BANGALORE, INDIA: Despite negative factors such as cost escalation, talent crunch and slowdown, India is poised to become a leading player in the field of R&D services, feels Stefan Dyckerhoff, executive vice president and general manager, Infrastructure Products Group (IPG), Juniper.

Juniper India Excellence Center currently has 1,800 employees along with 300 development partners at four buildings. Stefan talks to Divya Girish of CyberMedia News about the company's future plans, growth potentials in networking market and its focus on R&D center.

CIOL: Can you tell us some of your big clients and what is scale of business you do with them?

Stefan Dyckerhoff: We have a strong base in the Indian telecom market and some of the service providers we currently work with are Bharti, Vodafone, Tata Communications, Reliance, Datacom and Unicom and now we are also driving our focus into enterprise segment.

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We largely target the government, IT/ITES, financial and banking, telecom, retail, manufacturing and healthcare sectors in India. We have seen the government sector emerging as a big buyer and one of our main drivers of growth will be the expansion of the financial and telecom sectors.

Juniper builds very strong and robust core backbone networks for our customers. We are very bullish at this point of time, having a solid value proposition for the enterprise and service providers and are aggressively moving towards increasing our consideration rate while customers are seeing a win-win for themselves.

CIOL: What kind of R&D work will Juniper do in the Bangalore center? Can we expect end-to-end products coming out of the center? Could you elaborate on your India Development Center and its contribution to the company's revenue?

Stefan: Juniper's India Excellence Center (IEC) is responsible for the  full spectrum of activities including hardware and software development, test engineering, field trials, program management, quality assurance, technical documentation and product line management.

The IEC has significant and innovative contributions to all of the products that Juniper ships today. The latest example is the contributions made to the development of one of Juniper's latest T4000 Core Router.

The IEC has designed the T-4000 from the ground up out of India. Right from designing the T-4000, doing alterations within the existing chassis, upgrading network operating systems to still run in 4 Tbps per half-rack chassis was considered a tough task given the time lines and the complexity of the work involved.