BANGALORE, INDIA: Jim Anderson, senior VP,  Networking Components Division, LSI Corporation, says: “Indian market is an important market for us especially because of the new network build-out that is happening in the wireless infrastructure space. The company has been growing its presence in India pretty rapidly over the past few years and will continue to do so.”

The company recently divested its storage systems arm Engenio to NAS provider NetApp, so that it can increase its focus on semiconductor space.

Also Read: LSI elevates Jeff Richardson as COO

Jim, in an interview with Deepa Damodaran of CIOL, shares his views about the wireless trends and what excites him about Indian telecom industry. Excerpts:

CIOL: How was 2010 for LSI Networking?

Jim Anderson: 2010 was a very big year for LSI. In 2010, LSI's networking business saw a good growth and posted a revenue of a just a little less than half a billion dollar.

In terms of our major investments area, the revenue grew by over 50 per cent in 2010 as compared to 2009.

One of the areas where we particularly saw growth was communication processors, where the volume doubled year-over-year.

Last year we sampled 20 different component networking SoCs for our customers including standard and custom products.

We estimate that there is a $3 billion worth market opportunity in wireless and enterprise space.

CIOL: What were the factors that caused such high growth?

Jim: LSI's product line spans across communication processors, media processors, content and inspection processors and custom ASIC.

Customers are today looking for products with low power, cost and high performance. One of the areas where our communication processors, called ACPs, are used is in wireless applications, and wireless access points.

From service providers' perspective, number of devices, such as smartphones, iPads, iPhones, that are connecting to wireless access network are increasing by large numbers. Ericsson, in a study, finds that by the end of the decade about 50 billion devices will be connected to wireless network.

Moreover, today mobile phones are not merely used to send text message or make calls, but to access rich media content through real time video download, video streaming etc.