THE WORLD’S BIGGEST DEVELOPER COMMUNITIES
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Javascript 11.4
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Hyderabad saw biggest surge in
tech space absorption in 2019
Compared to
Bengaluru, the
city’s infrastructure
is better. And
talent is abundant
Swati Bharadwaj
& Swati Rathor | TNN
F
or years, Bengaluru has been
the biggest absorber of Grade
A office space, driven by de-
mand from IT and technology
companies. In 2019, Bengaluru re-
mained the biggest absorber. But
there was one big change.
The growth in absorption by Hy-
derabad was a phenomenal 82%, as
per estimates by real estate consult-
ing firm Knight Frank. That was
way higher than all other major
cities. Bengaluru was at just 14%.
What’s more, Knight Frank esti-
mates that in the second half of
2019, Hyderabad, with 8.9 million
sqft of office transactions, did better
than Bengaluru, at 7 million sqft.
The year saw two huge develop-
ments in Hyderabad – Amazon
opened its biggest single office facil-
ity in the world, and Micron Tech-
nology signed a leasing deal for over
1 million sqft, the largest ever single
deal in Telangana’s SEZs.
Something’s changing for the
city. It was once seen as a contender
to Bengaluru in tech. But it seemed
to be falling back as the agitation
around splitting Andhra Pradesh
intensified. Now, with that issue
fully settled, the Telangana capital
appears to be getting its mojo back.
A few things seem to be particu-
larly going for it. Bengaluru’s infra-
structure is creaking, Hyderabad’s
remains good. Property is cheaper
than in Bengaluru. And there’s
plenty of good engineering talent,
and that talent remains longer in a
company than in Bengaluru.
Anand Ramamoorthy, the India
MD of US chipmaker & storage solu-
Skills the electric
vehicle biz needs
Avik.Das1@timesgroup.com
E
lectric vehicles (EVs) will be
huge in India, and the country
needs more engineers who have
a cross sectional knowledge in the
fields of electrical, electronics and
mechanical engineering to build a
robust EV industry.
EV makers are looking to hire not
from the traditional automakers but
from the fields of software, consum-
er electronics and even from the
aerospace industry, where connectiv-
ity plays the most important role.
Since EVs are all about
connectivity, the field of
mechatronics has assumed
importance. It is a multidis-
ciplinary branch of engi-
neering that focuses on the
engineering of both electrical
and mechanical systems and
includes a combination of robotics,
electronics, computer, telecommuni-
cations, systems, control, and prod-
uct engineering.
IGNITE
YOUR CAREER
“This is a subject that was started
in US universities about three dec-
ades ago, but there is nothing of this
sort in India,” says Chetan Maini,
co-founder of Sun Mobility, an EV
ecosystem player. “One needs to com-
bine three areas – the mechanical
motor, electronics to drive it, and
smart software to control it. We need
engineers who understand multiple
domains.”
Kamal Karanth, co-founder of
head hunting firm Xpheno, says with
We hire many from the
chemical engineering side
who have knowledge of the battery
and thermal engineering for heat
dissipation
Anandakrishnan R | EXECUTIVE VP,
HR AND IT, TVS MOTOR
16
THOSE WHO CAME CALLING IN 2019 & 2020
AMAZON
Its single largest office
building in the world, three
times the size of its largest
building, which houses the
HQ, in the US
To house 15,000 people
MICRON TECHNOLOGY
Over 1 million sqft facility,
one of its largest tech
development centres globally
Single largest leasing deal
in Telangana’s SEZs
Will house 5,000 techies
over next five years
INTEL
1,500-people capacity design
and engineering centre to
strengthen computing and
communication technologies 1) Good physical
ONEPLUS
Facility will be the Chinese
smartphone maker’s largest
global R&D centre
Rs 1,000 crore investment
tions company Micron, says the
quick ramp-up of the company’s
design, engineering and IT teams to
over 1,000 in little over a year proves
that the talent landscape in Hy-
derabad is abundant. “Great infra-
structure and ease of entry were
also key determinants while choos-
ing Hyderabad,” he says.
Ramagopala Reddy, VP of R&D
at OnePlus India, which set up its
largest global R&D centre in Hy-
derabad last year, also emphasises
the “large pool of attractive talent.”
OnePlus’s Hyderabad centre plays a
major role in driving global innova-
tion, especially in areas like AI, 5G
and IoT. It currently has over 300
employees and expects to ramp this
to 1,000 by the end of 2020.
Telangana’s IT and industries
principal secretary Jayesh Ranjan
says the steady rise of Hyderabad
many of the products either in the
design or prototyping stage, the focus
on R&D in the EV space among
OEMs is high and the majority of the
R&D talent investment is in the do-
mains of batteries, battery manage-
ment, security, driving experience
and infrastructure for charging.
