'HPE India won over 350 patents in last 3 yrs, complexity increased'

We are no longer just an infrastructure company that sells computing, storage, and networking, said Cynthia Swarnalatha, VP - Engineering, SW CoE, Compute Business Group, and HPE India Site R&D leader

Multinational IT firm Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) has secured over 350 patents from its second-largest research and development (R&D) centre in Bangalore. Cynthia Swarnalatha, Vice President – Engineering, SW CoE, Compute Business Group, and HPE India Site R&D leader says the complexity of work has increased multifold in the last decade.

What are some of the important projects currently under progress at Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s research and innovation centre in India?

At the global level, we have announced a partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on exascale computing. Right now, we are in the process of delivering everything as a service. Bangalore R&D Center is leading the contributions in several areas.

For example, we are doing a lot of work in developing software for storage arrays in the cloud. HPE storage services that enable this right using various artificial intelligence (AI)/ machine learning (ML) technologies is a breakthrough work that we do from India. Our HPE Aruba team offers a portfolio of products that enables mobility-centric networks as well as security, and network management assurance services that can operate at scale. In addition, we have an Advanced Development Center in India that is doing a lot of work in emerging areas like AI/ML blockchain, and things like memory-driven computing, in collaboration with our Hewlett Packard labs global.

How are you investing in opportunities arising from cloud transformation?

We are no longer just an infrastructure company that sells computing and storage, and networking. We are now transforming into an edge-to-cloud journey. Several years ago, HPE said we don't believe everything has to be in the public cloud, the world will be hybrid. Today everything from music and entertainment to industry data is on edge, which refers to moving computer storage and processing as close as possible to data sources -- the users and devices.

Data is exploding at the edge. As much as 70 per cent of our applications and data live at the edge. Our HPE Green Lake offers a unified experience from edge to the cloud. We bring the cloud to you where you are. But we let customers pay only for what they use. It's a very open and secure cloud service that we offer.

How are you partnering with academic institutions on research and efforts like the centre of excellence?

HPE India has a long-standing research collaboration running with the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kharagpur. It's in the area of AI and data. We have partnered with them in several joint publications at top-tier conferences and published open-source artifacts. We did some joint work with them in quality of service (QoS) for network and storage a couple of years ago. Right now, we still have several projects with them. We published papers at machine learning conferences, such as the International Conference for computer vision (ICCV), as well as the European Conference on machine learning.

Last year, we also started work with a couple of universities or colleges in India to develop applications using swarm learning. All of this includes data-efficient training for computer vision AI models, which facilitates autonomous driving use cases, you know, and also enables data-centric approaches for trustworthy AI, where we are talking about fair, robust, and explainable AI.

How has your R&D work translated into patents and industry solutions?

We have been working in India for more than 30 years now – one of the oldest technology companies to be here. In just the last three years between the calendar year 2020 and 2022, we have at least 350 patents that have been filed and granted, which makes us the second highest contributor to patents in HPE after the US, which is our headquarters. These patents have been filed in areas of cloud engineering, analytics, artificial intelligence, infrastructure management, software security, high-performance computing, switching and routing, software-defined storage, etc, just to name a few themes.

Our R&D workforce is composed of experienced engineers at all levels, right from entry-level to the Distinguished Technologists, Engineering directors and VPs, including an Engineering Fellow.
 

While there is growing consensus on ethical AI, we don’t have uniform standards for it. Are you looking ahead to develop any framework in this area? 

We are contributing with innovation that will allow us to navigate to the right data with governance and trust. We are working with open source communities such as Linux Foundation AI, which works on trusted AI and OpenLineage on some of these efforts because these are open frameworks that are working in this area of trusted data analysis. So we are contributing to those innovations in the market.