Symantec India to Identify Products for Global Market

Symantec Corp.’s product development center in Pune, India, has beenassigned to identify new products for the company’s markets worldwide,according to an executive of the company.

The Pune development center, which has been mainly into productengineering, is now assuming product management functions, includingidentifying new products that the Cupertino, California, company canbring to market, said Sharad Sharma, Symantec’s vice president forproduct operations and general manager for India.

The Pune center, set up by Veritas Software Corp. in 1992, became partof Symantec after the merger of the two companies in July this year.The center currently employs about 1,100, and accounts for about 20percent of Symantec’s development staff worldwide, Sharma said.

The center has so far taken full responsibility for the development,maintenance and enhancement of some of Veritas’ products, but theproduct management for these products typically continued in the U.S.because of the proximity to the customers, Sharma said.

As the market in India and the rest of the Asia Pacific region growslarger and becomes more sophisticated, there is now an opportunity toidentify product opportunities and do the product management in India,according to Sharma. “We will be focused on global markets, but withcustomer access and insight coming from regional markets,” said Sharma,adding that it was premature at this point to predict how many newSymantec products would come from the Pune center.

This year, the Pune center is experimenting with a number of ideas thatmay lead to new products. For example, it is looking at offeringavailability and performance products for customers using enterprisebusiness software from SAP AG of Walldorf, Germany, and is working onthis with Wipro Ltd. of Bangalore, which has a large global SAPpractice. The center is also looking at a product for the disasterrecovery (DR) market.

“We figured that in some pockets in India there are sophisticated DRcustomers who are good proxies for sophisticated DR customers anywherein the world,” Sharma said.

An upshot of the transformation of the Pune development center into alocation for identifying new product opportunities is that engineeringmanagers at the center are getting into business-facing roles. The Punecenter is exposing its senior engineers to field operations to ensurethat they can make the transition from technology innovation to productinnovation, according to Sharma. “We want them to get insights intocustomer requirements by this move,” he said. “We want our engineers todo the market and business analysis.”

By John Ribeiro – IDG News Service (Bangalore Bureau)