Tata Elxsi is positioned as a product design services company, but check the small print and you will find it offers a whole lot and more in what chief executive officer Madhukar Dev likes to call the technical computing market

Does nuclear physics mix with business administration? It does in the case of Madhukar Dev, though blend would be the more appropriate term. The chief executive officer of Tata Elxsi has a master’s degree in nuclear physics from MS University, Baroda, and an MBA from IIM (Bangalore), qualifications that have served him well in a career spanning 21 years.

Mr Dev has been associated with Tata Elxsi for over 10 years in various roles, most recently as vice president and manager. He has been instrumental in nurturing the company’s economic, professional and, most importantly, intellectual growth.

A firm believer in the concept of knowledge acquisition, Mr Dev is passionate about applying contemporary management principles to business. The father of an 11-year-old son, he is knowledgeable about politics, economics and current issues, and picks gardening and reading as his favourite hobbies.

Christabelle Noronha caught up with Mr Dev recently to find out what Tata Elxsi is about and where it’s headed.

tata.com: There is some confusion about the scope of Tata Elxsi’s operations. Are you into software exports, a reseller for Silicon Graphics machines or a systems integrator? Where do you position your company?
Madhukar Dev: Today we are positioned as a product design services company. I think I need to briefly touch upon our history before I proceed. We were formed to manufacture, in collaboration with Elxsi, multi-computer processing unit computer servers in India. By the time we got the licences and built our facilities, the main collaborators with whom we were to make Elxsi machines had ceased to exist. So we looked at the alternate technologies that were available.

Silicon Graphics was the leading computer server enterprise in the world at the time (I’m talking about 1991), so we entered into a technical collaboration with the company to manufacture its computer servers in India. It was not possible then to import a fully-manufactured computer into the country without an import licence, and getting one was a time-consuming process. That’s when we started to manufacture these machines.

After we had made about 50 computer servers and sold them, government policies changed completely. Computers came under the ‘open general licence’ mechanism and anyone could import a fully-manufactured computer, which meant that it was no longer attractive to continue to manufacture them. This was in 1992-93 and we had a small team of 30-odd engineers who were developing the peripheral controllers that go into these computers.

When it became unviable to keep manufacturing, we started offering the services of these engineers, then part of what was called the R&D group, to overseas customers who wanted development work to be done. The R&D group was later renamed as the design and development group, and it started offering services to overseas customers. The domestic team that had been set up to sell computers within the country started selling the computers we imported from SGI (we were their distributor for India).

During the period between 1993 and 1995, hardware prices kept going down dramatically, and with it our margins. To sustain our domestic sales operations purely by selling hardware was no longer feasible. So from being a distributor we transformed ourselves into a systems integrator, where we put together complete solutions around the SGI hardware. Today one line of our business, which is the oldest line of business, is systems integration. It generates about 50 per cent of our revenue.

The 30-strong R&D operation we had when we used to be in manufacturing has today grown to 600 professionals who offer design and development services to companies all over the world. Both the operations [hardware and systems integration] generate equal revenues, more or less, and we have now started two new businesses. One is design-engineering services, with its orientation towards industrial design, and the other, which we have just got into, is animation services, where we provide both two- and three-dimensional animation content for customers in India and abroad.

tata.com: Where exactly does your expertise lie?
MD: Tata Elxsi’s expertise spans multiple disciplines, such as visual computing, networking and communications, multimedia, digital signal processing, embedded systems, storage solutions, hardware design, CAD / CAM / CAE, film/video and broadcast, and commercial and scientific computing.

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