WHAT happens when four Malayalees meet and decide to do something together?

Normally, you would expect them to form an association or a trade union, but in the case of this foursome, the place of their meeting happened to be Silicon Valley and not their home State, Kerala, and the goal — to do something on their own.

It was nothing but sheer entrepreneurial urge that brought together A.G. Karunakaran, Gopa Periyaden, Ravi Thumarakudi and Prakash Bare, four Malayalee engineers who went to the US on work.

The result was the creation of GDA Technologies, Inc, a company specialising in electronic design services.

Today, GDA Technologies is considered one of the fastest growing companies in Silicon Valley.

It is also a rare display of successful entrepreneurship in the US by Keralites, who otherwise comfortably adapt to new surroundings as efficient employees.

"We all went to the US from Kerala and worked with different companies. By the late 80s' manufacturing was coming out OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and was becoming an outsource-able function.

We teamed up when we felt that there was an increasing need to outsource hardware-centric engineering functions," recalls Gopa Periyaden, who is now Vice-President and General Manager at GDA Tech.

In May 1996, the company was incorporated, and the first employee was hired in September.

The mission was to become an electronic development partner for the embedded, networking and consumer industries.

Today GDA, headquartered in San Jose, offers a range of value-added electronic design services for system, board, embedded software and synthesisable core (IP) designs.

It has developed products in desktop, server, embedded computing, digital audio and video applications, Internet appliances and data networking applications.

While it offered electronic design services to clients, GDA Tech also developed its own intellectual property rights (IPRs) that can either be sold upfront or for a licence fee.

"We are creating re-usable blocks... We make them once and sell them many times," Gopa says.

Some of such blocks have been sold to Rambus Inc, a technology licensing company specialising in high-speed chip interfaces, for an undisclosed sum.

Gopa says such sales would lead to significant revenue streams for the company in the future.

Already, about 20 per cent of revenues are from licensing such intellectual property blocks.

The current list of clients and partners includes names such as Intel, NEC Electronics, Cadence and Motorola. Gopa says research and development outsourcing is set to grow exponentially and this trend would immensely benefit GDA Tech.

Revenues in the current year would touch $20 million from $15 million a year before.

The number of employees stands at 250 today, out of which 150 people are located in the two development centres in Chennai and Bangalore.

"We are going to scale up India operations and our plan is to have 500 employees here in the next two-and-a-half years," Gopa says. Revenues are expected to more than double to $50 million by 2008.

To give back something to Kerala, GDA Tech has now decided to set up its third development centre in Kochi.

This centre will work on embedded software and hardware board designs, and will initially have 25 engineers.

It will initially be located within the Rajagiri School of Engineering under an industry incubation programme of the School.

"Kerala, as such, has got a history of hardware development. A number of engineering colleges in the State produce a good number of engineers with electronic design skills and we are going to make use of that," Gopa, who was in Kerala to set up the Kochi centre, says.

The founders of GDA Tech themselves are a testimony to that statement.