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Could you give us a brief overview of Force10Networks and its offerings?
Force10Networks is a very young company, founded in San Jose, USA in 1999. We are the first company to ship line-rate 10 GbE in 2002, and also pioneered new switch / router architecture for high performance networking environments.
All of our products are leading in density and resiliency, thus working on a simplified architecture and reducing the cost of ownership. We have about 300 customers worldwide spanning enterprise data centers, government sector and finally to the service providers.
We are now about 400 people worldwide and as for our sales, it doubled in past three consecutive years. As for port shipments of 10 GbE, we stand second.
Force10 also has the privilege of traversing 25 per cent of Internet traffic in North America and also the top three Internet exchanges use our products.
Worldwide we have four Technical Assistance Centers, strategically located at our head office in US – San Jose, Tokyo, London and in Chennai, thus offering global support for growing deployments.
Who are your partners and customers?
We have some of the best partners with a worldwide presence. Some of the leading server companies such as IBM, HP NEC, resell Force10 a la carte and integrate into their solutions. Force10 is now integrated into IBM’s e1350 and BlueGene cluster solutions, Dell’s Advanced Technology Solutions and also in 10 GbE solutions for SUN and HP. Similarly, leading international resellers such as Commverge Solutions, and Allied Telesyn also extend Force10’s market presence.
As for customers, they lead the 10GbE transitions. We cater to customers who are into portals/search engines such as Google, Yahoo, and Facebook; Corporate data centres for DaimlerChrysler, Samsung and the like. We also have some service provider clients who are typically carriers and Internet exchanges, such as the JPIX (Japan Internet Exchange). We are also aiming at the online gaming market, which requires an enormous amount of data transfer over the Internet.
How significant is India for Force10Networks and vice-versa?
India is a very key geography as far as Forec10Networks is concerned, and is also the fastest growing country for new hires. We are now about 90 employees, which is more than double a year ago, and we would be ramping our count to 150 by next year-end, through the continuous hiring, which we have planned.
 Talking about the R&D Center in Chennai, it is the development base for advanced technologies and acts as a center-key to our industry leadership, given the fact that there is a significant talent available here.
At Chennai, Force10 would be concentrating on software development and it would also be a testing center for expanding out product portfolio.
What has been the driving force behind the expansion in Chennai?
Chennai will not only house our R&D but we see as a center for strategic engineering support for next generation Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs), and for this purpose we have a technically-sound key quality assurance teams. We also look at Chennai for hardware development for P-series security appliances.
Similarly, as for the sales team we would be expanding our team to meet emerging opportunity, as India’s bandwidth needs to accelerate.
How to you plan to attack the Indian market and what are the segments you would be aiming at?
Force10Networks is now spanning from the network core to the edge. We do not compromise on performance and thus solve the hardest problems first. In this context, we have already established technical leadership in the core with E-series, which has robust resiliency and density proven in the world’s fastest and most complex networks.
We would also leverage on our core expertise to expand to data center edge by offering a reduced price for 10 GbE per port to drive adoption with our product – the S50, and another one S2410, which drove down the latency from microseconds to nanoseconds.
Thus, we at Force10 want to expand the total addressable market with technology extensions into adjacent markets. For this, we would be targeting at securing the high performance networks with P-series – industry’s only line-rate 10 Gbps security system, for delivering high density, resilient PoE for next generation VoIP and wireless connectivity.
Overall, we intend to brand ourselves as a company with a high level of resiliency and density in the competitive landscape.
How do you think your products and concepts would transform market dynamics and networking economics?
We strongly believe that the dramatic improvements in density and throughput combined with the fundamental advances in resiliency would bring revolutionary network economics to multiple markets, namely in the portals/ search engines, data center and the service providers segment. And we already have a significant presence in all of these markets.
To be more specific on the economics of high density with a 270-Gig deployment as against 4 x 10 Gig to the core, in the first place would be more affordable in terms of money as well as space. The cost involved to implement a Low Density line-rate node is four times as costly as setting-up a High Density one.
On the network economics front, the Capital Expenditure (Capex) is 75 per cent lowers as only one device is used versus five in the other case, and uses 28 less line cards. Invariably, the reflections could be seen in the Operating Expenditure (Opex) as the power consumption is 81 per cent less thus reducing as much cooling needed, and also there is less rack space, which is required to put in a single high density system in place.
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