Satish Gupta has to scratch his memory "" really hard "" when asked to name at least one fascinating product that appeared in the market during his four years as head of the IBM research centre. As nearly 400 new products from the IBM labs are patented every year, choosing one is tough. He does pick one finally:
One truly significant thing we did was to dramatically improve the hard disk drive capacities in computers. IBM disk drives are the densest in the world, he says. An ordinary IBM desktop today may have upto 9 gigabytes of storage capacity and a laptop upto 3 GB. For the regular computer user this is indeed a boon.
Gupta, an IIT Kanpur graduate, had just completed a PhD in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University when he joined IBM's research and product development division fifteen years ago. There he worked on 3-D graphics and video imaging technology. He was one of the founders of the power visualisation system used in high-end engineering graphics. Soon he was heading the research division's strategies and operations worldwide as its vice president.
Recipient of three outstanding-innovation awards from IBM, Gupta was in Delhi recently to firm up plans to launch a range of new products from IBM including Windows NT workstations.
Gupta firmly believes in the salutary benefits of information technology (IT). It will not only make life more efficient, IT has the answer to a lot of social problems, he says. Working from home on computer networks, for example, is a better way to tackle pollution, he suggests.
And he speaks from his heart. Gupta is quite the doting family man, who likes to spend all his free time with his wife and son.
