumbai. Its India workforce numbers 500
engineers and 700 total employees, serving 300 customers and working with 160 channel partners. It
has relationships with the IITs in Mumbai, Delhi and Madras; the National Institutes of Technology
in Trichi and Surathkal; IISc; College of Engineering and Pune University, in Pune; the National
Institute of Engineering, Mysore; Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani; and RV College
of Engineering. It also uses Indian third-party systems integrators to leverage its product offerings.
Among VMware’s success stories in India:
• Bharat Petroleum was able to consolidate 17 servers, each running separate applications,
into a single integrated server, lowering operating costs and allowing easier development,
testing. and migration of applications.
136