BANGALORE, INDIA: As India is now positioned as one of the preferred destinations for companies for embedded design and development, Mohan Hebbar, vice president of Embedded Systems and Software at Symphony Services shares his experience on Indian Embedded design industry and talks about the way forward for developer community.

CIOL: Could you brief our readers about the role of embedded systems at Symphony Services and the areas that the company is targeting at?

Mohan Hebbar: Embedded software is one of the key growth areas for Symphony Services and is a logical extension of the company’s product engineering focus. Just as product engineering requires specialized expertise and focus, embedded software development requires similar capabilities and organizational DNA. Replicating our success from product engineering services for ISVs to embedded is the right growth strategy for Symphony Services.

We plan to expand into embedded space to tap the huge market opportunity in this segment. We provide complete embedded software product development services in communication, semiconductors, automotive, consumer electronics, and has initiatives in the medical devices and energy devices space.

CIOL: Can you elaborate on the importance of embedded design in the industry and how new technologies are helping designers to increase productivity?

MH: The importance of embedded systems is growing at a very rapid pace in all domains as it offers great opportunities to enhance the usability of systems and makes it possible to have smarter, connected and feature-rich products.

The embedded systems industry was born with the invention of microcontrollers and since then it has evolved into various forms, from designing for machine control applications to other new verticals with the convergence of communications. With a lot of functionalities being added, the need for high performance in embedded systems has become inevitable and so developers are increasingly leaning towards multi-core processors in their systems design decision.

Another recent development is that chip suppliers are now making and marketing new chips aimed at specific markets. For instance, Intel launched an embedded processor aimed at the Point of Sale terminal and other retail computing applications. Intel's Celeron CPU is extensively being applied to new IP STB designs.

CIOL: How software product engineering success provides the platform to take outsourced embedded software and systems development to the next level?

MH: The mantra of product engineering success is to build deployable products or solutions into the market and align them with ever-changing product road-maps. To manage product engineering services that enable clients’ success, a tremendous amount of detailing and process discipline is called for. In outsourced embedded software and system development, product detailing from use case elicitation to production testing is no different from software product engineering discipline.

By virtue of being engaged with product companies, we have a strong product DNA. This has enabled us to chalk out and tread the path of success in outsourced embedded space as well.