DARE - Because Entrepreneurs Do

Do you see HPC in the Indian industry beyond military and academics?
Absolutely. HPC is now used in automotive, manufacturing, product development, VLSI design, chip designing, and so on. In fact there are clearly marked domains where HPC is used. These include CAE (computer-aided engineering product designing—all the way from airplanes and automotive design to smaller products like mobiles are designed on HPC platforms ), EDA (electronic design automation), visual content creation, which is movie-making and game development, life sciences, and biotechnology—drug discovery and oil exploration.

All of this is today done out of India.

When you sell HPC platforms, is it a direct sale or a channel sale?
That depends on the vendor’s business model. Large customers are mostly sold to directly. Even there a partner comes into the picture for the project implementation.

What type of partners get into the HPC business? I assume these are not your typical box pushers.
It depends on what kind of value the partner brings in to the project. If they offer good service expertise, then we sell through the partner and the partner services the deal. Then there are partners who contribute in terms of solution pieces. We integrate that solution piece along with our infrastructure and sell that along with the partner. The partner can be as large as an Infosys or TCS or one having a turnover of a couple of crores.

What are the barriers to enter the HPC business?
Let us look at entrepreneurs entering the HPC business. If one needs to set up a rendering organization for instance, the entry barrier is a little high. He can get to solve some rendering and designing projects, he can get small pieces of a movie, which is one small character for example. He can look at starting as a design partner for a bigger house.

In CAE, you can look at a development facility that, say, designs components for automobiles.

The expertise that India has in HPC has now gone one step up the value chain in terms of our designing capabilities and understanding of the domain.

How big is the opportunity in India?
The market opportunity, including infrastructure, applications and services is 250 million dollars. Entrepreneurship in this space, I guess is currently at about 20% of this, that is fifty million dollars a year and growing.