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June 16-30, 2001 CHIEF GUEST |
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"The Indian market needs to effect attitudinal changes to curb piracy" 'A pure researcher' is what he likes to call himself. With three patents already under his belt and more in the pipeline, Naresh Chand Gupta, 34, came home to become managing director of Adobe Systems India. A gold medallist from IIT, Kanpur, who went on to do his MS and Ph.D in computer sciences from the University of Maryland, USA, he has ensured that Adobe's development facility at Noida emerges as one of the most productive centres for the parent company. In a chat with Sudhir Chowdhary of Computers Today, he dwells on the importance of Indian R&D expertise.
People invest money where there is value. The question to ask is, whether the kind of work they are doing is of high-end value and is it significant. In my opinion, the development activity, which is taking place at the centres of Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, SAP, among a host of others, is playing a leading role in their worldwide initiatives, including customisation of their entire range of products to suit country and industry-specific needs. As a result, they are deploying the best technology, services, and development expertise. I can talk about it from Adobe's perspective. We in India are owners of two full Adobe products. We already have six or seven worldwide patents with many more in the pipeline. There will be a lot more of Indian names with a whole bunch of people from Noida involved in developing our new product versions. The team here is involved in leading-edge development activity, and I am sure the same holds true for others as well. Now, the question arises, are these centres a tribute to Indian software talents. And will they expand base? The answer is yes and this can be indexed by an increasing faith in Indian development skills. What are the activities that are being carried out at the Noida R&D facility? A number of interesting technology areas is being pursued at the Noida facility. The focus is on three main areas-data interchange technology, PDF (portable document format) on mobile devices, and image processing and understanding. As far as data interchange technology is concerned, it enables various formats to be imported and exported from Adobe products. This technology ships with Adobe products and enables import of Quark, Microsoft Word, Freehand, Corel, CGM and Rtf into Adobe products. The area of PDF on mobile devices is very exciting and a lot of the products and intermediate technologies are expected to emanate from our Noida centre. I am very excited about the Adobe Acrobat for handheld devices. It is a product that has been developed at the Noida facility right from the conceptualisation stage to design and development. We are expecting more such work to come to India. Adobe India is developing new algorithms for standard image compression technologies, like JPEG and GIF, and emerging compression technologies like wavelets, JPEG 2000, and JBIG2. What all trends do you visualise in the publishing software industry? Making visually rich, personalised content available anytime, anywhere on any device. I think that's the next era of publishing. We define this new category as 'network publishing' because this will dramatically change the way content is created, managed, and delivered. Leveraging the Internet, this represents the third wave of publishing-following desktop and traditional Web publishing. It's the era of creating visually rich, meaningful content that is managed and delivered reliably wherever the user wants, whether it's a Web page, printer, cell phone, handheld device, PC or an Internet appliance. Users are beginning to expect publishing applications and processes to create and reprocess content anywhere, anytime to meet specific information needs. Stove-piped workflows are quickly becoming obsolete. The Web is raising our expectations for content flexibility. Content and presentation must be synthesised or brought together at the latest possible moment when the consumer requests information. The emergence of this type of processing intelligence on the Web will be the hallmark of an entirely new class of applications. In the new era, content will be created once by an individual or groups, and presented exactly as intended regardless of device. The consumer will enjoy the convenience of viewing that content anywhere, and if desired, storing, forwarding or printing it to another destination. Adobe's role in network publishing is to continue evolving, integrating and extending its award-winning software that creates visually rich content. Isn't software piracy a major problem in the industry? How do you solve that? India is one of the biggest publishing markets and it is growing at an excellent speed. But the major problem is the high rate of piracy (over 90 per cent for Adobe products). I think it's because of the ignorance of the end users, and also the market culture. In near future the Indian market will have no option but to effect attitudinal changes in itself. Any user who is after quality and reliability will not resort to the extreme of buying the pirated version. It is really a risky affair. We are working on several fronts to minimise piracy. The foremost is to educate the people about the futility and the potential risk involved in the installation of pirated versions. Industry-wide, organisations like Business Software Alliance (BSA) and NASSCOM are helping us. The second step is to provide incentives to the original Adobe users such as after-sale support, and training for the efficient use of various products. The third way is the penalisation by resorting to the legal route. India has sound legal provisions to protect intellectual property rights and laws to control piracy. How do you manage to get good programmers, retain them and retrain them into new technologies continuously? It is hard to find skilled IT workforce. Thankfully, India is a good destination to get skilled workers at economical rates and this is its USP. Adobe has always believed in pampering its workforce. We are a company which encourages its people to think and innovate, and not just remain back-end office workers. We hire the best and respect them. Developers are encouraged to file US patents. Rewards like stock options and project bonuses are offered, which are at par with what is given in the US to inculcate a sense of ownership. |
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Most
of the global IT giants have set up software centres in India. Is there
enough creative development happening at these centres or are these mere
recruitment points?
