The Hindu : Force in embedded computing

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Apr 15, 2003

Business

Business

Force in embedded computing

By N. N. Sachitanand

BANGALORE APRIL 14. Today's original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) of electronic products face a highly competitive market, compressed product lifecycles, quick time-to-market and constant pressure on margins. They are coping with this by shifting from proprietary to open standards platforms and outsourcing everything except core design. Telecom equipment makers, for example, having come under tremendous cost and resource pressures, have cut their R & D budgets by over a third and R & D staff costs by half in the past two years. They have decided to concentrate internally on value differentiation, outsourcing all other development.

One of the major beneficiaries in this transition has been vendors of embedded systems products. An industry leader in this field is Force Computers Inc., which was founded back in1981 in Munich but was acquired in 1996 by the U.S. giant, Solectron, one of the world's largest providers of electronics manufacturing services. According to Paul Mercadante, President of Force Computers, the company has a global workforce of around 1,000 persons and provides embedded solutions for telecommunications, storage devices/networks, data communications, instruments/industrial controls and medical instrumentation. A subsidiary of the company, DY 4 Systems, works on embedded systems for Defence and Aerospace. The networking and communications space accounts for 50 per cent of Force Computer's market.

Force Computer's strength, says Mr. Mercadante, is the fact that from its inception, it has been always in the vanguard of creating and applying open standards for embedded systems. Since 1981, when it co-pioneered the development of the VMEbus specification, Force has been involved in the formulation and implementation of standards and specifications such as PMC, PCI/ISA, ePCI-X, CompactPCI and recently AdvancedTCA, CompactTCA and Carrier Grade Linux. Recognising the richness of electronic design talent in India, Force Computers has decided to make this country one of its development nodes. Of its eight design centres, the only one in Asia/Pacific is in Bangalore. A small local start-up called Smart Module Tech was acquired in 1996 by Solectron in 1996 and transformed into Force Computers (India) Pvt. Ltd.

"We are focussing in Bangalore on the requirements of the telecom industry,'' says Chris Williams, Vice President and General Manager of Worldwide Product Marketing, who took charge of the Indian operations two years ago. "We have ramped up fast in the last two years, growing from 35 to 100 persons. We have graduated to designing full systems now and are doing cutting edge stuff.''

Recently, Force Computers India decided to enlarge the scope of its services to include system software development, so that its OEM customers will only be left with the task of porting their applications onto the embedded system platform. To spearhead this new activity, T. S. Ushasri, has been inducted as the Managing Director. She was earlier with Digital GlobalSoft as their chief technology officer. Due to the induction of this activity, she expects that the headcount in Force Computers India will go up by another 50 per cent in the next 18 months.

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