Bangalore: Huawei Technologies, the Chinese global telecom equipment and solutions provider, has decided to explore the possibility of forging partnerships with major Indian information technology companies such as Tata Consulting Services (TCS), Infosys and Wipro.

Commenting on this major shift in strategy, George Huang, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Huawei Technologies India Private Limited (HTIPL), which is Huawei Technologies' largest overseas research and development centre, told The Hindu that cooperation is the mantra of the future.

"Cooperation is the trend in the industry. One company cannot sustain development activities on its own," he pointed out.

Admitting that more detailed discussions were needed with players such as TCS and Infosys before final plans on a partnership could be hammered out, Mr. Huang said that cooperation could entail a variety of areas.

"For example, we provide telecommunication equipment to TCS. We can now cooperate with TCS to develop some of the support systems for TCS's parent company, Tatas. Besides telecom support systems, there are other areas such as manpower requirements for customer support and maintenance.

In the case of Infosys, besides cooperation between our research centre in Bangalore and them, there could be cooperation in China between Huawei and Infosys' recently established development centre in China," he said.

HTIPL, which was set up in Bangalore in mid-1999, is a key component in Huawei's plans in the development of cutting edge technology, products and solutions that can be supplied to its customers worldwide.

According to Mr. Huang, besides developing products such as Softswitch, intelligent networks, mobile handsets software and networks management software, HTIPL develops common platform software that can be widely used on all of Huawei's products and solutions.

On HTIPL's new innovation in next generation network, Mr. Huang disclosed that the most important part of Huawei's next generation network software platform was developed in Bangalore.

"For next generation network equipment where we were No 1 in 2005 in terms of market share, value and contracts (according to the international market research and consulting firm Dittberner Associates), the Bangalore centre made the most innovative contribution," he said.

Bangalore centre

Highlighting the importance of the Bangalore centre, Mr. Huang said that it had developed three software products for Huawei's optical systems.

"The software developed in Bangalore for the optical domain will be used by all of Huawei's optical system solutions, be they traditional or latest," he said.

Praising India's capabilities in processes, Mr. Huang said that this was one of the reasons why Huawei came to India: "Based on the mature process systems we can assure the quality of our products and solutions. This (mature processes) is a big advantage when compared to our other 11 research and development centres," he added.

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