Dr. Ravi Gopinath took charge as the Managing Director and CEO of Geometric Ltd. in October 2006. Prior to joining Geometric, he was with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS), where he went on to lead their Engineering and Industrial Services strategic business unit and manufacturing practice. He joined TCS at its Corporate Research & Development Center in Pune, India, in 1994. An active researcher, he is the author of several publications and holds two international patents. Dr. Gopinath graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology, Mumbai, with a major in Chemical Engineering in 1989. He holds a Ph.D. in Chemical Engineering with a specialization in Control Systems from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the United States, which he obtained in 1994.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: The initial response has been very good. We certainly appreciate the consideration. The award has generated some good visibility for us, and we probably need to leverage the best out of it.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: When we talk about the EDS space, I believe one of the key elements of Geometric's success has been its constant focus on innovation. The field of engineering, in my view, is predicated, first and foremost on innovation, and secondly, on efficiencies, which have to work together in conformance. Geometric, when it was established 14 years ago, invested in creating Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) and technologies that were focused on delivering engineering productivity. Our starting point was innovation directed at efficiencies; and that ethos has clearly remained with the company throughout. The fact that we have made a strong commitment to create intellectual property assets and products in the engineering domain gave us a firm foundation on which we diversified, first into developing software for leading Independent Software Vendors (ISV) of the world in the engineering space; and then extended logically into partnering with them to implement those solutions for end-users, and in many instances even embedded our technology as part of the ISVs' solutions. Increasingly, we have started to leverage our own domain expertise in multiple areas and technologies to take those solutions directly to the end-users of the engineering domain. We have taken this step from the technology enablers side of the engineering world into the process enablers side, as we have extended the business of global engineering services, through our acquisition of Modern Engineering Inc. in 2006. It has been a very logical progression, but what I would like to emphasize is that the heart of the company has always centered on innovation targeted at engineering. I think that theme has stayed within our company consistently and I believe that is our differentiator and is fundamentally what has contributed to our success.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: There are two or three facets. Firstly, the technical core of the company has always been extremely strong. There is a very strong mindset within the company about product orientation, which means that people understand what it takes to make a successful product, whether it is a physical product, as in the case of an automotive OEM, or a software product. We started off more in the domain of software as a product, but software as products also addressed a larger enabling requirement in the manufacturing and the engineering world. This internalization over the past years has led to a very strong product realization mindset in the company, which has been embodied in everything we do. I believe that is the foundation of the competencies that we bring to the table. So, I would say that in the domain of engineering technologies, there are very few companies in the world that have such a diversified portfolio of engineering technology competencies across multiple platforms. It is truly one of the deepest and widest portfolios that one would find in the EDS domain. This has been a tremendous source of value to our customers across the globe, be it our strategic partners like Siemens PLM, or customers like Ford.

Secondly, as you said, it has a lot to do with customer relationships. In fact, our management philosophy is "people building partnerships". We view each customer as a relationship that we have to sustain and grow. It is the strength of the relationship foundation that enables us to carve strategic directions together. In both the cases that you cited, there has also been a clear articulation of the strategic directions that we are taking together, which has, in my view, contributed to such kind feedback on Geometric.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: At this point, I would say that our footprint from the product development process into the manufacturing process is a developing one. Our historical strength was in the product development processes, which revolved around modeling, simulation of the product development, and the manufacturing process. What we have done over the last one and a half years, as you rightly pointed out, was launch a set of offerings related to shopfloor systems, founded on the paradigm of integration between the traditional PLM and manufacturing system, which we foresee to be an increasingly strong and seamless one.

If you look at the buying pattern today, I would say that customers are still not buying a single integrated solution and that is largely going to be determined by the availability and the robustness of enterprise applications that span the entire process. I would say that the area as far as the technology footprint is concerned; the coverage of looking at product development through manufacturing operations management has a seamless continuum. This technology landscape is now evolving and there have been many significant changes and consolidation in the technology world associated with that paradigm. From our perspective, we are engaging with customers in the pure-play PLM space and manufacturing operations management space. But what is interesting is that the intersect between the two or how manufacturing information can be more effectively leveraged at the enterprise level to drive product development and vice versa; that is now probably one of the hottest areas of engagement and discussions. I believe that this clubbed sourcing, as far as we are concerned, is probably a year away, but there is every sign that this is an extremely active area of engagement.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: Absolutely. EMI is a very hot button today. Let me answer your question in two parts. To update you on our relationship with Dassault Systèmes, we have a joint venture with them for product development and R&D where we hold 70 percent of the equity in the venture. It has been in existence, since 2002 and is managed by Geometric. The second part of our relationship is related to services, where we work in partnership with them to service the customers of DS technologies. There have been cases where customers are already involved in implementing DS technologies and we provide the whole host of services on the DS platform. So, with regard to PLM system integration competency set, the DS technology portfolio is extremely strong in our competency profile.