“Battery management talent with
3-6 years of experience can com-
mand a salary of Rs 10-15 lakh per
annum. Typical employment change
in this domain is seen to bring a sal-
ary movement between 30% to 45%
over the last drawn salary,” he adds.
While all manufacturers import
the battery cells, a handful are
moving to make the battery
themselves, and are filing pat-
ents around the technology.
Companies like Ultravio-
lette Automotive and Ather Energy
are designing the circuit board of
the battery, looking into the thermal
management – how the heat is
spread uniformly over the cells and
also focusing on electrical safety.
Ultraviolette said of its 50 engi-
neers, 15 are part of the electronics
and engineering team that works
on the battery.
“All are from the consumer elec-
tronics and aerospace industry and
worked in companies like Samsung,
Reliance Jio and Honeywell with
about 10 years of experience on aver-
age,” says Niraj Rajmohan, CTO at
Ultraviolette.
Tarun Mehta, co-founder of
Ather Energy, says there is a signifi-
cant skill gap. “There is a demand
for power electronics engineers who
can work on high voltage systems,
and for people with deep knowledge
of embedded software.”
Being
specialised
in one area is not
enough, as the
vehicle is connected.
People joining us
have to realise they
have to reinvent
themselves
Sunitha Lal |
CHIEF HUMAN
RESOURCES
OFFICER,
ATHER
ENERGY
6.9 Java
6.8 Python
6 HackerRank 5-10M
5.5 C#
AMAZON’S NEW OFFICE IN HYDERABAD
Hyderabad’s
home to large
facilities of all 5
most valued tech
firms globally –
Apple, Microsoft,
Google, Facebook
and Amazon
HYDERABAD’S SECRET SAUCE
3) Large educational
infrastructure and and R&D institutes
connectivity,
4) Reasonably priced
compared to Bengaluru real estate
2) Good availability of 5) Cosmopolitan
skilled talent pool ambience
is not by default but by design. “For
most IT companies, the choice is
between Bengaluru and Hyderabad.
Where Hyderabad scores the most
is infrastructure. The quality of
infrastructure is superior and the
cost of acquiring that infra is much
lower,” he says.
He also notes that around a dec-
ade ago, there was a gap between
the talent in Hyderabad and that
in other major cities like Bengal-
uru and Mumbai. “But in the last
five years, the efforts of the gov-
ernment and educational institu-
tions have made a considerable
difference in making the city’s
talent industry-ready. Our talent
in the area of GIS and financial
analytics is unmatched,” he says,
adding that even the attrition rate
is 6-7% lower in Hyderabad com-
pared to Bengaluru, and the cost
UNWINDING WITH UBER
In the pics are Uber employees
in their offices in India
Workplace massages, Masala
Bhangra, Yoga and Tai Chi
classes are held as part of
Unwinding with Uber, a series
of engagement activities to help
destress employees
They are organised across
Uber’s India offices in
eight cities. One employee
engagement activity is
conducted every month
There’s also the Uber
Premier League that has teams
competing in cricket, basketball,
football and table tennis
How UST’s Arun Kumar got $30K from Facebook
Ardra.Shankar@timesgroup.com
H
acking is often seen as a pe-
jorative term. But there are
also white hat hackers – the
good guys. They are armed with
the same set of tools and tactics,
but with an ethical approach. In
fact, big companies rely on them
to find vulnerabilities in their sys-
tems and help them defeat mali-
cious hackers.
“The goal is to make the inter-
net a safer place for all,” says Arun
S Kumar, one such ethical hacker
from Kerala. In 2016, while most
teenagers his age were casually
scrolling through their Facebook
feeds, 20-year-old Arun spotted a
technical bug on the social media
platform through which one could
PHP 5.2
Twilio 5 2.8
Salesforce 5 2.1
Celebros (NLP) 5 2
J-Frog Artifactory 5 HERE
Source: /Data
OPPO
Largest R&D centre
outside China. Working on
5G solutions and India-
specific mobile phones
and solutions
SHURE INCORPORATED
US-based microphone &
audio electronics major’s
first India engineering
centre
INTERCONTINENTAL
EXCHANGE (ICE)
It’s the New York Stock
Exchange (NYSE)’s parent
company. The India
headquarters in Hyderabad
will initially focus on
providing ICE Data Services’
reference data
S&P GLOBAL
Opened a second office
in Hyderabad in 2020 after
opening a tech development
centre employing over 1,000
employees in mid 2019
of acquiring talent is 15% lower.
