IBM sets up Indian tech design center
IBM Corp. in New York announced this week the establishment of a center in Bangalore to provide technology design services for advanced chips, cards and systems to companies in Asia.
IBM Corp. in New York announced this week the establishment of a center in Bangalore to provide technology design services for advanced chips, cards and systems to companies in Asia.
IBM's chief executive officer (CEO) and chairman of the board, Samuel Palmisano, made a low-key visit Monday to Bangalore, India, where the company's Indian subsidiary is based. This is the first visit by a chief executive of IBM to India and comes in the wake of recent trips to India by Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and Sun Microsystems CEO Scott McNealy.
Investments by Intel Capital, the venture capital program of Intel, dipped last year -- not because of a shortage of good deals, or lack of funds at Intel Capital, but because the company often could not find other investors to join it in investing in startups, according to an Intel Capital executive.
Believing that the current cost of storage area network (SAN) installations are too high to attract small businesses, Kumar Malavalli, co-founder of storage-switch provider Brocade Communications Systems Inc., has invested in what he calls an "ecosystem" of eight companies that are developing low-cost and high-performance SAN technologies with the avowed goal of "taking SAN to the masses."
The Indian government-run Center for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) has designed a parallel-processing 1 TFLOP (trillion floating point operations per second) supercomputer, scalable up to 16 TFLOPs and available on a build-to-order basis.
The promise of the Internet still holds good, though its fulfillment is likely to take longer than was initially expected, according to Bill Gates, chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corp. of Redmond, Washington.
The release of a production version of the free GNU operating system (OS) has been delayed beyond the end of the year, as the current development version of the system does not support large disk partitions and high speed serial I/O (input-output), according to Richard Stallman, president of the Boston-based Free Software Foundation (FSF).
Intel plans a major expansion of its research and development efforts in India and will increase the number of employees it has here from the current 1,000 to about 3,000 over the next few years, Chief Executive Officer Craig Barrett said here last Friday. The investment required for this expansion would be about US$100 million, Barrett added.
Bangalore-based Infomart (India) Pvt. Ltd. has designed a Linux-based personal digital assistant (PDA), that aims to offer features comparable to PDAs built around Microsoft Corp.'s Pocket PC operating system (OS), but at a price below lower-cost PDAs based on the Palm OS.
Oracle Corp. plans to make India its key product software development and customer services base outside the US, according to an executive of the company.
India's Finance Minister has ordered a probe into the "improper payments" that Xerox Corp. said its Indian joint venture had made in connection with government contracts.
Oracle plans to work with data center operators in Asia Pacific, rather than set up its own data centers in the region for its IT outsourcing services, according to a company executive.
Even though Sun Microsystems's research and development (R&D) budget will be flat this year over the previous fiscal year, it is unlikely to impact Sun's investment in its pet software projects, according to an executive of the company.
After a dip in investments last year, Intel Capital, the venture capital program of Santa Clara, California-based Intel, expects an increase this year, according to a company executive. Investments by Intel Capital this year are expected to be close to US$400 million compared to about $360 million last year, said Claude Leglise, vice president and director of worldwide geographies sector at Intel Capital.
After a dip in investments last year, Intel Capital, the venture capital program of Santa Clara, California-based Intel, expects an increase this year, according to a company executive. Investments by Intel Capital this year are expected to be close to US$400 million compared to about $360 million last year, said Claude Leglise, vice president and director of worldwide geographies sector at Intel Capital.