Over the past decade, the Indian research and development (R&D) arm of Intel, the world’s biggest chip maker, has come to play an important role in the development of new products, making its mark with the six-core Xeon 7400 processor a few years ago to the recently launched Haswell microprocessor. Kumud Srinivasan who took over as President Intel India last year, tells FE’s Ajay Sukumaran that the India team is now exploring ways of using its expertise to address some unique market needs. Edited excerpts:

India is Intel?s largest non-manufacturing site outside the US. What’s the vision for the operations here?

We have a very strong engineering presence here. We are looking at a very exciting India market, lots of innovation is happening in this market and we are looking forward to accelerating the growth. My vision is that I leverage some of our engineering capability over here to help address the needs here.

In India, about 70% of our employee population is focussed on engineering. It is a mix of everything, hardware and software in India. All of our projects are globally based projects and we are doing bits and pieces of these projects here, so we’ve got a pretty comprehensive mix of expertise. So now we are looking at some of the unique India market needs and seeing how we can use some of the expertise we have to address the needs, not just necessarily all by ourselves but also working with the ecosystem around us in India.

What would be these unique needs?

If you look at the India market and the level of literacy, you can begin to see it would be very beneficial, just to take the ultrabook as an example, to have speech-based software, in fact, maybe taking that all the way into the hardware. Speech recognition on the client so that we are not forcing the user to interact with the PC through the traditional keyboard. And then take it further and look at all the other Indian languages and can we actually take it beyond 1 or 2 to, say, 9 different languages?

Another area, which in Intel we refer to as perceptual computing, is interacting with the PC in more creative ways like gestures and facial expression and you can imagine how something like that would be very powerful in India. And take that from the PC platform and move it into tablet and you can begin to see that it could be extremely useful. Add the security piece into the hardware, we can begin to see how we could use security to do authentication.

There are certain things that would probably, once we introduce it over here, become very useful all over the world but it would be most pressing perhaps in the India market. That’s what we are exploring.

All this is underway already?

We are beginning to look at it and also understand what it would take to actually develop the local ecosystems, the ODMs (original design manufacturers) over here. If you look at the component manufacturing world in India, there’s a lot more that we can, and should, be doing. That’s something we are beginning to look at, talking and seeing how we can work with the government and work with industry fora like the IESA and Nasscom to develop device component manufacturing in India which is a great area of win-win.

Would that mean from a pure R&D focus you are moving to a larger role now?

I wouldn’t really refer to it as a larger role but it is looking at the engineering expertise that we have and applying it not just to our global product roadmaps but also seeing how we can apply it to our local market needs.

As you go further now, how do you see your employee strength growing?

In about 2010-11, we almost doubled in size. Having gone through that growth spurt in the recent past, at this point we are not looking at another significant one.

We are looking at essentially a period of stability where we digest the resources that we did add on. Basically, doing what I described doesn’t necessarily mean more resources, it just means perhaps a slight shift in focus, a slight expansion of focus.