Juniper eyes 30 p.c growth in India operations

PANAJI, GOA: Relying heavily on its R&D initiatives in Indian market,Juniper Networks, an IT and computer networking products MNC, is expecting over 30 per cent growth in its India operations for FY2009-10.

“Our overall addressable market size in switching, routing and security has now reached $12 billion for the entire APAC region. In the next 4-5 years, we will invest a further sum of $400 million towards the R&D activities and strengthening our proof of concept labs in Bangalore, Mumbai and Delhi,” commented Nagendra Venkaswamy, managing director India & SAARC during the J-Partner Summit held in Goa from May 26 to 28.

Thus far the company has invested over US $200 mn for R&D operations in India.

“Not all vendors are playing offensive and investing seriously in R&D like Juniper,” says Sanjiv Verma, director, enterprise and channels sales, Asean & India.

The company has also forayed into Ethernet switching market in 2008 and shipped over 500,000 switch ports during last fiscal. It is also engaged in developing the low-cost switch to address specific market needs of countries like India.

“It is early days in switching, however the demand is visible and consumer wants more choices. For the financial year 2010, we are aiming for considerable amount of market share in the switching space” said Venkaswamy.

The company is claiming to play aggressively in the Indian market and making investments into the data centers, distributed enterprise and adaptive threat management solutions. In addition it will also continue to focus on increasing its brand awareness, and focusing on power saving products and solutions.

“Our approach is to work in an innovative manner and to strengthen our portfolio through continuous innovation and R&D. We are not like Cisco who seems to be a sales and marketing driven company only” added Venkaswamy.

It has around 120 reseller partners in India and 100 service partners in APAC, and will now increase its partner base by another 10 per cent.