‘Behind every Galaxy camera click is work done in Bangalore,’ Samsung India R&D head narrates 25-year journey to excellence

Every time you utilize the 5G capabilities or click on a photograph utilizing a Samsung Galaxy cellphone you can be counting on the years of labor executed by engineers within the Korean large’s Bangalore R&D facility. But at the same time as Samsung celebrates its twenty fifth yr in India, only a few folks understand how the corporate has at all times had this robust analysis and improvement facility within the county, evolving with the necessities and the expertise of the instances.
There is one one who is aware of all about it, Dipesh Shah, MD on the Samsung Research Institute, Bengaluru and one of many first workers of the corporate in India, becoming a member of even earlier than the India operations began. “I cannot forget the day I landed for the first time in Korea, in June 1994. The person who had come to pick me at the airport was speaking to someone from the car on a wireless phone. I called my mom that night and told her about what I had seen,” Shah remembers the time he understood the alternatives that Samsung can deliver to my very own profession. But that was a minimum of a yr earlier than Samsung set store in India.
“We too started like most other multinational companies. Our main thing was to hire talented manpower here, led by a project or technical lead in Korea. So, there was lots of travelling by these people to understand what it takes to make a global product in terms of quality, performance and innovation benchmarks,” Shah tells indianexpress.com concerning the first section of Samsung’s R&D operations in India.
Now, Samsung has a minimum of three R&D centres in India — one in Bengaluru and two within the nationwide capital area — making Indian the second largest software program R&D hub exterior India. But it has been an extended journey getting there and Samsung has, as Shah places it, “grown with India”.
“Many of our engineers developed telephone exchange software as it was mostly PBX then. ISDN development was done out of Bangalore, and we worked on solutions to connect computer telephony with PBX,” he says, including how the native service firm ecosystem helped lots in taking these tasks to scale. Shah says the 4 years of working with world groups was adopted by the solution-oriented R&D section that lasted about 14 years from 2000.

Shah remembers how this section was marked by two massive traits — the onset of world normal our bodies like 3G and open supply. “So the Samsung’s Voice Over LTE technology was first developed out of Bangalore by using one of these standards documents. And Samsung’s first internet browser based on open source was developed out of Bangalore. Even today, on all Samsung Galaxy phones, we use the same browser engine,” he lists the achievement of the India R&D workforce.
Then there was a “rebuilding phase” when the workforce modified its orientation to develop into a analysis centre. This is when the title of the organisation was modified from Samsung India Software Operations to Samsung Research India, Bangalore. “Till then, it was all about someone defining what we need to develop and our engineers using the right tools and techniques to develop what was needed. With the reorientation we built the capacity for what we should do and why we should do so,” he says on how this was when engineering and the analysis elements have been mixed. “We constructed the capability by hiring very top quality expertise from India, from the highest 50 universities particularly IITs, in addition to a major variety of returning Indians, who had spent 10 plus years within the US engaged on product innovation.
Dipesh Shah, MD on the Samsung Research Institute, Bengaluru
Because of this legacy, amongst Samsung’s 13 R&D centres, Bangalore has emerged because the centre of excellence for wi-fi communications, multimedia and picture processing, synthetic intelligence in imaginative and prescient, voice and textual content applied sciences and Internet of Things. “Globally, they think Bangalore is the place where these four technology talents are available.”
Now his workforce is engaged on 5G and IoT options, working intently with native startups in what Shah calls ‘open innovation’. “We have invested in some of them who basically bring content and services to our consumers to our products,” he says, including that Samsung can be involving professors from main universities and college students in new tasks. “In one of our programmes, we work with about 150 colleges in India, where students get to work on current active projects of Samsung and contribute and create patents with us.” Shah firmly believes India is poised for a giant leap and that Samsung has executed its half in powering Digital India.
“Throughout the 25 years, what has kept me totally excited is the three keywords: technology, innovation, consumer focus. So being very closely connected to consumers and customers, we understand their pain points and their pleasure points. We use technology to solve their problems. And then we do innovation to take these solutions into their hands through various channels,” says Shah. “Now technology has changed, tools have changed, programming techniques have changed from embedded systems to cloud computing. Samsung has always been on the top of these technology, market, consumer and lifestyle trends.”
He is pleased with the numerous contribution the India workforce has made to Samsung’s progress too. “Both the Samsung smartphone and the Samsung network had significant contributions from Bangalore. Samsung Galaxy phones are supposed to have the best cameras and a significant contribution in this image processing is from Bangalore engineers especially,” Shah says, including how each time you are taking an image with a Galaxy digicam there’s an AI module written by Bangalore engineers understanding the scene round you.
Shah can be excited by how his workforce has contributed to the Make in India efforts. “Before 2015, mostly European products we used to come and be localised. From 2015 onwards, very unique Indian consumer insight based product development, software development, user experience development was done out of India.”

Even as he picks expertise from one of the best institutes within the nation, Shah underlines why steady studying is the “unique reason somebody should join Samsung R&D in India”. He elaborates: “There are regular training programmes, very high end… there is a lot of emphasis on continuous learning as programming languages have changed, processes have changed and software development life cycles have changed.”
For the longer term, Shah is assured the India workforce has it in them to steer the AI/ML world. “I have very high confidence in AI, because our engineers are very good in math. AI is basically fundamentally based on math, and then a lot of AI is open source. So that gives a great opportunity for us to be at the same level as any expert anywhere in the globe.”
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