In 2005, when the capability of the VMEbus was being challenged by the increasing needs in aerospace, defence, and such critical-data-intensive missions, Robert Tufford, Embedded Communications Computing, Motorola, noted in an article that the VME Renaissance was taking place, characterised by innovation and performance improvement, while maintaining backward compatibility and protecting existing customer investments. Here is a similar example from our home ground--Mistral Solutions' V8TS board, recognised by NASSCOM as a market-facing innovation, would typically fit radar, sonar, imaging, medical and naval applications. Anees Ahmed, president and CEO, Mistral Solutions reveals his thoughts about it.

How important is innovation in a tech firm like yours, and how do you keep up the vibes of innovation in your organisation?

Innovation plays a key role in Mistral's design process. It is Mistral's constant endeavour to deliver industry-leading technologies in the embedded domain. One of our missions is to be a leading product-realisation company, achieving about 30 per cent of our revenue from our own products. Today, we are competing in the international sphere, so if we are not creative, innovative and timely, we cannot be competitive. For companies like Mistral that invest in R&D, innovation is a business need.

You've won the award for a market-facing innovation. How important do you think this is, in comparison to the other two broad types--process and input innovations?

Innovation of any kind is good and important, be it products or processes. They all achieve the same goal of taking a company forward, and help it compete in the global arena.

Can you please tell us more about V8TS, and elaborate a bit on the innovation that won you this award?

The V8TS Board (VME-based 8-TigerSHARC and PowerPC board) designed by our expert design team is an extremely powerful dual sub-system product consisting of digital signal processing (DSP) and control processing on a single 6U VME platform. This is one of the first designs that combine the power of PowerPC and multi-DSPs on a single platform. It is a very complex board with about 10,000 parts on it. The board has a multi-processing DSP system, a PowerPC-based system, and a user-programmable FPGA (field programmable gate array). The board is ideal for usage in radar, sonar, imaging, medical and naval applications.

What are the competing products in that space (if any), and how do you manage to maintain an edge over the rest?

The V8TS is a first-of-its-kind design. There are other DSP-based engines available in the market, but currently no product provides signal processing and application control features on the same platform. One V8TS card provides 29 gigaflops of performance, and can replace a current system consisting of 6-50 DSP cards.

What is the market for your product in India, and how big is it outside? Are you tapping both?

Our current focus is to make this product available to the Indian market--specifically, the defence sector. The expected business potential in the next three years is approximately 15 crores in the domestic market alone.

What, according to you, comprises an 'innovation ecosystem', and how good is it in India, compared to other countries?

The ecosystem in India is not mature. Our educational system does not encourage innovation or innovative thinking. Unless this changes, we will not see major innovative efforts by individuals and companies. .