Those trained by the Telangana
Academy of Skills & Knowledge can
hit the ground running. The pres-
ence of top-notch educational insti-
tutions like IIIT-Hyderabad and IIT-
Hyderabad, as well as startup incu-
bators like T-Hub, have made a huge
difference to the innovation environ-
ment in the city, Ranjan adds.
Nasscom’s vice-president of in-
dustry initiatives KS Viswanathan
says that in the early 2000s, Hy-
derabad primarily had entry-level
talent, but it has now matured. Also,
many techies are returning from
abroad, strengthening the mid-man-
agement talent pool. “This is very
helpful as 70-80% of hiring in MNCs
is lateral hiring,” Vishwanathan
says, adding that in the coming days,
the city can improve the diversity
of talent and exploit its potential in
Masala Bhangra, a cardiovascular exercise
routine with a Punjabi twist
INSPIRATION
easily hack another user’s pass-
word and take over any account
on the site. “I found that the pro-
gramme written for transferring
celebrity or business pages is not
foolproof, which means anybody
could manage the page and make
edits,” he says.
He soon wrote to Facebook’s
web security team and informed
them about the vulnerability.
Within a fortnight, Arun received
a bounty of $10,000 from the com-
pany for his report, under their
Bug Bounty Program.
That’s not all. In the next four
months, he reported two more
bugs on the platform and has so
2-5M
4 C/C++
3.5 Digital Ocean
2.9 HackerEarth
SAP Cloud Platform
Visual
Docker
2 been unable to transform the
2 Kaggle
Our first CoE
(centre of
excellence) in Asia
was launched here.
In five years, the
Hyderabad centre has
delivered innovations in
payments, risk and eats engineering
on a global scale. We are investing in
growing and scaling data sciences,
analytics as well as a self-sufficient
product management organisation
to enable the transformation of
Hyderabad as a full spectrum
tech site
Naga Kasu | DIRECTOR-ENGINEERING
AND HYDERABAD SITE LEAD, UBER
Our design
and
engineering centre
in Hyderabad
is engaged in
making contributions
to critical global products
and technologies across next
generation SoCs (system on chips),
graphics, hardware platforms and
software to fuel Intel’s growth
Jitendra Chaddah | SENIOR DIRECTOR,
STRATEGY & OPERATIONS, INTEL INDIA
engineering R&D, where Bengaluru
is a dominant player.
The queue to enter Hyderabad
is only growing longer. This week,
Experian announced a new develop-
ment centre in the city, where it
plans to hire 2,500 techies by 2024,
and Accenture rolled out an innova-
tion hub spread over 3 lakh sqft that
will house over 2,000 techies and
Accenture’s first Nano Lab in the
Asia-Pacific region.
Hyderabad is the next ‘Silicon
Valley’ of the country, says Karan
Virwani, CEO of co-working space
provider WeWork India. “The city
has become a hub for indigenous
entrepreneurs and large IT/ITES
companies as well as large enter-
prises from across the world who
are increasingly looking at Hy-
derabad as their base of India
operations.”
YOGA
Our holistic approach
focuses on various
factors that affect
physical, emotional and
mental well-being and
build community within
the company. Uber’s
culture convoy is a
voluntary group across
locations in India and
South Asia that helps
organise activities based
on the requests we receive
from our employees
– Neha Mathur | SENIOR HR
BUSINESS PARTNER, INDIA
&
SOUTH ASIA, UBER
far received a whopping $30,000.
Later that year, he was invited by
the Facebook web security team
in Silicon Valley to share his in-
sights on how to make the website
safer for its users. “It was a great
learning experience, meeting
hackers from around the world,”
he says. He is now among re-
nowned white-hat hackers listed
in the Facebook hall of fame and
is one of its go-to bounty hunters.
Arun developed an interest in
computers at a young age, and
has been cracking security bugs
in major web platforms since
2013. After graduating in com-
puter science from MES Institute
of Technology and Management,
Kerala, Arun joined IT firm UST
Global’s Thiruvananthapuram
TECH I’D LIKE TO SEE
AI devices for visually impaired
S
ight is the most delightful of
senses that we possess and
being bereft of it is a trauma.
Assistive technology has made
great strides in this regard with
audiobooks, scanners, apps for
auditory directions, etc, but has
lifestyle of the
visually
impaired.
Technologies
such as
voice
recognition
and
computer
vision, along
with ML and
wearable
AI,
have
Anil Valluri | PRESIDENT, INDIA AND SAARC, NETAPP
This billionaire’s
parents were
small farmers
Sujit.John@timesgroup.com
L
ast year, Business Insider
ranked him among the
richest Indians globally.
Around the same time, Forbes
ranked him the 225th wealthiest
American, with a net worth of
$3.6 billion.
