Sun to increase investment in India

NEW DELHI, INDIA: Sun Microsystems Incorporated plans to increase its investment in India by 60 to 70 per cent.

The company will also concentrate on more services-led inorganic growth through acquisitions.

“Sun will significantly increase its investments in emerging BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India and China) economies. In India alone, we plan to increase our investment by 60 to 70 per cent, especially in the services space,” Don Grantham, executive vice president, Global Sales and Services at Sun Microsystems Inc., told CyberMedia News.

“The investment will be on professional services business model, which has generated a revenue of $5.2 billion. It will not be services business alone, but services-led with customer engagement. The services practice will be in high performance computing, virtualization etc. There will also be dedicated sales models for volume partners also,” Grantham said.

“Sun will also invest significantly on partner channels and value-added resellers to create a completive advantage. The investment is to make them return more value to the customers and offer more products and services. We will be focusing more on systems, storage, software and services with close to 15 to 20 per cent investment going into R&D,” Grantham added.

“We still believe that network is the center of computing, and rely on the open-source strategy – the key being the acquisition of Solaris. Even in the hardware side, the economics is changing now. The T1 and T2 servers have turned into a billion dollar business for Sun,” he added.

Bhaskar Pramanik, president (India GEM), Sun Microsystems India, said, “India is the smallest and the fastest growing market for Sun, contributing close to two per cent of the global revenues. We intend to double the revenue share in the next couple of years. For this we will be targeting BFSI, Telcos, education, government, retail, IT and ITES apart from microfinance, micro-insurance.”

Sun Microsystems grew at about 18.5 per cent in the fourth quarter. The growth margins have increased at 48.5 per cent as against 43.4 per cent the preceding fourth quarter.