The Hindu Business Line : Foundry Networks bullish on India

FOLLOWING the co-branding agreement inked recently with D-Link, the high-end enterprise products firm Foundry Networks Inc seeks to capture a significant pie of the Indian enterprise networking market.

Aiming a target of $10 million to $15 million in sales by 2006, the US-based hardware vendor expects the estimated increase in IT investment by Indian firms and the proposed scale up of infrastructure by Indian BPO firms to drive the enterprise networking market in India and push up the sales of Foundry Networks in the process.

The networking industry in India estimated at $200 million includes switches, fast Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet.

The current growth rate of 25 per cent is expected to sustain over the next four years.

"Even though we have been present in India, as several of our global customers such as Lucent have their development centres located here, a direct presence was lacking.

With D-Link it is possible for us to establish a stronger presence in the Indian market," Mr Chandra Kopparapu, Vice-President and General Manager of Multi-Layer Switching Business Unit, Foundry Networks, told Business Line.

With Indian companies more conscious of the need to invest in IT infrastructure and "asking the right questions," the enterprise networking market will boom, according to Mr Kopparapu.

On this front, upcoming launches from the US-based enterprise solution provider includes Layer 3 switches X424, X448, 24 port and 44 port Gigabit copper and Layer 4-7 Servion GT Gigabit appliance for security and balancing.

For D-Link India, the agreement with Foundry Networks has led to several large-scale orders including ONGC and National Institute of Technology, Jamshedpur.

The company expects to gain a market share of 15-20 per cent, according to Mr Rajiv Kapoor, General Manager, Business Development Enterprise Solutions, D-Link (India) Ltd.