Singapore: India’s largest software exporter—Tata Consultancy Services—has signed an agreement to collaborate with the Gintic Institute of manufacturing technology of Singapore’s Nanyang Technological University to jointly work on embedded software systems for smart controllers.
These controllers are used in any process oriented activity like petrochemical refining and in the oil and gas industry.
“We intend to develop the prototype of a smart controller in the next 9 months,” TCS regional director for Asia Pacific, Girija P Pande said. Gintic and TCS will jointly have claim over the intellectual property that emerges from this high-end research collaboration.
The aim is to add functionality to the existing controllers and make them much more cost efficient. Mr Pande said that the addressable market for such controllers is quite large, especially in the western countries.
The collaboration agreement is likely to be extended to joint research in other areas also. “This is just the first step,” he said.
Tata Consultancy Services will also expand its operations in the Asia-Pacific region over the next few months. Specifically, development centres are planned to be set up in China, Australia (Melbourne) and Japan (Tokyo) over the next three months. This would boost the share of revenues contributed by the Asia-Pacific geography, which comprises all 13 countries east of India, to 10 per cent of overall revenue.
“Currently, Asia-Pacific contributes a little under 10 per cent of the revenue. Even to touch 10 per cent would be a significant achievement since the total revenue pie is growing by over 35 per cent,” Mr Pande said.
Revenues of the 19,000-employee TCS are expected to top $1 billion for the year ended March 2002, against $690 million last year. In Singapore, which has been identified as one of the three focus markets for the company in the Asia-Pacific region, TCS has two other ventures besides Gintic. It has a 49:51 venture with Singapore Airlines for providing aviation services to the company and also to other international carriers. TCS also holds a stake in ‘eAsiafinance’, a unique initia-tive for wealth management on the Net.
The other two focus markets for Tata Consultancy Services are Australia and China.
TCS, a Tata group company, also has research and development alliances with universities like Carnegie Mellon University, University of Humberside (UK), University of Waterloo (Canada), University of California, University of Wisconsin, Rotterdam School of Management and with the Indian Institutes of Technology.
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