Cisco India hived off as separate geography

Priya Padmanabhan

BANGALORE: Networking major Cisco,

which is having a dream run in the Indian market hived off its Indian region,

giving it a separate geography status in February 2006.

Though this is the company's internal decision, it shows the growing

importance that the company accords to the Indian market.

Speaking to CyberMedia News on the sidelines of its first ITS meet, Rangu

Salgame, president, India and SAARC, Cisco Systems said that the decision

demonstrates that the company has logged the potential of India. “This would

mean that India is a valuable and strategic market and would get more attention

and investment.”

The specific geography status was previously accorded to another high growth

market - China. With Cisco India clocking Rs 2703 crore in 2005 and year on year

growth rate of over 40 per cent, the move was bound to happen sooner or later.

Salgame said that the business verticalization strategy had Cisco India

undertook in 2004 would continue. Cisco has business units for key

verticals-enterprise, ITS, telecom, government and consumer.

He was confident that VoIP adoption in India would spark off with the

government approving the logical partitioning of single integrated

infrastructure for Public Switched Telephone Networks (PSTN) and Voice over

Internet Protocol (VoIP).

In his keynote address at the ITS summit, Salgame stressed that intelligent

information networks would power the IT services industry in the “interactive

economy.”

“There is a transition from the transaction era to interaction. Rich media

is today driving integration and personalization of services.”

He said that while sequential transactions were the norm a few years ago,

today the business world deals with non-linear interactions through websites,

blogs, mobility and SMS.

© CyberMedia News