Juniper R&D center doubles manpower

BANGALORE, INDIA: Unlike other service providers Juniper uses "One operating service" for all its products," said Nagendra Venkaswamy, managing director, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks. He was speaking at a press briefing announcing that Juniper has doubled the size of its Bangalore R&D centre making it the largest engineering department outside US.

"The new centre has 1275 seating and 750 rack (to store switches, routers) capacity. A quarter of Juniper's engineers are- based here and we contribute to all stages of product development," said Sridhar Sarathy, managing director, India operations

The centre is capable of product design and development, technical documentation and support and the engineering works such as hardware, software, testing, customer, support, programme management and product management.

"Juniper, a half a decade old company that started off with 30 engineers way back in 2003, has grown to be company employing 1000 engineers (950 in Bangalore, 10 in Chennai, 40 in Delhi and Mumbai) today," added Sarathy.

"We expect that this steady growth continues and in a couple of years Juniper plans to expand all its centres four times and for this we have set aside investment plans of 2 mn for Delhi and Mumbai and 8-10 mn for Bangalore sector," added Venkaswamy.

"Juniper's Ethernet switches, of its Ex-Series that was launched a month back, represent a new era in networking. We have gained four customers in the last four weeks, but a major chunk of them are yet to be addressed," Venkaswamy averred.

"Most of our clients are service providers and two-third of the revenue is generated from services alone. In future we will also have defense projects. India, being a steadily growing market, is strategic to Juniper's growth too, both as a fast growing adopter of high-performance networking technologies and as an increasingly important link in our global R&D strategy, " Venkaswamy said. Juniper that has seen a 31Ppercent growth year-on-year is the 5th largest company in APAC, but will grow to be the first in the coming years," he added.

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