The Hindu Business Line : Light in the Valley

Sniff the air over Silicon Valley and tune in with sensitivity to its spirit and you can come to one comforting conclusion - there's a technology rebound in the air.

Recently in Silicon Valley

THE old, disabled man in the wheel chair evoked more curiosity than sympathy. I was wondering how he had managed to board the bus and who would help him get off it. The lady bus driver was kindness personified as she promised to help me reach my destination, a Wal-Mart store. Then the bus pulled over for the old man to disembark. How will he take his wheel chair out? Should I help him since I am sitting near the door?

But then I saw how technology works.

The driver pressed a few buttons, and a platform popped up from beneath the steps. "One more day in whacky San Jose," the old man muttered as he wheeled his way out.

There I was in San Jose, heart of Silicon Valley. The term Silicon Valley was first used in 1971 and originally it was used to describe the Santa Clara County. The Valley is surrounded by the San Francisco Bay on the east, the Santa Cruz mountains on the west and the Coast Range to the south-east. A number of tech majors such as Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, AMD, Adobe and Cisco, apart from Intel, are headquartered here.

Yours truly was there to attend the Intel Developer Forum (IDF), an event at which the chip giant announces to the world its latest products and talks about what is in store for the future. Afteryears of covering the `IT beat', Silicon Valley and the places comprising it - such as San Jose, Sunnyvale, and Fremont - sounded rather too familiar though one was never in that part of the world.

It was indeed a different kind of experience to be in the technology hub of the world and to get the real hang of entrepreneurship that is palpable all over.

At the IDF Intel told us - some 300 journos and 3,000 attendees - which direction it believes computing is getting into: wireless, hotspots, Wireless Fidelity or Wi-Fi, personal server, hyper threading, nanotechnology, new chipsets, China and India.

Intel talked more about wireless and the Internet than about microprocessors and computers.

But more than that, one could feel that a fresh dose of enthusiasm is bubbling in the technology world.

So is the industry readying for a bounce back? I decided to check out.

Turnaround in the air...

There I met A G Karunakaran or `AGK'. AGK is the President of GDA Technologies Inc, an electronic design services company he founded along with three fellow Indians.

GDA Technologies had a pavilion at the IDF as Intel is one of its clients. AGK told me that things are indeed looking up compared to the past.

His company, started in 1996, today has 160 people, many of them in the two offshore centres in Chennai and Bangalore.

"We will have a turnover of about $10 million in 2003," AGK is confident. "We want to scale up in India dramatically over the next one year," he tells me before rushing off for a client meeting.

"A team of four sticking through tough times is news in itself" I told myself. But this is Silicon Valley where the dynamics of business are different.

"The very nature of this place will spur the entrepreneur within you," Krishna Kumar, my old friend and journalist who is based out of Fremont, tells me. He had landed in the Valley at the height of the dotcom boom three years ago as the need for content was as important as cutting-edge technology.

"During those days, you had to wait for months to get an apartment," he tells me. Then life came down to terra firma as the bubble burst.

The Valley is now preparing for the turnaround. Everybody believes that the worst phase of the technology industry is over, though things haven't really started to look up. "It could be a year or so (for things to get better)," says Margaret Steen, a journalist with San Jose Mercury News.

Steen tracks careers in the Valley and believes that though companies haven't started hiring in a big way, they are not firing people either.

A recent survey by The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE) also indicated that boom time is in the offing as most of its members said they are upbeat about the near future.

India on their map

Krishna Kumar took me to meet Kumar Malavalli, Co-Founder of Brocade, and one of the most successful Indian entrepreneurs in the Valley. Sitting in his palatial house in Los Altos Hills, Kumar also sounded bullish.

Areas such as data protection, disaster recovery and back-up services are already witnessing an upswing. Kumar believes that India can emerge as a location for providing disaster recovery and back-up services as companies are feeling the need for having such facilities in different geographies.

Such kind of outsourcing is the in-thing here. Everyone is planning to increase outsourcing to countries such as India as controlling costs is paramount.

"Outsourcing is now on in the Valley," says Uma Uppalapati, President of Globalways, a `human capital management' start-up. That prosperity is coming back is evident as he flaunts his latest gizmo, a Wi-Fi-enabled PDA that has a camera.

His colleague Dilip Khare, who is the Vice-President at Globalways, says that today companies in the Valley need people with multiple skill-sets.

"Earlier they would hire different people for each job, but today you have to do many roles."

For instance, a developer has to double up as quality analyst as well.

Khare says billing rates are, nevertheless, down by half. "Earlier, developers would get $80-90 per hour but now it has come down to $45-50 for a general coder." Ask how he survived the bad times and Khare says his income today is only half of what he used to make. "I know many people whose savings got completely wiped out in the past one year. There are guys who went back to India after parking their cars at the airport," he says.

But those days are gone, hopefully forever.

Globalways is confident that it can place 100 consultants on projects in two quarters, compared to the 25 it has placed so far. A job site is also being launched, targeting global companies who need people for the offshore facilities in India.

Spirit of survival

Later in the day, we drove down Highway One along the Pacific, from a trip to a Harley Davidson Museum and showroom at Santa Cruze. I had a few more hours left in the Valley.

"Could you take me to Palo Alto, where the renowned HP garage is located?" I asked my friend. He obliged and we reached Palo Alto nearly an hour later.

With the help of a map I was carrying, we spotted the garage, tucked away behind a house.

So there I was at the birthplace of the Silicon Valley, from where William Hewlett and David Packard started it all, way back in 1939.

Standing there in the twilight, I could feel the spirit of entrepreneurship still thumping from inside the garage.

Picture by V.V. Krishnan

vipin@thehindu.co.in

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
Don't do it all yourself

Teeny-weeny and naughty on the Net

Win 98 `auto login'

Removing worm

Online info on Outlook

Taking the call