As far as EMI is concerned, as of today, we are not doing any specific work with Dassault Systèmes. However, we have a well-developed set of offerings in the EMI arena centered on specific process solutions. We have entered into a strategic relationship with a couple of leading companies in this arena and we would be announcing our go-to-market strategy on these solutions shortly.

The opportunity for EMI is tremendous and it is not just my own personal area of excitement, but there is a lot that can be done and has been done in the traditional process manufacturing arena. If you look at batch process manufacturing, particularly in industries like the food and beverages, or the pharma and the medical device industries that are governed by very stringent regulatory compliance. The implementations of EMI solutions are an integral part of traceability, which when specified in that context is essentially a PLM problem. Thus, we are actually looking at manufacturing operations management as a bridge to extend our native PLM competencies into the batch process manufacturing arena, which I believe is a tremendous area of opportunity and significantly under-leveraged at this point of time.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: In the current economic environment, I would say that the major restraint or constraint is obviously what is happening in the macro-economic environment. There is a certain amount of anxiety that one is witnessing in almost every market. Having said that, I think it also presents, for our customers and the ecosystem of global solution providers such as us, a unique opportunity. While certain markets face many challenges, there are other markets such as China and India that are growing exponentially. Therefore, the opportunity for truly global companies and many stellar global companies that we work with is to capitalize on the global engineering talent and enabling technologies, to ensure that they use efficient localized engineering as an effective enabler to address local market requirements. I think this becomes a unique opportunity. We are specifically doing in terms of addressing the first restraint on the macro economic constraints of the engineering design services business is to position our service portfolio as a global engineering service portfolio, which I believe is unique. Currently, we have the opportunity and the capability to support our customers not just in traditional markets such as the United States, but leverage the same competency set in eastern Europe, China, and India, to provide them a seamless global engineering workforce that can be leveraged centrally or to address the specific needs within each of the regions that they are targeting as specific markets. In my view, this is a very important paradigm shift. Companies under pressure can approach this in two ways: you can say the situation is too tough and lets cut down on everything, or you can approach it and say how can I leverage partnerships on a global level more seamlessly and effectively to ensure that I am addressing these economic imperatives. I believe that many companies are looking at the latter, which certainly gives me hope that we will evolve into a new paradigm of global engineering.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: First of all, I would say that the differentiator is our focus. Our competitors traditionally have highly diversified portfolios including not just engineering, but financial account management, billing solutions, CRM, and so on. There are many large information technology companies with a much diversified portfolio. We have started from and remained committed to the product realization processes, which is really product development and manufacturing. In my view, in the evolving context of globalization, having a global company with that kind of focus is extremely rare. We believe we are one of the few companies in the world that have this focused competency set, yet can provide customers a global footprint that they can leverage.

As you said, the second point of differentiation is that this competency set is now available in traditional outbound markets such as the United States, and in all of the major destination locations that you cited earlier. We have a delivery center based on engineering services and the technologies in eastern Europe in Romania. We have started and are ramping up our delivery center in China; and we have a large footprint of delivery center locations in India of course. But, I think the focus on the engineering and manufacturing competencies and the global availability of these competencies is a clear differentiating factor.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: I think it is a great question and honestly speaking, I see a tremendous opportunity there, which I must be equally candid and admit that we have not leveraged at all. There are two major opportunity markets, which are highly accessible to us today. One is India, where the number of SME clusters associated with engineered products is very high and the other is Europe and the SMB industry in Germany, on which a large part of the economy is founded. We have not addressed these, but at the same time, we are now developing a much focused go-to-market strategy, which is going to be based on our technologies and the assets that we own. I believe that the way one has to position solutions to the small and medium businesses is not by selling off-shoring services to them, as they do not have the arbitrage capacity requirement; you cannot sell humungous enterprise implementation solution to them because that would be an over-kill for a number of SMEs. Ultimately, these companies have very well articulated problems. You will also find a degree of native efficiencies and indeed process level innovation in most of these companies, because they are constrained in many instances by capital. But, they have found very intelligent, smart, and innovative ways to get around, addressing processes a lot more efficiently, working with an ecosystem network to get help whenever they want.

