PUNE, INDIA: Symphony Services, the global leader in the product engineering outsourcing services, organised a roundtable in Pune on embedded software and services titled 'India, the new frontier for "Technovation" in Embedded software and services'.

The roundtable was lead by eminent speakers: Poornima Shenoy, President, Indian Semiconductor Association (ISA), Amitava Roy, President, Symphony Services, India and Mohan Hebbar, Vice President, Embedded Systems & Software Business Unit, India, Symphony Services were present at the roundtable and shared their views and perspective on various aspects of the fast growing embedded software segment and growth opportunities that has put India on a new road map in technology and innovation. 

Symphony focus on embedded software and services
At the event, Symphony Services shared its foray into the embedded software and services space since year 2006. With embedded business unit accounting for 20 percent of the revenue in the year 2007 and expected at 25% in 2008, the company plans to leverage further on opportunities in the communication, devices and storage domains.

According to Amitava Roy: "For Symphony Services to foray into the embedded segment was a logical extension of its Product Engineering Focus for ISVs (Independent Software Vendors). The growth of semiconductor industry has coincided with growth of embedded space in Symphony.

"Currently the market needs expertise from semiconductor domain to application and as India moves up the value chain, a need to collaborate and innovate will emerge in the embedded technology sector and Symphony is at the forefront to leverage on this opportunity. At our Center of Excellence we are investing and engaging in emerging technologies, creating value accelerators to enable customers for a fast time-to-market and providing consulting services for high-end product definition and design."

Symphony Services currently provides complete embedded software product development services for clients in Communication, Semiconductors, Automotive, Consumer Electronics, Medical Devices andStorage. With a strong leadership team in Symphony and client base, the company will continue to look at multiple domains for growth and will focus on both organic and inorganic growth to further its embedded business.

The company also continues to focus and expand its presence in the Pune market. In less than three years, the company has built a 1000+ strong delivery centre at its Pune operation. The company has been working on cutting edge work in the storage area and has become a magnet for top talent in Pune. Symphony Pune teams work on wide variety of product development work - for market leaders to start ups, complete product development for embedded devices and for storage to e-business category. So far, over 12 client patents have been filed by Symphony Pune operations. 

Unseen technologies touching human lives
Mohan Hebbar highlighted the embedded application work undertaken at Symphony which primarily focuses on innovations in embedded especially in the communication space including infrastructure and device verticals for infotainment, media applications, enterprise communications and healthcare segments.

The company's approach is to visualise the embedded technology through its impact on human lives and work on client solutions through latest technologies such as nano, mobile application, NFC, RFID and ZigBee technologies.

Embedded industry growth figures
Ms. Poornima Shenoy threw light on some interesting trends and facts on the Indian semiconductor and in specific the embedded software and services industry.
* Embedded software which is the key differentiator responsible for driving the hardware design industry is the largest part of the hardware design world and about 81 percent of the revenue comes from the embedded software industry.
* Currently at $ 4.9 billion, the embedded industry is predicted to reach $ 8.9 billion by 2010. The industry has an annual compounded growth of 22 percent in India which is remarkable as compared to 7-8 percent globally, hence one of the fastest growth areas in three years to come in the IT domain.
* The job opportunities created by the sector attract the crème of the engineering talent. Currently there are 130,000 jobs in semiconductor design world and in the VLSI design world there are about 14,000 designers in the industry across the country. Every single chip designer creates about five jobs in embedded software and that in turn creates about 50 job opportunities in application software. Hence, the VLSI designer is the key to the actual growth.