BENGALURU: Dell is looking towards India to transform its research and development capabilities that have lagged rivals for years. The US technology company is strengthening its engineering team here and increasing the number of patent applications filed from India — which, a senior executive said, has already become the largest contributor to software patents for Dell — as the local unit gets a large piece of investment that chief executive Michael Dell has promised for its R&D push.“At the corporate level, the number of patent filings has been growing at the rate of about 25% year-on-year,” B Rudramuni, executive director and head of Dell India R&D, told ET. “However, in last two to three years, Dell India's patent filings have grown at 50-70% year-on-year. In fact, in 2014, patent filings from India nearly doubled.Almost all these patents were for enterprise software products: software meant for businesses to use in areas such as data centres, servers, storage and network applications.It is ramping up the engineering team in India with aggressive hiring. In 2014, Dell India hired more than 400 engineers to work for its research and development team. It is expected to hire even a larger number of R&D product engineers this year.Dell’s India R&D workforce of 2,500 is its largest outside of the US and forms 10% of its total headcount in India. The investments in India R&D go beyond talent cost as Dell has setup a large data centre in India for engineers to test their code.“The R&D expenditure on our IT infrastructure is three to five times more than the overall headcount cost. We have about 5,000 servers at the disposal of our engineers at the Bangalore center alone. This is the size of a medium data center and is meant purely for R&D purposes — for engineers to develop and test their algorithms, study performance, etc.,” Rudramuni said.At $1.1 billion, Dell’s R&D spending in 2013 lagged behind most of its peers who spent between 3% and 12% of their revenue on R&D. Dell spent just about 2%. Michael Dell has been trying to flip that ever since. The company has been way behind rivals in securing patents, an indicator of R&D success. In 2014, IBM received 7,534 patents, while HP got 1,574. Dell, ranked 129 in terms of top patents assignees with just 280 patents. Rudramuni insists that the number of patent filings last year was much higher.