OREANDA-NEWS. April 13, 2015. India’s manufacturing industry still has a way to go before it can become what the country’s IT sector already is: a global leader. India is a global power when it comes to software development in particular. The country is home to some of the biggest software firms in the world, such as Tata Consultancy Services and Wipro Technologies, and it also has a thriving startup scene. New companies are constantly being established in the region around Bangalore especially — several thousand per year, in fact. These startups don’t wait around for orders from large companies; they just keep on developing.

“They come up with some really fascinating ideas,” says Gerd H?fner, an IT specialist who heads the Siemens Corporate Development Center for software, which is part of Siemens’ Corporate Technology department. More than 3,000 employees in Bangalore develop software for 30 business units— not just for the Indian market but also for markets around the world. For example, all aspects of syngo classic software, which is the platform for all imaging systems manufactured by Siemens Healthcare, are developed by Siemens in Bangalore. The days when Americans and Europeans viewed Indian software developers as cheap “coding slaves” are long gone, according to H?fner: “Today, we have full responsibility for the software used in complete products from various business units in all Siemens divisions.”

Siemens is also looking to benefit from the ideas developed by the Indian startup scene. For example, H?fner and his team closely examined 160 startups and gave ten promising ones the opportunity to present their ideas to high-ranking Siemens executives. Some of the companies then received support from Siemens as they continued to develop their concepts. One startup built a 3D printer that produces exact copies of bones and organs using images recorded with nuclear magnetic resonance and computed tomography machines. Doctors can use the perfect copies to prepare for actual operations.