Dassault Systemes, the French maker of computer-assisted design programmes, will establish a data centre in India by 2018 to expand its cloud services, Olivier Ribet, vice-president of the company said in an interview on Tuesday.
Dassault will continue to expand the tailored industry solutions for transportation, mobility, aerospace and defence and industrial equipment in India, Mr. Ribet said. “Now we also plan to get into fashion and apparel industry and other consumer goods segment. Architecture and construction industry is also on the radar.”
Dassault will make “IoT-ready products” for the Smart Cities planned across India, he said. An increase in the availability of smartphones, corporate and government investment, start-up ideas and allied factors such as cloud services and data analytics will fuel the Internet of Things opportunity in India, according to Gartner Research.
The number of start-ups in India is slated to reach 11,500 by 2020 from 3,100 in 2014.
$15 billion opportunity
IoT market presents India with a $15 billion opportunity as electronic devices surge to 2.7 billion in 2020 from the current 200 million, according to the government. But issues of security, privacy, standardisation and a shortage of skilled manpower pose a challenge.
Dassault Systemes on Tuesday set up an Aerospace and Defence Centre of Excellence in the technology hub of Bengaluru to train engineers to overcome a shortage. “This is a sort of a finishing school,” Samson Khaou, Dassault Systems India said.
Mr. Ribet said the company was “closely watching” the ideas that emanate out of start-ups. “One such is Joby Aviation.”
The commute of the future is in the clouds, he said. Joby Aviation, an aerospace start-up based in Santa Cruz, California, with their Joby S2, a two-seater virtual take-off, and landing electric airplane, is capable of safely and efficiently transporting passengers and is designed to solve the world’s commute. “We have everything in the world we need,” Mr. RIbet said. “The key is to invent something which costs less, which uses fewer resources.”
He said last week Huawei and Dassault Systemes signed a pact whereby the two companies would work closely to enable Dassault Systemes’ platform to run on Huawei Cloud.