Bangalore drew them in 2007

Bangalore drew them in 2007

It remains a key pit stop for global chiefs in their race for IT leadership


Anand Parthasarathy, The Hindu Business Line

Bangalore, Jan. 1 They came, they saw, they concurred: Bangalore remains a compelling place to do IT. The first impression on landing at the airport and trying to get out is a Kafkaesque experience.

Reaching the nearest luxury hotel – just 2 km away is a one-hour ordeal. The lights go off a couple of times during key presentations – till a noisy generator kicks in. But the compelling logic of doing core technology work in India’s infrastructure-challenged silicon city wins, at the end of the day.

So while the whining and groaning continues unabated, the Chief Executives of major Information Technology companies kept arriving jaded and jet lagged throughout 2007 – but leaving most times, with the conviction that Bangalore was still best, for the brainy work that their industries needed, to fuel their race for global leadership.

How to we love thee? Let us count the ways. (Excuse us, Elizabeth Barrett Browning):

The Bhishma pitamaha of the Internet, Dr Vint Cerf (now Vice-President and Net Evangelist at Google), came early in the year – and he had one core message to share: Forget the PC. The mobile phone was the information appliance of the new century.

AT&T’s Chairman-CEO Mr Randall Stephenson used his visit in July to announce a sharp shift in focus to wireless. nVidia makes some of the fastest graphics chips in the industry – and CEO Mr Jen-Hsan Huang came to Bangalore, because it was there that Indian engineers had crafted the GoForce 6100, a zippy new addition to the global product line.

Yahoo’s co-founder Mr David Filo has made Bangalore his annual stop and in April, he was on hand when 20 India-specific Web pages went online – many localised applications created in the same city.

Storage leader Quantum’s Chairman-CEO Mr Richard Belluzo was bound for Hyderabad in October – to open the company’s R&D centre. But next stop was Bangalore – because there is where the market lay.

When Mr Shantanu Narayen visited his Bangalore operation in early December, he was Adobe’s President. By month-end, he had become CEO.

On his second visit to the Karnataka capital, Dr Vanu Bose who founded Vanu Inc to exploit key technology that would create a software radio for mobile phones, set in motion local research teams who would take the product smoothly from 2G to 3G.

When Sun Microsystems President Mr Scott McNealy held up a tiny chip in the city in July — which housed the UltraSparc T2 “open” version of their server processor — he was in fact showing it to the largest concentration of Sun and Java developers in any city any where.

And for AMD CEO Dr Hector Ruiz, his visit to Bangalore in December, was a chance to unveil the chip maker’s latest quad core processor – and show off his smart new headgear: a traditional Mysore peta’

These are just the IT heads who spoke to this correspondent in privileged briefings for Business Line during 2007. The city also saw the likes of Cisco head Mr John Chambers make key pronouncements about their sharp ramp up of Indian operations during 2007.

Who’ll be here in 2008? Nobody’s saying yet — but chances are the Usual Suspects will be back once more — and a few other head honchos....As long as the desi brains based in Bangalore keep ticking and delivering.