Tata Elxsi, Sasken enter product design market

Tata Elxsi and Sasken Communication Technologies, pioneers in tapping IP-based revenue sources in India’s $ 3.5 billion embedded-systems design market, have come up with prototype designs of products to help them explore the emerging market of product design by customisation.

The companies are targeting the burgeoning consumer durables and communication devices market with the two models they exhibited in the recent GSM conference in Spain.

“We have developed a generic design for a portable media-player on which can be customised into a full product according to our clients requirements,” said Nitin Pai, marketing head of the Rs 220-crore Tata Elxsi.

The company had long been developing and licensing out designs for individual components, but this is the first time it has come up with an entire product.

Pai added that the new approach would help the company in tapping the fast-evolving market for smart phones, media-players, game-consoles and toys. “We believe that this model of going to the market ready with a

base product is going to be much more popular than the current approach,” he said, pointing to the ‘services model’ adopted by his bigger rivals like TCS, Satyam and HCL.

Bangalore-based Sasken, which had been investing in developing prototypes of software and hardware components for such products for over a decade, also came up with the design for a state-of-the-art mobile-phone.

“We have patents in various parts of the phone, including multi-media and basic-communication like GSM, GPRS and broad-band... Taking advantage of our expertise, we decided to put it all together and offer our customers a basic model which we will modify according to their requirements,” said G Venkatesh, Chief Technology Officer, Sasken.

The two companies are pioneers in developing component-IPs, such as those that control the video-capture and playback of phones and other devices, and are the first to go to the market with a ready-made design for an entire-device.

“In a way, it is the second stage of outsourcing product development,” Pai said, “so unlike just doing bits and pieces, we are telling companies to stick to what they are good at... branding, marketing and getting customer feed-back and outsource the designing part to us.”

Hyderabad-based Satyam Computer Services, till now restricting itself to a services-only approach under which it undertook design activities only as part of a client-contract, too is reported to be mulling a switch over.

“We are thinking of it,” said Ravi Amur, vice-president, Embedded Systems Group, Satyam Group. He added: “as we believe it will help us better address the Taiwanese customers who frequently wants an entire product designed rather than just parts. It will also help in reducing product development time.”