"We believe we are the leaders today, especially in our product offerings ..."

Sasken Communications Technologies Ltd., is an embedded communications solutions company that helps businesses across the communications value chain accelerate product development life cycles. The Company offers a unique combination of research and development consultancy, wireless software products and software services, and works with Network OEMs, Semiconductor Vendors, Terminal Device OEMs and Operators across the world. Global Fortune 500 and Tier 1 companies in these segments are part of Sasken's customer profile.

Established in 1989, Sasken employs over 3,500 people. Operating from state-of-the-art research and development centers in Bangalore, Pune & Chennai in India, Kaustinen, Tampere, Oulu & Turku in Finland and Monterrey in Mexico. Sasken is also present in Shanghai (China), Ottawa (Canada), Nice (France), Frankfurt (Germany), Kanagawa (Japan), Lund (Sweden), Guildford (UK) and Boston, Dallas & Santa Clara (USA).

Sasken bagged the National award for R&D efforts in industry, in the computer software category, for 2007. The award is in recognition of their work on conceptualizing, designing and developing an optimized multimedia subsystem. The output is rated the best in its class globally, as evidenced by its deployment in commercially released mobile handsets by many tier-1 vendors.

http://www.rndindia.info spoke to Dr. G. Venkatesh, Executive Director and Dr. Viswanatha Rao Thumparthy, Head of Corp R&D, on the companies R&D philosophy and practices.

Considering Sasken is a telecom service and applications development company, how important is the R&D in the context? Is R&D seen as a stand-alone function or does it run through the entire set of functions the organization performs?

R&D is important to Sasken for the following principal reasons.

Sasken spends more than 10 percent of its revenue on R&D. What is Sasken’s near term and long term R&D objectives and goals?

Sasken’s near term objective is to enhance its capabilities to retain and attract more customers. Its medium term objective is to enhance its product differentiation and to expand into adjacent markets. Its long term objective is to diversify its business into new markets, perhaps by partnering with others.

 What is the R&D strength of Sasken, both in terms of numbers and also in terms of specialization of those in the R&D? Where does Sasken fit in the continuum of similar high tech telecom service companies?

Inclusive of all types of R&D, the strength of R&D in terms of numbers is around 75. Employees involved in R&D are experts in the telecom domain, especially in the wireless protocol stacks, multimedia codecs, middleware for mobile handsets, mobile handset design, physical layer design and IMS.

In India Sasken would be in the top league in its R&D strength with respect to companies with similar business.

 Where does Sasken see the telephone technology heading and what would be Sasken’s role in the same?

As per Sasken, mobile phone technology is evolving towards being a converged device for communication, information and entertainment. It will be a primary source of content. It will be the wallet, thus being the repository for payment instruments. It will likely be the primary device through which payments are made. It will be the vehicle for social networking. In meeting these needs, it needs to have capability to handle media rich content (processing power, broadband access, storage, media capture & display peripherals, applications), flexibility for connectivity (WiFi, BlueTooth, NFC etc) and security against unauthenticated use.

Sasken is a major player in the multimedia space. Sasken’s vision is to make multimedia universally available. Today, multimedia is typically available only in high-end phones. The challenge is to make it available on all devices.

Considering the technology Sasken deals with is cutting edge in nature, does Sasken participate in the forums, which decide on the equipment standards, etc.?

Sasken is a member of premier technology bodies including ITU, 3GPP, GCF, MPEG-ISO and ATM, DSL, NFC and SDR forums. It is a sponsor of the CeWIT (Center of excellence in Wireless Technology) in India. It is a founder member of BWCI (Broadband Wireless Consortium of India), an initiative of CeWIT. It is actively pursuing contributions to the IEEE 802.16m (WiMAX) standard.

How does Sasken manage its R&D talent, particularly in the context of the workforce migration, etc.?

Sasken has had a good track record of retaining its R&D talent. This is due to the fact that it has been continuously striving to grow up in the value chain and, therefore, values R&D output. There is adequate management commitment to the R&D effort. Towards achieving meaningful outputs, the R&D goals are well defined and reviewed by the top management.

