Sonus to expand Indian R&D base

BANGALORE: Riding high on the availability of talented software professionals in India, US based Sonus Networks, provider of voice over IP (VoIP) infrastructure solutions for wireline and wireless service providers, is looking forward to increase its R&D strength in India.

"It is good to see such great talent available for us in this country. We started our R&D center in March 2005 and now we are 27 people. We would be increasing this number to 60 by end of this year and eventually take this to 100 by end of 2006," informed Sonus Networks Asia Pacific & Japan VP Simon Naylor.

The company's decision to expand its R&D efforts stems from the fact that Asia has become a hotbed for the company's products and services. At present, the Bangalore based R&D center employs 27 people working on products like next generation application server IMX and architectural development for its IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) product.

"We are working with a lot of carriers in the Asian region. Different carriers in countries like Japan, Malaysia, China and Singapore are deploying our equipment. We would be opening a 'technical assistance' within this R&D center. So as we grow in Asia, we want to strengthen our support and technical assistance infrastructure to India," Naylor added.

Moving forward as the company increases its R&D strength, it plans to focus on providing network simulation capabilities and recreation of customer networks. "As Indian software professionals are immensely talented - the possibilities for this R&D center are huge. We would be deploying an IMX based application for a Japanese carrier in September 2005 and this is likely to be developed from our Indian R&D center. So, I am very exited about our India capability," he further informed.

IMS FOR NEXT-GEN NETWORKS

Participating in the CommunicAsia 2005 and eyeing the carrier market, Sonus Networks has unveiled its IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem) solution for next generation networks. "This solution allows our customers to seamlessly and cost effectively comply with the IMS standards and to maximize their investment by delivering converged multimedia services," Naylor explained.

With service providers always on the lookout for building newer revenue streams and improving margins, converged networks can be one way of achieving this. "Converged networks were originally seen simply as a way to reduce operating expenses, but the real potential for service providers lies in the rollout of innovative multimedia services," he added.

Supporting approximately 12 billion minutes of VoIP per month, globally and actively being present in Asian countries like Japan, China and Malaysia, Sonus is now eyeing the Indian carrier market.

"India is a huge market for us and we are engaged in some test runs. We have great expectations from a market like India and we already have our sales team in Mumbai working towards exploring opportunities for us," Naylor added.

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The author traveled to Singapore at the hospitality of Sonus Networks.