CHENNAI, INDIA: Lured by sustained expansion in India's telecom and networking sectors, US-based Patton Electronics, a leader in the production of network access and connectivity products, recently opened the doors of its new India headquarters in Chennai.

Leveraging the US, Swiss and Indian resources, Patton Electronics (USA) and Microsense (India), have come together to deliver integrated solutions for carrier-provider, enterprise and industrial networking.

Headquartered in Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA, Patton's customer span the size spectrum, ranging from small businesses to Fortune 500 companies with most of them specializing in telecom, service providers or corporations with private networks.

Launched during Patton's 25th year of operations, Patton-India is backed by investment from Patton-Inalp Holdings (Switzerland). Privately held and operated since its founding in 1984, Patton's niche was making modems and connectivity products for the telecom industry. Over the succeeding years, Patton has taken those simple beginnings and expanded into a manufacturing company that provides a product line in excess of 300 items.

Talking to CIOL about the company and the launch of its India operations, Burton A. Patton, executive vice president of Patton Electronics and acting president of Patton India said: "Ours is a horizontally grown company which has not gone public yet.  This organic growth has shaped the company well and has given us a personality.  The way we do our business is different from others in the industry."

"Patton has a strong presence in the market in the converged communications space. Voice over IP (VoIP) is our largest selling product. To develop the product, we have tied up with a Swiss company called Inalp Networks, which develops smart nodes," he said.

"We entered this business when VoIP was a dream. Since our technology is home grown, it is highly adaptable," Burton added. Europe is the leading market for Patton. With Inalp having a strong sales organization, Patton has the largest revenue base for its VoIP product in Europe.

Patton's product line includes Internet technologies, central office, last-mile access and connectivity products.

Entry into Indian market
Patton entered India in a small way 10 years ago and has a handful of distributors here.  "Since we design, develop, manufacture and sell the components, we could not resist expanding and staying out of the game in India. In association with Microsense, leading distributor for Patton's products in India, Patton India will leverage local technical talent and deepen the relations with industry peers to deliver seamlessly-integrated, world-class solutions of carriers, service providers and enterprises throughout India and world," Burton said.

"As we have been doing business here, we are seeing some impacting changes in the Indian scenario. In the next 10 years, the telecom market is going to go crazy. There is competency in software development as well," he added.

Adding to this, Robert R. Patton, president, Patton Electronics, said: "As we decided to enter India, we outsourced the software development to Microsense. We have an extremely unique USP in delivering VoIP gateways for Indian market. As of now, there is no competition for us as our product stands apart from the rest with an in-built leased line in our VoIP gateway."

Leveraging Patton's products and the brand name, the company India intends to emerge as an 'integrator's integrator' offering integrated and interoperable solutions that incorporate several 'best-in-class' third-party brands.

Enabling enterprises to adopt VoIP
Touching upon the Indian telecom industry, Burton feels: "Unlike other countries, India is yet to open up to regulations. However, the market here offers great challenges with unique opportunities as well." "We are operating VoIP in a legal way with the regulatory structures in India. We enable enterprises to go in for VoIP in a legalized way. When the regulatory environment changes they can adapt to the same and rebuild the network without any upgrades."

Once the regulation changes, we will unplug the PSTN/PBX and connect them with smart nodes. "We help enterprises build low-cost VoIP network by supplying high quality, reliable voice networks. We are aimed at serving at least 10 percent of the market," adds Robert.

Burton says: "Our products extend the life of the network enterprises already have. It enables them to do away with the leased line network. Our products are mostly useful to companies with large branch offices – in sectors like BFSI, retail, transportation and hospitality."

"Our products support high scalability and does not require heavy investment. One can start small and still scale up," he added.

Explaining about its Netlink products, Robert said, "It is a set of interoperable solutions that an integrator can bring to customers. In India, Netlink products are at a mediocre level. We are targeting at integrators, taking it to the third-party level."

Triple Play Alliance
Patton is also a member of the Triple Play Alliance (TPA). Formed ion 2005, TPA is an association of close to 20 industry vendors and service providers. It is aimed at advancing the global development and spread of Triple Play networking solutions and technologies, and to eliminate barriers that may exist to deploy triple play services. 

Patton, which has been shipping data communications products for over 15 years, has a product strategy is to combine transmission and IP technologies into customer-premise network access devices capable of T1/E1/xDSL transmission, IP routing, FR multiplexing, and VPN access servers. The latest incarnation of this strategy is its Model 3120 Remote Access Server (Model 3120 RAS).