After planning a substantial investment in India earlier this year, Adaptec has rolled out its new initiatives. David Noah Nair, country manager, Indian sub continent, Adaptec briefs Chitra Padmanabhan about the company’s future channel and R&D strategy

What are the R&D initiatives undertaken by Adaptec in India?
R&D is critical to our business and we have been investing more than 20 percent of our revenues in R&D year on year. As India has the ready talent, we believe that India will play a big role in our future products. The importance of India can be gauged from the fact that the India R&D centre is the only centre of the company outside the US. Earlier this year, we decided to invest at least $10 million over a period of three years to ramp up our India operations. We have already acquired a 12,000 square feet centre in Hyderabad. Our 150-plus R&D engineering team will operate from this centre. Adaptec plans to gradually increase the scope of work being carried out in Hyderabad and the Bangalore centres by establishing a Compatibility Test Laboratory and enhancing its R&D capability to support its range of next generation storage and design solutions. The investments made in India are also aimed at aligning the US corporation’s research and development work with the Indian centre in order to
support its outsourcing requirements.

What is the scope of work done by Adaptec’s Bangalore centre?
Since Bangalore is the technology hub we are looking to develop stronger driver and firmware teams to support multiple operating systems. Cashing on the opportunity in India, we intend to drive at a time-to-market advantage to gain over the competition by having 24-hour development cycles.

What are the new initiatives taken by Adaptec in the Indian market?
Our major emphasis is on designing next generation Internet Small Computer System Interface (iSCSI) technology-based solutions and compatibility labs across OEM platforms and operating systems. In this connection, we have extended RAID and SCSI products with a new family of Ultra320 SCSI. The new suite of SCSI controllers deliver the performance needed for mainline storage, video editing and streaming video and audio while integrating RAID, enabling companies to protect their workstation and server data. The second family of products that we are heavily banking on is VideOh!, which has the capability to transfer analogue video to the PC. This product is primarily targeted at the home user. Users can connect VideoOH! devices to other devices such as VCRs, camcorders and USB connections in PCs. All devices come with Adaptec’s Sonic MyDVD software which allows users to not only edit content but also personalise his/her own DVDs with his own titles, sounds or special effects.

The product will be available in both the internal and external variants. Unlike the internal product that is a PC/MCI card, the external product will be a self-contained unit with its own power supply. The VCD creator will feature USB 1.1 connectivity while the DVD will feature USB 2.0. We have also become more aggressive in signing up partners as we believe that our growth will come from partners. We also will be conducting more roadshows to increase awareness for our products.

What is your current channel strategy?
We are looking at expanding our channel network to ensure that products are easily available across the country. Adaptec is also exploring options of tying up with retail chains across the country. Since VideOh! is targeted at existing PC users, the option of a tie-up with a consumer durable channel is also not ruled out.

The company is looking at reaching out to the home market through the distribution of evaluation units. Also on the agenda are a series of road-shows in the first quarter of the new year since we see a potentially huge market for our new launches. The company has trained its distributors and is looking at the product to help demystify the notion that Adaptec is a tech-heavy company. The distributors have committed adequate manpower to sell Adaptec products. The company is also looking at a distributor to take the product to other countries of the Indian sub-continent.