HP aims at emerging markets

BANGALORE, INDIA – HP Labs India, the Bangalore, India-based operation of Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) Laboratories in Palo Alto, California, is developing a hardware-software combination package called Shop Owners’ Management Assistant (SOMA) that will help small retailers manage their businesses, according to a lab executive.

The development effort is just one example of how the company is creating applications for different world markets by using India as a test bed.

The SOMA package will include a point-of-sale device as well as application software. There is no time frame for the product’s release, which will be aimed at India and China retail markets.

“We studied the retail sector both in India and in China, and it looks very different from the U.S. retail sector for example,” said Gita Gopal, associate director of HP Labs India. In India, for example, only 2 percent of the retail sector is organized into large retail store chains, and there are about five million small retail outlets in the unorganized sector, according to Gopal.

The large retail chains and small retail outlets share similar business issues, such as managing inventory, meeting customer needs, personalizing the service and increasing profits, Gopal said. “But you cannot take a point-of-sale device that is designed for the U.S. and put it in India,” she added, as Indian shop owners are not usually familiar with English, and the small store’s operation system greatly differs from the U.S. model. While small stores may have many assistants, the final sale and cash collection are controlled by the shop owner, according to Gopal.

The challenge in developing SOMA is not limited to getting the right device with the appropriate language interface to the retailers, but also requires an understanding how the retailer does business, and developing an application that solves the business’ problems, Gopal said. Equally important is determining how the retailers’ systems can connect to the systems of the vendors who distribute their goods through these retailers, according to Gopal, who added that some large multinational and local vendors of retail products may be willing to subsidize the cost of the technology to the small retailers.

Starting with a focus on developing technologies to bridge the digital divide, HP Labs India is now also looking at opportunities to target a new, growing segment of the middle class in India and other emerging economies, Gopal said. People in the new middle class tend to have different product and service requirements than the traditional middle class, like being more at ease with the local languages than with English, according to Gopal. She noted that only 25 percent of the last one million mobile phone subscribers for Indian service provider Reliance Infocomm Ltd. spoke English.

To address the new middle class’ and enterprises’ requirements for services and products, HP Labs India is working on a variety of technologies. One project is a technology that will deliver mobile phone voice services in local languages, according to Warren Greving, director for sustainable solutions at HP Labs India.

As HP looks beyond traditional computing markets, their Indian lab will focus on contextual innovation, requiring the lab to design products appropriate to local context and conditions, said Srinivasan Ramani, director of HP Labs India.

The lab developed Script Mail, a low-cost, e-mail device that runs a Linux kernel on a reduced instruction set computing processor. The device’s position-sensitive pen unit allows users to write a message in a variety of languages and scripts. The message is then e-mailed as an image file. HP Labs India is also looking at other applications for the Script Mail device, according to Greving, and is modifying the device to electronically process various forms such as income tax and census records. Handwriting recognition software is also being bundled with the device.