Also, due to its sharp focus on wireless, Sasken has been able to set up the right environment for conducting R&D, in terms of the people, laboratory infrastructure, support and academic linkages.

Sasken also has a well established process of recognizing its talent, by encouraging them to publish their work and also file patents.

 Sasken is a knowledge-base company, what is your KM strategy. Do you see any problem in the knowledge sharing and documenting for the use by the others within the company? How is the knowledge management implemented?

As a knowledge-based company, Knowledge Management is quite critical to Sasken. It is, therefore, handled as a corporate function by the CTO’s office. Its objective is to develop and maintain processes for knowledge capture, knowledge sharing and knowledge protection.

Our knowledge management system is implemented as a set of portals. Each BU and the CTO’s group have a portal. The BU specific portals contain information more relevant to the BU. The portals not only have technical information, but also project management, customer and proposals related information. Thus, multi-dimensional knowledge is maintained and disseminated. The CTO’s portal maintains additional information such as papers published, forum membership data and patents filed & granted.

Sasken has recently commenced an annual Sasken Technology Conference (STC) to provide a platform for the employees to present their ideas and share their knowledge.

From an implementation perspective, Wiki based pages are being contemplated to encourage further involvement of the employees in knowledge capture and sharing.

Sasken is in the cutting edge of communications technology. You have a few patents yourself. How does the company deal with Intellectual Property Rights?

Ownership of IP enables differentiated offerings and, at times, cross-licensing of certain IP, with non-competing companies. Sasken has a well defined process for actively identifying innovations in day-to-day work and protecting them through filing of patents. All papers are screened before publication to ensure valuable IP is protected before it is disclosed. While most of the IP results from day-to-day operations, corporate R&D focuses on creating IP pro-actively, in similar and new domains.

Could there be a consorted effort by Indian companies, which have overlapping interest in telecom service to cooperate in their R&D efforts?

Yes. This is possible. One such initiative is the Broadband Wireless Consortium of India (BWCI). This consortium is the initiative of CEWiT. It consists of equipment vendors, semiconductor manufacturers, technology houses, service providers and regulatory bodies. The primary objective of this consortium is to influence the global standards to include the specific requirements of India. Other objectives include the development of simulation tools and test-beds to enable all parties to share expensive resources. This will encourage experimentation and provide a platform for testing interoperability.

How soon can Sasken be a leader in mobile phone service companies?

We believe we are the leaders today, especially in our product offerings. In multimedia, the most direct competitor is PacketVideo (http://www.packetvideo.com). There are a number of small niche players who provide only parts of the solution. In-house development groups of handset manufacturers are also a competition. However, the maturity of Sasken’s offering has made it a natural choice over in-house development groups in at least one case of a tier 1 mobile handset vendor (the name of the vendor cannot be disclosed due to confidentiality reasons).

In protocol stacks we are the only third-party company that owns communication stack IP in GSM/GPRS, EGPRS, UMTS and TDS-CDMA. In application frameworks, we are we are only one of 3 independent companies who offer such frameworks worldwide, and have the most integrated solution.

Including IP-enabled and pure-play services, we are engaged with 5 of the top ten mobile handset manufacturers, 7 of the top 10 wireless semiconductor manufacturers, 5 of the top 5 wireless network infrastructure manufacturers and 2 of the top 5 wireless operators. This is evidence of our leadership position in the mobile phone services segment.

Software patent in the country is a contentious issue. Do you have any thoughts on the issue? Should the computer software be allowed to patent in India?

Sasken does not have any strong opinion on the software patent issue. We believe that the utility may be limited as they can be easily worked around. Interface specifications will not be easy to work around, but if universal adoption (say a standard) is the objective, then patenting will be an inhibitor. Software patent may be useful for very complex or large software. 

Do you have any thoughts on how in-house R&D in various service industries could be enhanced?

On this I could say the following:

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