TCS strengthens patent portfolio

Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), the $4.3 billion information technology (IT) company, which has filed nearly 200 patent applications over the last five years, continues to strengthen its intellectual property (IP) portfolio in areas such as development and design, business systems and cybernetics, embedded systems, performance engineering, broadband and broadcasting.

During 2006-07, it made 25 patent applications and was granted three patents. Some of the patents it has filed comprises a method to include virtual ads in video presentations; a system for calculating vehicle insurance premium; method to encrypt a video sequence; and a system for the time of arrival (ToA) estimation in wireless communication systems.

The company is also planning to launch a software program for enterprises called TCSInstantApps. Styled on the likes of GoogleApps, TCS InstantApps features multi-tenancy capability, which implies the hosted application is capable of servicing all customers (treating them like tenants). This enables it for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) offering too.

"This breakthrough technology has been created in TCS Innovation Lab, Delhi after many years of research. We have realised that using this technology, we will be able to prepare situational applications for our customers with very little turnaround time and most importantly provide them with a right technology for business process innovation. This is expected to cover both small and medium businesses (SMBs) and large enterprises," said K Ananth Krishnan, vice-president and chief technology officer.

TCS has 19 innovation labs across the world, of which around seven are in India. To extend this concept to its clients and partners, the company launched the 'Co-Innovation Network' (COIN) in January 2007. COIN is a collaboration of TCS, academic institutions, industry bodies, alliance partners, customers, venture capitalists and 8-9 Silicon Valley start-ups. The TCS Labs' has also made a foray in the embedded systems arena "" especially for "cognitive radios" - and "nanotechnology". Krishnan says cognitive radios are "a potentially disruptive technology being researched for future wireless communications". The approach here is to bring intelligence to the radios that have an evolutionary path from Software Defined Radios (SDR). Regulatory certification for a cognitive radio is one of the major challenges for the deployment of such devices.

"We are also exploring nanotechnology from several dimensions "" its impact on bio-tech, impact on electronics and embedded systems and on material sciences. For instance, the following projects have been initiated in collaboration with IIT Bombay, development of an artificial retina using extremely low power sub-45 nm electronic devices; using DNA-based structures for interconnects in very large scale integration (VLSI) fabrication," said Krishnan.

TCS has also made contributions to the open source community. For instance, it has developed tools to deal with Indian language input for the web; and a text-to-speech system for Telugu that was integrated into the desktop to help the illiterate by reading out the text on the screen.

As in 2006-07, the estimated cost savings in terms of dollar was $8.05 million and the number of licences issued to TCS stood at 3,479. "The savings figure is obtained by assuming a conservative notional licence fee (as though if we had purchased licences from a third party tools vendor). This is for internal licences. For external users, it is based on actual revenue obtained," explains Krishnan.