Converged Networks Ideal For New Generation Network Deployment

In a one-on-one with Biztech2.0, Nagendra Venkaswamy, MD, India and SAARC, Juniper Networks, talks about new generation networks and trends in the networking space.

Could you please shed some light on the current scenario in the networking space?

The impact of the global financial recession has definitely been felt in India. If I look at the market as a whole, the banking, IT and the ITeS sectors have certainly slowed down. It is clear that even if the business has not been impacted, there is a lot of caution that has come into the market. People are taking a closer look at possible investments and in certain cases also postponing investments.

However, if I look at the market as a whole, it also consists of the telecom sector, which is continuing its healthy investment trend. The market also includes the government and defense sectors, which are still going strong. Speaking specifically with regard to us, the impact has been very neutral. The size of the market is around Rs 800 million and we don’t see a deceleration in the market at all.

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What impact has the market slump had on Juniper’s projects? Are you supporting your partners with any financial assistance?

We will have to wait for the banking sector to sort itself out in terms of liquidity, the global financial market and interest rates before they actually go back to their investment agendas. In the IT and ITeS space, there are cash-rich companies, which don’t opt for local financing and interest rates for many of them are rather high. So they are waiting and watching out for customer projects and typically, their investments are directly linked to the projects that they get.

Thus, financing and supporting the customer with long-term payment options is not really going to bring the market back, barring exceptional cases where we have tie-ups with financing companies, which we put forth in front of partners so that they can use the financing from these companies to tide over short-term crisis. Juniper has relationships with several financing companies and credit corporations, who front-end any such activity with partners.

What possibilities do you see with the penetration of 3G in India?

We see enormous possibilities with 3G coming into the country. Preceding 3G are the new generation networks (NGNs). When the NGN trend gets fully blown, we see huge possibilities for us. 3G will mean greater bandwidth requirements, new applications, and requirement of security, OSS and BSS. All of that is bang in the middle of what Juniper does. Broadband networking is Juniper’s space and that is where we have made our mark in the service providers’ space. We expect to see the next big wave of implementation in the service provider space in the middle of 3G.

What is your take on converged network services?

Converged networks are the most elegant way of implementing NGNs. The key here is more financial than technological. At the end of the day, what does a service provider do with the investments that have already been made? That is why there is a slow and steady move towards converged networks.

What people are looking at is a step-by-step movement towards converged networks. It is not going to be a paradigm shift where a company is going to scarp the existing equipment and move into a new network altogether. I don’t see any technical challenges in this whole thing. What will require attention is to see how the investments play out. What do they do with the newly installed equipment? To me converged networks are the way to go. They will have to grow if 3G has to be implemented in a big way.