Brocade invests $300 mn to capture new IP-based market in India

Storage and networking solutions provider Brocade has said it will invest $300 million (Rs 1,870 crore) in India over the next five years. The company is making new investments in India to build facilities here as an additional base to support Brocade’s new IP innovations. The $2.2-billion company, which has about 1,000 employees in India, has set up a new 157,000 sq. ft. R&D unit in Bangalore. Brocade, which primarily does business through partners such as EMC, Dell and Hitachi, and hence is not as well known outside technology circles, has now decided to aggressively engage with clients in the country. [caption id=“attachment_2199392” align=“alignright” width=“380”]  Christine Heckart, senior vice president, ecosystems, and chief marketing officer, Brocade[/caption] “This is a very exciting time in the networking industry. The market, which has stagnated for about 10 years, is going through a transition,” said Christine Heckart, senior vice president, ecosystems, and chief marketing officer, Brocade. Brocade is betting big on the Indian market with its new IP architecture-based solutions, and believes that India is the ideal test bed for the new IP architecture as enterprises and service providers in India are receptive to open standards and are well positioned to leap directly to new IP-based technologies over proprietary, legacy networking technologies. Market trends The world has changed a lot in the last 20 years but the underlying networks and the way data centres are constructed have not changed, according to Brocade. As social, mobile, analytics, and cloud (SMAC) drive companies to become digital businesses, and with 25-50 billion connected devices and things by 2020, there is enormous pressure on underlying networks, which are struggling to meet the demands of cloud and mobile infrastructure. “We believe there’s really a need for a new kind of underlying infrastructure. Today, large internet companies are facing the IT relevance gap. The gap exists because expectations being driven by the SMAC are entirely different, but the underlying network is ideal for the second platform i.e. client server and LAN/WAN,” Heckart explained. “We have made enormous investments in the old IP, so we cannot throw that away. But to meet the needs of the third platform (SMAC), we have to re-invent and re-imagine IP. And, this is what the industry has started to call the new IP.” Unlike old IP, the new IP is based on an open architecture and software-centric. It offers flexibility to customers to buy hardware and software separately and configure them together, which helps in lowering TCO and increases the rate at which companies can innovate. New age IP networks help customers become digital businesses faster. India-first approach Brocade claims that India has some unique advantages over the rest of the world, which has gone through the progression over the last 10 years deploying the old IP and now moving to the new IP. India has a chance to leapfrog, and can straightaway deploy the new IP. Brocade sees trends like consumerisation of IT, 4G mobility rollouts, SMAC, Digital India (infrastructure, services, literacy) as drivers for new IP-based technologies in India. [caption id=“attachment_2199396” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Lloyd Carney, CEO, Brocade[/caption] “India is the fastest growing global market for Brocade,” said Brocade CEO Lloyd Carney. “The company has grown over 400 percent in the last two years in India and has won over 100 clients across industry verticals, including service providers (cloud), in BFSI, healthcare, education, and media. Some of the big clients are Micromax, Videocon D2H, Reliance Big, among others.” With large Internet-based businesses growing in India, the data centre market is growing at rapid pace. And, Brocade sees a huge opportunity here, and said it is already working with cloud service providers to get a fair share in the growing startup space too. In addition, the company is also in talks with the Indian government on initiatives like Digital India and smart cities. On the smart cities front, Brocade is working with government bodies in the role of a technical consultant. Other than that, Brocade is also eyeing acquisitions of mobile technology firms in India. The company recently acquired two Indian companies – Vistapointe in September and Connectem in March. Both companies have a strong engineering presence in India.