TCS rolls out enterprise innovation

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) today launched its enterprise-wide innovation programme to mark the silver jubilee of its research centre, the Tata Research Development and Design Centre (TRDDC).

With this, the company has upped its total spend on innovation to 4.5 per cent of its revenue.

K Ananthkrishnan, chief technology officer, said, "Core R&D accounts for 0.26 per cent of our overall revenues and an enterprise-wide innovation programme will account for 4.5 per cent of our overall revenues."

Besides TRDDC, the company already has 18 domain-specific labs located in India and globally. For instance its retail and travel laboratory is in Chennai, media and entertainment lab in California, automobile in Detroit and manufacturing in Pune to name a few.

In October, TCS had announced the setting up of its domain-specific lab for networking and large data systems by March in Peterborough.

The other areas of interest, Ananthkrishnan said, "Are banking, insurance, healthcare and government for which we will set up domain specific labs in the next few months."

Each of the domain-specific labs will also be supplemented with customer experience centres for showcasing technologies.

"We work in 11 different domains and each domain will have multiple showcasing centres in various parts of the world," said Anathkrishnan adding, "Currently, we have five such showcase centres and will increase these to cover all the domains. As the centres act as fertile ground for ideating and innovating."

The enterprise-wide innovation ecosystem includes strategic alliances with its customers, academia like Stanford University and others, multilateral bodies like CSIR and start up companies.

"We have 10 active alliances with startup companies in IT, infrastructure, consulting, process management and engineering services and some of these alliances have become several million dollar businesses for us and the companies," he said.

TCS also provides engineering services, infrastructure management services, consulting, products and assets and IT back office support.

"In the past two of these businesses, engineering services and products have come from our R&D practice. They now account for 10 per cent of our overall business and are growing. Besides R&D has also had significant investment in the IT Services business," said Ananthkrishnan.

The new areas of interest for the company in software engineering are data masking, for which the company is developing its version 2 of its data privacy tool, Masketeer, system complexity management, where companies work with over 100,000 desktops, 1,000+ servers and inter-linked communication systems, fraud detection and information extraction tools, for getting information from disparate systems.

"All of these would have application in the financial services sector largely and even healthcare and government sectors," said Mathai Joseph, executive director, TRDDC.

Elaborating on the technologies commercialisation, he said, "The pilots for data masking and system complexity management tools are completed and they are ready to go live with potential to become separate practices for TCS," Whereas the fraud detection and information extraction tools, "are undergoing trials and will take a year to go commercial."

TRDDC is also working on process engineering technologies nanotechnology and on transformation of industrial waste into useful products. "These would take a few years for commercialisation."