Among rags-to-riches stories,
it will be tough to beat that of Jay
Chaudhry. He was born and
raised in a tiny village in the foot
of the Himalayas, on the border
of Punjab and Himachal. His
parents were small farmers.
“Our village got electricity
when I finished 8th grade, run-
ning water when I finished 10th
grade. I sat in a car for the first
time after 12th grade. And I had
a flight for the first time when I
went to America to do my Mas-
ter’s,” he says.
THE GURU
His parents encouraged him
to study because they hadn’t
been able to study. Chaudhry
proved good in studies. So teach-
ers took interest in him. In 10th
grade, a teacher said: “You’re
wasting your time in the class.
Go and sit in those bushes and
read. Do your assignments and
show me your assignments twice
a day.”
Pre-university (11th grade)
was in a college in the district
headquarters, about 12km away.
So he could bike it. He became a
gold medallist in Himachal Uni-
versity. He was looking to do en-
gineering at the Punjab Engi-
neering College, but then a
teacher told him that the IITs
have a system where they take
top performers from universi-
ties. “I didn’t even know about
the IITs then,” Chaudhry says.
But he applied – for electron-
ics engineering. He was selected
to IIT-BHU. It was a cultural
shock for him, to go from a
village in Himachal to be
with the metropolitan
crowd at BHU. He adjusted.
Like most in BHU, he
too applied for Master’s to
US universities. The Univer-
sity of Cincinnati, Ohio, of-
fered him a schol-
arship. The
Tatas had a
funding pro-
Arun Kumar, who is 23, has
been cracking security bugs
in major web
platforms since
2013. He’s a
product engineer
at UST Global, but
also volunteers
at Kerala Police’s
cyber research
centre
office as a product engineer in
2017. He’s a part of the UST Ga-
rage Ventures team, a product
development and startup accel-
erator programme.
He also volunteers as an as-
sistant commander at Kerala
led to specialised products
which have life-changing
potential. Warsaw in Poland
has implemented a smart city
project that has created waves
with its intelligent automation,
improving the quality of life and
providing independence to the
visually impaired. The future
relies on affordable assistive
technology that can help
differently-abled people. Tech
pioneers are constantly
innovating on this front. One
such mainstream technology
that could be life-changing is
the driverless car that can help
them navigate treacherous
terrains. The increasing access
to AI-based vision-assist
devices has the potential to
take life to new heights.
gramme that helped him buy the
airline ticket. “It was just luck
and it comes together some-
times,” Chaudhry says modestly.
After Master’s, he worked in
IBM and a few companies. When
the 1990s internet boom spawned
successful startups, he wanted to
try something in internet secu-
rity. But he couldn’t find funding.
One day, his wife, Jyoti, told him
politely: “Hey, you keep talking
about it (starting a venture). Ei-
ther you do something or you
shut up.”
Chaudhry told her the only
way to do it is to put their life sav-
ings into it. Jyoti was an MBA
from IIM Calcutta, and they had
met at the University of Cincin-
nati. Hers was a combination of
technology and finance. The two
decided to take the risk, and
jointly started a venture called
SecureIT in 1996. “It was proba-
bly the biggest and best gamble
of our lives,” Chaudhry says.
Within two years, SecureIT
was acquired by VeriSign for $70
million. It was a very successful
story in Atlanta. 70 of their 80
employees became millionaires.
The Chaudhrys now had
plenty of liquidity. They founded
three more startups in quick suc-
cession. All were acquired.
Chaudhry then wanted to do
“something big, something last-
ing.” It was 2007. Chaudhry saw
SaaS companies like Salesforce
and NetSuite becoming very suc-
cessful, and was convinced that
security too would have to move
to the cloud. That was the genesis
of Zscaler. The company went
public in 2018 and has a market
capitalisation today of over $7
billion. Its customers are the
likes GE, Siemens and Shell.
Last year, Chaudhry recol-
lects going to see the then CIO of
GE, Jim Fowler. “I said, Jim,
thank you for making time to see
me, even though we are
such a small fraction of
your IT budget. He
smiled and said,
`Even though you’re
a small part of the
budget, without Zscal-
er, I have no cloud
strategy. I want you to
come and see me eve-
ry six months’.”
Jay Chaudhry
Police’s cyber research centre
Cyberdome, where he collabo-
rates with government depart-
ments and agencies, ethical
hackers and law enforcement
organisations to develop frame-
works to help protect the online
world from security threats.
Arun plans to use his reward
money for higher studies. He also
hopes that in future, more young-
sters would join forces against
cybercrimes. “Earlier, access to
information regarding cyberse-
curity was limited. Today, there
are many local developer com-
munities and hundreds of blogs
and tutorials on the internet to
help you brush up on your skills.
And there’s no dearth of oppor-
tunities.”