IXIA opens R&D and Customer Support Center in Bangalore

BANGALORE, INDIA: IXIA, a leading, global provider of IP network testing solutions, has opened its R&D and Customer Support Center in the city.

With an investment of Rs. 45 million, the state-of-the-art center will further strengthen Ixia’s presence in India. The facility will offer a wide variety of services for its India customers, including sales, service, comprehensive training, and a proof-of-concept and certification lab.

In the coming years, Ixia plans to increase it presence and penetration in significant verticals across the Asia Pacific region, including the carrier, enterprise and government markets. India has evolved to become one of Ixia’s key markets for expansion, accounting for 30 percent of its R&D activities today. In addition, India is poised for substantial sales growth in the next three years due to increased R&D activities from Ixia’s long-standing US-based equipment manufacturer customers.

The company now has more than 130 engineers in India offering customers core R&D functions, fully equipped labs to support both pre- and post-sales activities including professional training and the staging of real-world triple-play testing scenarios. The in-house training department offers hands-on training for Ixia systems and testing technologies as well as seminars designed to certify users on specific Ixia test applications.

"India’s contribution to our global growth has been increasing over the years. It has now become one of our most important growth markets," said Sam Bass, Executive Vice President of Operations for Ixia. "Our offices in Bangalore and Kolkata allow us to more effectively utilize the talents of local software engineers and to support our local customers in successful the testing and deployment of their IP networking technology. This is in line with our mission of creating cutting edge IP test solutions for our customers."

Ixia has been working with the software development and quality assurance communities in India for the past five years from outsourcing in 2002, to incorporation with 25 employees in 2005, to its present-day operations in Bangalore and Kolkata. Ixia’s R&D team in India has specialized in the areas of conformance, performance and functional testing of high performance IP communication devices and networks. Some of Ixia’s prominent customers include Cisco, Reliance, Juniper, Motorola, Nokia, Texas Instruments and Bharti.

"India represents a growing part of Ixia’s global business. India’s brisk growth has resulted in a huge demand for communication and internet infrastructure,” said Victor Alston, senior vice president of product development and marketing for Ixia. "Communications and entertainment delivery over the last five years has rapidly moved to an IP infrastructure. Our products provide exceptional performance and flexibility for testing networking and application-aware devices that are required to scale in advanced triple-play networks."

According to a 2006 report on Word Communications Test Markets by Frost & Sullivan, Asia Pacific (includes India) is likely to grow 12 percent over the next five years and is likely to reach US $296 million by 2012. Data convergence of video and voice, IPTV/video on demand, 3G and 4G wireless, carrier Ethernet are some of the trends that favour the growing IP testing market in India.