It is truly the entrepreneurial spirit of innovation and growth that fuels many of them. So, the kind of technology solutions they need is actually the point solutions that address specific problems. So, in my view, that has to be a very important part of our entry strategy into the segment. I think we should be able to, based on our preliminary work, classify the SME segment into multiple clusters and segregate those clusters by region. We, then actually look at possible assets and the very rich repository of IPR assets bundled with the problems that we can help them solve. For example, the optimization of the sheet metal usage, which is a very simple problem but can generate a tremendous amount of saving in terms of raw material cost. We have a much focused solution that allows sheet metal usage optimization or packaging optimization. These are simple solutions, from an expanse perspective, and not large enterprise applications; but identify a problem, they solve it, and they ensure that it remains solved. In my view, this is the fundamental characteristics of the solution that will appeal to and be most relevant to the SME segment and our go-to-market strategy will be founded on this.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: Our share of revenue from software companies is going down, but let me also add that software companies will remain an integral part of our revenue portfolio. But not just as a customer to whom we provide outsourced software product development services. Our relationships with software product companies are increasingly going to be multidimensional, where we will do development for them, where we will support them and their endusers in terms of the implementation of those technologies, and we will proactively work together to construct new solutions that address specific industry vertical requirements. For example, we are working in several new exciting verticals, such as developing solutions for the food and beverage industry or the medical device industry, in partnership with some of these companies. The key to our software company revenue base is multi-dimensionality. Those are the companies with whom we will grow and this three-pronged structure is going to be the foundation of those relationships. As far as the automotive industry is concerned, you are right; it is a very important element of our de-listing strategy. The way we are going about this is to look at what are the process and competency adjacencies that we can deploy. For example, in Detroit, we do lot of tool design for automotive companies. We have now increasingly started to look at how these tool design competency sets in Detroit can be deployed into other industries that require similar competencies, like aerospace. At the same time, we look at our technology capabilities and much of our technology implementation work has been done in the automotive OEM and the tier 1 arena. But, we are also saying that there are elements of PLM that apply to other industries like food and beverage, medical devices, upstream oil and gas, and the fashion and apparel industry. All of these are verticals in which in the last financial year, we have made inroads, won our first customers and are starting to ramp up. It is going to take time, as the de-risking process is not going to be an over night one. I think our strategy is clearly oriented towards growing in news vertical by leveraging the competencies that we have.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: I would say by the end of our financial year 2010; my sense is that we will have a well-balanced vertical portfolio by March 2010.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: Let me cite this in two parts. Firstly, if you look at the entire software product development work that we do for customers, actually it is outsourced R&D because we are doing software product development for them at various stages of the life cycle and in many instances, we take complete ownership of that development. Having said that, I should also say that it is directed R&D. In the sense that what they are leveraging is a set of competencies and processes that we have, and it is something that we are delivering to their specifications. However, at this point, we do not have a dedicated R&D group in the company. What we do have is a significant investment in the development of tools and IPR that I have talked about. Our internal R&D group generates the technologies that I had talked about earlier.

These have resulted in technologies like the Nesting Optimization solutions which I talked about, and the Automated Feature Recognition (AFR) technology; and many products that we have launched, whether it is something like DFMPro, which connects the historically siloed activities of product design and product manufacture, by bringing in logic that allows manufacturability to be formally checked at the design stage itself; or, I would say something fairly diverse from our traditional portfolio, like the launch of 3DPaintBrush, which is a near real-time rendering software that has more of a mass market application. All of our innovations are founded on the concepts of geometry and product design and development, but what we have done over the past year is a lot of innovation centered around our domain knowledge and expertise in the manufacturing process arena.

So, the engine that we have going on within the organization is that our internal technologies and product groups, act as the internal innovation engine but they work very closely with our outward facing practices and business groups, to constantly connect with the market, see what the needs are, and once we decide, this represents an opportunity that can be formally abstracted and captured in a technology asset or a product, then we fund the internal development.

The way this kind of work is taken up is that we often embed it, or in some cases we take it out to market directly; where we build the solution for the enduser. But, in many cases, these technologies become part of other enterprise software and we have done this with Dassault Systèmes and Siemens PLM Software, Inc. and we get a royalty on these components.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: I would say, rapidly diversifying our global foot print innovating through technology assets, and efficiencies through our delivery processes, which are uniquely tailored for engineering service delivery.

DR. RAVI GOPINATH: We have been very happy to work with Frost & Sullivan in this exercise. I do think that this specific initiative of your company is a very important one, as it performs a very important task of making markets aware of where they can potentially partner to do more exciting and innovative things together. One of the largest constraints that we dealt with last year was the visibility and brand recognition of Geometric in our global markets. We are very confident about our competencies and the innovation processes that we have within the organization, but all of that would serve our shareholders and customers to no extent if that remained a well-guarded secret. So, I believe that this initiative by Frost & Sullivan serves a very important purpose of getting communities together and I sincerely appreciate that.