Tata Consultancy Services has decided to commercialise its research activities by filing for intellectual property rights to all major R&D results in future.
The company expects to file 10-15 patents every year this year onwards and thinks that these patents will become major revenue grossers for TCS.
Tata Research Development and Design Centre, TCS's research enterprise, has been quite active in filing for intellectual property rights since 2000.
TCS through TRDDC has already registered around 35 patents in the last three years of which 15 have been approved and 20 are pending with the Indian patents office.
The company will also start filing for patents in the United States patents office this year to ensure global level protection and commercial value for its indigenously developed applications.
"At this stage the patents will be filed with a view to protecting the results of our R&D but we hope that these intellectual properties will bring in substantial revenues for us in future. We are hoping to file 10-15 patents every year starting this year," said a senior executive at TCS.
The company will also file these application-specific patents in other countries or regions where they will find commercial use.
TRDDC has already taken a step in this direction by patenting its CEMPAC software package, developed specifically for the cement industry, in Malaysia and China.
CEMPAC has already been patented in India where it has enjoys fairly good commercial acceptance.
Inspite of its state-of the-art R&D facilities and a pool of some of the best technological brains in India, TCS has done little in the past to commercialise its research and development actvities.
So far TCS has been the sole beneficiary of TRDDC's intellectual pool and most of TRDDC's research efforts have directed at developing software applications for TCS.
Besides software activities, TRDDC also works in the engineering activities space.