Maxxan to open R&D center in B'lore

BANGALORE: San Jose based Maxxan Systems is entering the Indian market to promote its enterprise storage solutions. The company would bring its array of products including MXV intelligent SAN switches, software for disaster recovery and storage consolidation, storage gateway systems, virtual tape systems and infrastructure software to India.

Buoyed by the storage demand from verticals like banks and financial institutions, BPOs and telcos, the company is optimistic about growth in India. Maxxan's president and CEO Vic Mahadevan said, "The awareness about disaster recovery is high in India and besides there are no legacy systems to be dealt with. Our single location solution would be 30-40 percent cheaper than EMC's while for multiple location, it would be 50-60 percent lower."

Maxxan is betting on its intelligent technology based on its SANe architecture and low TCO to have an edge over competitors like Network Appliance and EMC. According to Mahadevan, "We focus on storage applications on the network since traditional storage systems are mostly proprietary and tend to be platform dependent. Our products are platform agnostic and can deliver any storage requirements from the network at a lower TCO."

The company's latest intelligent storage switch-MXV500 employs a unique architecture called Storage Application Network engine (SANe), which offers a centralized platform for deploying applications such as data replication, disaster recovery, SAN and NAS replication and virtual tape.

Besides entering the Indian market, Maxxan would also set up its only R&D center outside the US in Bangalore. The four-year old company clocked $12 million in revenues last year and aims to hit the $40 million mark the coming year. The Bangalore center, which will house 60-70 engineers by next year, is expected to bring about this rise in revenue.

"We are ambitious about our Indian operations. We target around 75 percent of Maxxan's revenues to come out of cutting edge products developed in India," informed Mahadevan.

The company has received $85 million in funding from investors like US Venture Partners, Venrock Associates and China Development Industrial Bank and Bank of America.