Interviewer: Sudarshan NS – Founder and President & Sanket Bandyopadhyay – Co-Founder and Vice President at Daikoku Innovations .
Sudarshan NS – Founder and President at Daikoku Innovations.
Techmezine: Can you please share an overview of DAIKOKU INNOVATIONS ?
Sanket: Daikoku Innovations is a product design services company, the foundations of which were laid in 2016. You can say that we are an ODM without manufacturing. However, we have an MoU in place with a contract manufacturer which allows us the flexibility to go for manufacturing based on customers’ demands. We are well spread across the communication, medical, industrial and aerospace segments. As we speak, 90% of our projects have started from paper designs and have been taken all the way to being production worthy. We are constantly innovating and helping our customers bring their product concepts to reality. Our core strengths are hardware engineering, firmware engineering and industrial design. We are trusted partners to our customers all the way from product conceptualisation to taking it to full-fledged production.
Techmezine: What are the recent products you have delivered or are working on?
Sudarshan: We are working on passive optical networking products, medical wearables and several products in the smart energy segment. We have developed a ML based seed-sorting algorithm which can be used in textile and manufacturing industries as well.
The core team has deep experience across multiple technologies and that makes Daikoku just not limited to the products that we have delivered or are working on, but many more and that includes blue-sky innovation.
Techmezine: Please discuss Passive Optical Networking products that you are developing ?
Sudarshan: PON uses point-to-multipoint fiber to the end-points in which optical splitters enable a single optical fiber to connect to multiple end-points. There are three major devices in the network: 1. OLT (optical line terminal), 2. ONUs (optical network units) or ONTs (optical network terminals) and 3. Splitter.
Daikoku is working extensively on the below products in this domain.
- XPON to Ethernet ONU
- Single-Band XPON ONT (802.11n)
- Dual-band XPON ONT (802.11n/ac)
- Wi-Fi 6 XPON ONT (802.11ax)
- GPON/EPON OLT
- XGS-PON OLT
Techmezine: Please discuss any difficulties the company faced during the COVID-19 pandemic?
Sanket: COVID-19 was a challenging time for all of us, but the exciting projects kept us super busy. The major difficulties were in rotating the engineers between the lab and their homes. We have a lot of hardware to work on along with firmware where remote access to hardware may not always be efficient. Also, customer agreements are sacrosanct for us, we fully protect customers’ IP, hardware, firmware etc. and that never allows us to move anything sensitive out of Daikoku’s office premises. We are extremely particular about that. Due to these firm principles we had to meticulously manage working between office and homes, that was a challenge, which we did overcome.
Techmezine: Since you spoke about IP, how do you manage the IPs of multiple customers?
Sudarshan: We have NDAs and watertight agreements in place with our customers. We go through multiple rounds of discussions with our customer before we finalise and deal. These discussions are a part of our trust building process along with immaculate documentation.
We candidly discuss what’s possible and what is not and make sure everything is in black and white. We dedicate independent servers for sensitive customer data with all necessary securities in place. On handover, depending on the agreements’ clauses, we do a complete IP transfer with no trace left at our end.
There are other models too and one of them is where we work on a royalty basis.
Techmezine: Please share a few details around the company’s expansion and growth plans in India?
Sanket: We are growing steadily and have plans to expand into tier-2 cities of India in the future. We want to decongest the metro cities and bring employment to tier-2 and also tier-3 cities. This is our long-term vision. At the same time, we are planning to increase our presence in the US market by having an office in that geography. The discussions are on for all of these and when the time is right these all should fructify. We are a company with traditional thoughts but are very pragmatic. India has traditionally been an IT powerhouse and a preferred destination for captive design centres We intend to create value for our customers and plug the shortage of true-blue product design services company in India. The world must know that world-class products can be created within the Indian ecosystem.
