Infinera sees 20-25 pc y-o-y growth in India

BANGALORE, INDIA: Digital optical networking systems provider Infinera Corporation, which started its sales operations in India in early 2011, is very bullish and foresees a 20-25 per cent year-over-year growth over the next couple of years.

Tom Fallon, CEO, Infinera, said: “We have been a bit late to the market because we are a young company and only recently started venturing into the APAC region. Moreover, we were always considered to be a company which is behind in terms of technology, since we were offering only 10G platforms. However, today we have 100G and 500G platforms in our portfolio and we see a huge market opportunity here in India. The local market is in the cusp of making very significant investments on network."

The company, found during the Dot-com bubble of 2001, announced plans to expand its India R&D centre and sales office in Bangalore. The R&D centre, which was found in 2001, is its second largest following the US headquarters in Sunnyvale.

"The expansion will be in accordance with the company's growth. The Infinera Bangalore team played a major role in development of our DTN platform,” said Subhendu Sarkar, senior sales director, Infinera India. “In just about a year we have about five-ten per cent of market share in OTN space."

The company is also building its third generation DTN platform, DTN-X, slated to be launched in 2012. This multi-terabit packet-optical transport platform is touted to enable 500 Gb/s FlexCoherent super-channels and comes with 600 optical functions and over 250 fibre channels have been eliminated. The company claims that this platform is better from its competitors such as Huawei, Ciena and Alcatel.

"When we built our 100G platform in 2004, everybody said it will not see any usage, whereas today after six years, we see it happening. Similarly, may be today Indians do not use video as much as in North America. However, they will soon be using it as and when the technology is available and it will happen very soon, because consumers need it. And for the Internet nothing is ever enough and to support high speed Internet usage 100G will not be enough. So we see a market for the 500G very soon. Videos, mobility and cloud will drive network traffic in India," adds Falon.