Sowing seeds in research

<div class="section1"><div class="Normal"><span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">Paul Horn</span> heads over 3,000 researchers worldwide at IBM’s research labs. Speaking to <span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">Saikat Chatterjee</span>, Horn talks about the furutre of Indian research labs: <span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">How important is IBM’s India centre?</span><br />The centre in Delhi is the newest and the smallest, but is growing very rapidly.Right now it is a small but important little jewel that has the potential to become a real star. We are going to grow this laboratory and the China research lab.<br />These two will be the focus of our growth for the research division. We believe that any centre needs 200 people to attain a critical mass. But we are not going to get to that number in a year.<br /><span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">Has any work done in India translated into products?</span><br />A lot of the work in e-commerce has been productised. Our focus is not just being innovative but to bring the technology right into the marketplace.<br /><span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">IBM does research over a 20-year timeframe. Does the Indian laboratory have a shorter research cycle?</span> Yes, it has a shorter time-frame but that is because the research done here is mainly on software. Typically, software has a much shorter development cycle than research done on semiconductors. It is very hard to do work which requires long development cycles because you don’t know how they can be applied. In all our labs, we try to have a balance between long-term exploratory work and near-time research work.<br /><span style="" font-weight:="" bold="">What research areas are you looking at for the Indian operations?</span><br />The future of the information age is about getting information from anywhwere. We are working on a system that analyses all textual data from the Web, for example, and give you the relevant data.<br />Some people call it the future of databases. As you know, we are building the world’s biggest supercomputer called the Blue Gene which can process huge amounts of information. Lot of the algorithimic work for the supercomputer is being done here. </div> </div>