Emerson bets big on Indian arm

The US-based Emerson Electric expects its Indian subsidiary to play a leading role in the foundation of the company's products globally.

Emerson Network Power India, formerly Tata Liebert, is one of the four companies mandated to participate in its global research & development initiative and officials state that India's strength is complementary to one of the company's main focus, which is software engineering.

Gene Hayden, vice-president, sales and marketing, Emerson Network Power - Asia Pacific, said: "The Indian operations serve as a manufacturing as well as marketing hub for south Asian countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh and Nepal. It contributes to nearly 10 per cent of the revenues to Emerson Network Power- Asia Pacific and we expect this share to rise to over 20 per cent in the coming years."

The global engineering team of the company is spread across North America, Europe, and Asia Pacific. Hayden emphasised the importance of India's role in the development of the global products development for Emerson and indicated that various initiatives have been taken with respect to the Indian R&D.

The global R&D numbers, he said, have thus increased over the past two years and the company aims to double the growth this year.

Hayden said: "To efficiently condense product development times and source products globally, the Indian R&D centre has assumed importance due to its superior software development capabilities. The Indian R&D hub is strong in terms of software capabilities and India provides software support for new product development in conjunction with hardware capabilities provided by China for manufacturing products worldwide with joint developments happening for all the new platforms."

India, he said, has been instrumental, in developing products like Network Power Switch and also used the global platform to create a product series which are exported to other countries from here.

The R&D centre here has also contributed to the development on the cooling front, which is the UCS-24X7, a cooling solution specially devised for server rooms in small to mid-sized IT companies has been developed here.

India has also been responsible for designing the first of emergency cooling technologies for radio base stations.