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Report authored by: Arjuna rao, Chavala
Dr A Paulraj gave a picture of the life in Silicon Valley from his first
hand experience of setting up a company called "Giga bit networks" one
and half years ago. He said that there is no dearth of funds. He said that
8 out of 10 startups succeed in one way or other. One key challenge that
entrepreneurs in silicon valley have to face is that of competition. As
an example, he mentioned that there were two or three companies when he
started the company one and half year back. Now there are over 80 companies
addressing the same business segment. He mentioned that while silicon technology
doubles every 18 months and storage technology doubles every 9 months,
the optical technology is doubling every one and half months. He said that
one can gauge the speed at which the technology is changing by saying that
optical technology will have an impact of 100 times the silicon technology
in a span of 10 years. He said that in USA, there is tremendous shortage
of skills and transnational startups are increasing.
He explained how Bandwidth is the fuel for the new economy. It is a
crucial element which can make various applications in the area of content,
personalisation, e-commerce, intranet, extranet, outsourcing, video, os
dial tone pervasive. Telecom infrastructure can be looked at on a scale
ranging from Backbone, IP core, Regional, metro, IP edge, Broadband access
to Enterprise. He gave an example of infrastructure stack and example players
in each segment as captured below
Example Players- Infrastructure stack
Mariamba - IP Service
Web Methods - IP software
SUN, CISCO,DELL- IP Component
EXODUS, iBeam - Network services
Quest, Level 3 - Access providers
Juniper, Zaffire - Network components
He said that in US, researchers would come out of the universities to
commercialize their ideas. For each technologist, we need 10 architects
and for each architect, we need 10 implementors. He said that as our software
industry is at the level of implementation. We should move toward the level
of technology creation, where the pay-off is highest.
ISRAEL model
He said that Israel has succeeded in moving up the value chain. If you
look at the factors responsible for this, you will find that Israel has
these + points -Two strong universities
-Good physical infrastructure
-Direct flights to US(12 hours)
-Army as technical training ground for entrepreneurs
-US connections of faculty
-VC with Israeli connections
The typical company structure of a company of Israel these days consists
of the front end (Marketing, product management) in US and the backend
in Israel. Examples include VYYO, Orchid, metalink etc.
He said that India has english speaking technical manpower, social/cultural
orientation for sw /technology, very good UG educational base, very good
skills developed via engineering services work, as assets. The challenges
faced are lack of leadership skills, poor infrastructure, weaker job skills
update/training and weak research base in universities. While one could
find 10 to 15 conferences/training programs on any day in USA, we have
hardly few conf/training programs in India. He said that Indians have enterpreneurism
in their blood. What we need to work on is making the infrastructure better
and research base stronger. He explained that Stanford university allows
professors to consult one day per week and also allows them two years of
leave if they wish to start companies.
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