A brain trust in Bangalore

By Steve Hamm

updated 6:11 p.m. ET Aug. 18, 2005

They call it the monkey incident. A couple of months ago, a handful of engineers at Sarnoff Corp.'s lab in Bangalore, India, were conference-calling with colleagues at the research-for-hire outfit's headquarters in Princeton, N.J. They were sitting around a table in a meeting room when they heard loud banging from behind an air conditioner cover on the wall. One of them lifted the cover, and a baby monkey leaped into the room and raced around underfoot.

Two of the engineers were so surprised that they jumped up on the table. Then, "We all fled the room and closed the door," says Kiran Nayak, one of the participants, who recalls the incident with a huge smile.

It all turned out well in the end. In due time, the monkey returned to its mother, out on the building's ledge, and the engineers reclaimed their conference room and resumed talking about data-compression algorithms.

Such are the oddities of global research collaboration.

'Highest expectations'
Sarnoff is one of many Western tech research outfits that have turned to India for its combination of low labor costs, big brains, and English speakers the likes of which are available nowhere else in the world. Notables including Microsoft, Google, and IBM face plenty of challenges, but they're convinced that their investments in Indian research will pay off handsomely in the end.  (MSNBC is a Microsoft - NBC joint venture.)

"We have the highest expectations for Indian innovation. There's no question the raw talent exists," says Krishna Bharat, principal scientist at Google, who's starting up the company's new lab in Bangalore.

Sarnoff, a descendant of RCA's original TV-research lab, opened its doors in Bangalore a little more than a year ago and already has 70 employees in two offices. Now it's in the process of consolidating in a larger space to make room for another 80 engineers it plans on hiring within the next 12 months.

Third wave
It's all part of Sarnoff CEO Satyam Cherukuri's master plan for creating a new model for tech research. "We're pioneering global networked R&D on behalf of our customers," says Cherukuri, who came to the U.S. 20 years ago from India for graduate school and has run Sarnoff since 1998.

Cherukuri calls this the "third wave" of tech research. The first wave was in-house R&D in large corporations. The second came with venture capitalists funding innovative startups that eventually grew to maturity or were bought by the big players. "This wave is about harvesting innovations anywhere in the world, with companies using their own employees or third-party researchers like us."

Sarnoff's India operations add to its small army of researchers, who are distributed worldwide. It has 400 engineers and scientists scattered in Princeton, Silicon Valley, Belgium, Japan, and, now, India. The company went through an extensive review of where it should expand next. While it considered 13 countries, it didn't take long to fix on India.

Test bed
Google, Microsoft, and IBM have similar strategies for distributing their research operations around the globe. IBM has long had a research outpost in Delhi, but added a software lab in Bangalore in 2001. Google and Microsoft have opened research labs in Bangalore within the past 18 months.

They can pick up an engineer just out of school for $5,000 to $10,000 a year in salary. But it's not just about the money. It's about the talent, says P. Anandan, managing director of Microsoft Research, India. Also, he says, "India's a test bed for developing technology for emerging economies and rural communities."

Doing research in India isn't without its challenges, however. Tim Mitchell, an Aussie who is Sarnoff's managing director in Bangalore, says it's tough to locate seasoned managers and engineers with the skills in analog-chip design that the company needs.

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