VIA Tech opens office in India

Taiwan-based chipset manufacturer, VIA Technologies Inc. has taking its market drive to Mumbai, India with the introduction of the Intrepid Computing project, just as it has opened an office in the city.

The project known as the Technology Innovation centre in Mumbai would facilitate development of PC-1 machines at inexpensive prices aimed at combating dust, heat and other related problems for developing countries worldwide.

The company would also create server appliances to be used for wireless mesh networking in order to provide high bandwidth machines for both town and country.

The choice of India, it was gathered was based on its perfect example of this type of market because it consists of hundreds of thousands of villages with the telecommunications not being what they might be.

Country manager of VIA India, Ravi Pradhan, said the Mumbai technology centre would work with government, industry and educational institutes to develop Power-Heat-Dust (PHD) appliances that consume a lot less power than conventional machines.

He said his firm wanted to bring the price of PCs for people down. “It’s not just the price of PCs, but electricity that’s the problem in rural India and much of other developing countries around the world,” Pradhan said.

Noting that there are also electric power cuts in even towns and cities from time to time in India, but stressing that the machines VIA is developing would run for as long as 16 hours in some cases.

Chief executive, Wen Chi Chen, said it was his first time in India, and pointed out a thin client is easier to maintain, thus it has a lot lower cost of ownership, the security is better and it’s a dream machine for corporations.

China and India moved swiftly to mobile phones because they did not have the legacy infrastructure of some countries.

With China and India leading in deploying this PC-1 project, other parts of the world will be playing catch-up, he said, and will be later on the scene.

VIA Technologies, Inc. is known for being a market-leader in core logic chipsets, low power x86 processors, advanced connectivity, multimedia, networking and storage silicon, and complete platform solutions that are driving system innovation in the Personal Computers (PC).