You have an R&D office where?

May 3, 2006 —

If your headquarters are in Oslo, Norway, then Brisbane, Australia, might not seem the obvious first choice site for your research and development office. The same would be true of Iselin, New Jersey, and Islamabad, Pakistan. But the reasons behind such moves can initially be very human and end up proving smart and lucrative in the bargain.

Take Trolltech AS, which has its headquarters in Norway, and has a foot in both the open-source and commercial software worlds through the dual licensing of its Qt C++ application framework and its Qtopia application platform for embedded Linux.

Back in 1995 when the company co-founders Haavard Nord and Eirik Chambe-Eng made the first Qt code available online, within 24 hours they received an e-mail from Warwick Allison, a Ph.D. student in Australia.

Allison wrote to say that Qt was missing one factor, and, "here it is," rather generously including 400 lines of code.

Nord and Chambe-Eng were impressed and went on to offer Allison a job with Trolltech in 1997. They asked him to move to Oslo. He decided to abandon his Ph.D. studies and make the move.

Up until that point, the three had only communicated by e-mail and, before Allison's girlfriend would let him accept the job, she insisted that they at least speak on the phone. They had a two-minute call, Chambe-Eng recalled, and the Norwegians had no idea what Allison looked like when they went to meet him at the Oslo airport. They did, however, have a sign with his name on it.

Allison spent two years in Oslo, but ended up moving back to Australia in 1999. He was just too good a person to lose, according to Chambe-Eng, so Trolltech kept him on. Today, Warwick heads up the company's embedded R&D operation in Brisbane with a staff of between 30 and 40 people. With much of the early adoption of mobile and embedded Linux taking place in Asia, particularly China, having an R&D office in a similar time zone has proved very valuable, Chambe-Eng said.

Then, there's EnterpriseDB Corp., a U.S. open-source database vendor. While the company has the predictable R&D office in India, it also has one in neighboring Pakistan. That came about through Denis Lussier, chief technology officer at EnterpriseDB. Before co-founding the open-source player, he was the chief executive officer and chief architect at Fusion Technologies, a pioneer in offshore software development, which maintained an operation in Islamabad.

In 2004, EnterpriseDB acquired Fusion's 20-strong development team in Pakistan which has become one of the company's R&D operations. It's proved a great decision, according to Andy Astor, president and CEO of EnterpriseDB. While there's something on the order of between 30 percent to 40 percent high-tech employee turnover in Indian cities like Hyderabad or Bangalore, Islamabad remains "a well-kept secret," he said, experiencing zero IT staff turnover.

For some companies then, R&D facilities are set up around good employees, no matter how odd the location might seem.

IDG News Service