What makes India a growth focus area for Cisco

BANGALORE, INDIA: Office aisles that light up as you enter and fade off as you move away. A new workspace for every day. Air conditioner that switches on just 10-15 minutes before you enter and lights and phones that automatically get activated in your name, at your workspace. Bank transactions done over an ATM-like machine, situated very close to your work area. A virtual doctor, who is available round the clock at the click of a mouse, and the liberty to check what is on the menu at cafeteria and also able to see how many people are there in queue, even without entering one.

Sounds like a mixed-up script of a Hollywood sci-fi movie and Bollywood commercial film? Well, all this and more is happening at Cisco's campus in Bangalore, which is a demo ground to test and showcase the possibilities of a world connected through IP and for all that Cisco is innovating from the country.

Network is the highway that allows you to connect to all these things, also called 'Internet of Things', a concept that Cisco is excited about, nowadays. The above was just one example of what Cisco wants to do, which is to connect everything from edge to network to all the way to cloud. Faiyaz Shahpurwala, India Site Leader, Cisco, in a candid chat with Srinivas Rasoor and Deepa Damodaran of CIOL explains what innovation means to Cisco and how Cisco India is paving the way for a smart world. Excerpts:

CIOL: Can you tell us about your designation, 'India Site Leader'?



Faiyaz Shahpurwala: I get that asked a lot. San Jose is where Cisco's corporate HQ is located at. Then, we have several sites, such as India, which is also our second world headquarters. We not only have a India centric, but also a global centric focus. India site is not a back office for Cisco. We have moved budgets and GMs here, unlike many other MNCs, who still get directions and budgets from their respective headquarters.

Being the Site Leader is my functional role. I handle operation for all of the India site. My focus areas are services, solutions, people growth, talent development, innovations etc. We have over 10,000 employees in this site.

Jeff White heads the Cisco India sales. We are two distinct entities, but work together. We came here to innovate, not only for India, but also for the emerging countries and that can not be done while sitting in San Jose. Emerging countries are a big growth focus area for us for innovation.

CIOL: How do you look at innovation?



Faiyaz Shahpurwala: Innovation has to start at every level in an organization and in everything you do and not just in what you sell. Cisco is driving the concept of the ‘Internet of things' from here. This journey started six years back, and now we are mainstreaming it.

It is going from relevance to scale. When we came to India, we had to be relevant at first and now we want to scale. We want to launch new products, and build existing relations. We started up with a small set of developers in areas such as services in IT, engineering and process.

Cisco's campus has the best of amenities than any other campus in the world. Every application here, such as healthcare, education, work space and other amenities, is controlled by IP networks through cloud. We first did this here, and now will start doing it elsewhere. This is to show that innovation not only happens in Western world, but can also happen in a developing nation like India.

CIOL: What does 'Internet of everything' mean?



Faiyaz Shahpurwala: Cisco has begun the journey of the Internet of Everything from India. We build all the stuff from here and we have now started working with customers in the emerging countries. World's population is expected to touch 7.6 billion by 2020. There will be over 50 billion smart connected, network-enabled devices by the same period. Things such as transport, buildings, camera, air conditioner everything will be IP enabled. We are moving from the analog world to an IP enabled world.

We live in emerging countries and fail to realize that we are leading the world in this technology. It is us who is responsible for the big shift that has happened in IT world, which is moving from on-front to cloud. The Old IT world that I grew up had smart people and everything was developed in house and you had people and lots of budget for IT and to develop stuff.

That world still exists. Our new world is about mobility, network, and cloud: So we are moving from on-brand to more cloud delivered services. SaaS will be a $196billion market in the next three years.

In India and in the emerging countries cloud happened at a larger scale because here the problem is that not every oragnisation has IT support, nor do they have the required budget to build such stuff. So, if they can get it over cloud, and only have to pay it per usage, then it is great.

Such a world can pave way for smart cars, agriculture, security, infrastructure management, healthcare, education etc.

We are working on National Standards, working with various forums, lots of good engineers here, thinking about interesting problems, some of them focus on technology, some on policy and many on standards. The learning for us over the years is that it's not just about technology, but we have to partner right from ground zero for establishing the standards, being in the best practices, understanding the company specific problems.

We have lots of projects with government. And that is one of the big charters driving the national agenda. To transform an emerging country, there are certain things that come into play. The groundwork has to be very good as service providers. Here we don't build out the infrastructure, physical, networked, the enterprise can not just come out because those are critical building elements. So if you don't have a national broadband network then how can you create entrepreneurship? But once you have the network there is a whole lot of new people who are coming out within the country with entrepreneurship and ideas, within the city and from the city.

When you think about India, Mexico, and Brazil, big enterprises are in the hands of Tatas and Ambanis, whereas in the US, you only have public companies. In emerging country, government has a big role, as do service providers. Those are the things that are more focused on driving the countries' centres. These things will have to play out over in the next decades, so intrinsic models, coming up with right derivation and right policy so we can solve these problems at a standard level.

CIOL: Is Cisco receding completely away from Home networking industry?



Faiyaz Shahpurwala: Yes, we are receding from the consumer market. Our learning there is that it has a very different set of requirement and they require a different shelf life. The cycle time for products is much faster; there are different price points. We are into developing big iron technology that already has some issues like complex production. In consumer market, there is a new sexy product out in the market every quarter and the product needs to be new, it has different distributions and is probably not in our stride.

Our focus in the last few years is that we want to continue in those markets with partners like Belkin. I'm not talking about sales, but from a globalization perspective. We have sales office in many places. We are growing, we have about 10,800 people but we are not like Infosys, they are the services Company, we are more of a development company.

We are not in mood for solutions, we do not make things on the internet. So we are not going to go to a hundred thousand people more in terms of headcount. What our concentration is that we need very highly skilled people, very focused, and of course we hire people from schools and we bring them in and then train them. So it is a multiple-focused model and it works for us.

We have been selling you IT products for over 25 years, and traditionally we sell IT where we provide network connectivity, but now it is other companies that are becoming IT companies, like Johnson & Johnson has become an IT company and some have become ICT companies. It is all powered by the same stuff, but we have got more than them. The CEO of the company cares only about how he can monetize and sell more ads and how he can generate revenue from business.

I'm not talking to an IT person first; I'm talking to a guy who thinks on business line. I'm talking about the business, decision making. So the lines of IT help them grow.

CIOL: IBM too has something on the lines of smarter planet. How is Cisco's different from it?

Faiyaz Shahpurwala: IBM and Cisco work together around this. When IBM talks about smarter planet, we talk about smarter connected communities. They do not make the networks, they come from consulting, software analytics and that is what they do. For us we own the control points, which are networks like the edge, network, and cloud. And it is a complement because you need to build that on top of that because you need software services and they need to partner with us on that. We are building the systems you run those solutions on.

IBM cannot build what we put in smart car, they can only provide an application at the back end, whereas, we can provide you system integration.

The kiosk at Bangalore Airport does not have a PC at the back. They are HTML 5 network enabled devices, and have window-like screen, and has API connected to a cloud network, unlike others.