Courtesy: CIOL

• Claims it as the only company to set up such a hardware design center in India

Bangalore, Apr 28: 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.