Dell to set up hardware design center in Bangalore

BANGALORE: Computing major Dell plans to set up hardware design center at its

Bangalore R&D center and plans to double its engineering team from the

current 300.

"We plan to gear up our Bangalore center to carry out entire hardware

design for our enterprise class of products right from board design, chassis,

BIOS to storage and server products and is the only company in Índia to have

such a center,"said Forrest Norrod, vice president of Server Engineering,

Dell.

The company plans to start the center by this September and is expanding its

current office to accommodate the new team. Apart from hardware design, the

center will also carry out performing beta testing and validation for all its

products, he said.

In addition to Bangalore, Dell has four other global R&D centers in

Singapore, Shanghai, Taipei and Austin. On choosing Bangalore over its other

centers, Norrod said that since Bangalore already supported three pillars of

their objectives-application planning, design and development and testing of

their products, it was strategic to have hardware designing also to be done

here.

Besides, the availability of local talent pool of electrical engineers with

experience in VLSI, board design and other required competencies, also favored

the choice, he said.

Currently the company is working on its next-generation server products that

would not only enhance the performance but also offer better thermal

utilization, easy to manage and deploy systems. The Bangalore center is also

working on IP based products for the global market and has filed around 145

information disclosures for last year, alone which leads to patenting of these

innovations.

Though we are currently the no 2 in server market shipments, we are

increasing our breadth and depth of our product offering to rapidly garner

leadership position, he said. Dell plans to enhance its offerings across the

different product segments including servers and storage, better processes

including clustering environment and offering these as packaged solutions. The

design center will work on par with their Austin center on complicated server

environments, adding more capabilities to their existing product line and also

on high end product offerings including blade servers.