Panel Discussion at Embedded Systems Conference - India Design Houses: More of the same?

ESC is India’s Largest Conference and Expo on Embedded Systems. ESC includes technical sessions, expo and industry sessions.There was a CXO Panel discussion yesterday on “India Design Houses: More of the same?” 

The objectives of the discussion were:

• To sum up the nature and future of Indian design
• How to go up the value chain in design?
• What the untapped areas of design are for Indian companies?
• What expectations MNC companies have for Indian partners to help them tap into new markets and market segments?
• Understand the current state and future direction of an Indian design house

The panel was moderated by PVG Menon, President and CEO at Vann Consulting. Speakers were

• M.A. Mohamed Saliya Co-Founder, iWave Systems Technologies Pvt. Ltd
• Sudhir Sathiyamoorthy
• AGM, Business Development,,
• Technology Practice, Infotech Enterprises
• N. Kishor Narang
• Head, Corporate Design Excellence Centre,
• Indo-Asian Fusegear Ltd
• Mahesh Mehendale, TI Fellow and Director, VLSI Architectures, Texas Instruments

Mr Menon started the discussion by quoting statistics about the Indian electronics industry. There is an increasing trend of products being designed for India, out of India and meant for the world. Every technology company in this space has an “India presence” or “India alliance”. The overall electronics industry stood at $41 Billion in 2009 out of which $17 Billion was locally manufactured. The semiconductor industry as such stood at $5.4 Billion. The Indian design industry was valued at $9 Billion and is experiencing tremendous growth.

Mr Saaliya spoke about how iwaves systems, a design company started in 1999 has been successful in providing design solutions to overseas clients. “Selling electronic design to Japanese companies is like selling ice to eskimos”, he said. Despite this iwave has managed to be a part of many Japanese products.

Iwave has been instrumental in designing many innovative products, among them is an ophthalmic unit whose cost was brought down from 5 lakh Indian rupees to 50,000 rupees. Mr Sudhir was of the opinion that the Indian design industry has a compelling future. To move up the value chain Indian firms have to build concept products which have innovative designs and also bring down costs.

The panel also discussed about how design houses need to have a consulting layer in order to provide end to end design solution to clients. Design houses need to work with domain experts in building domain specific products.