Force10 to expand India development centre

CHENNAI - With the global market for computer networking products and solutions on the rebound, the $175 million revenue Force10 Networks Inc. plans to expand its Indian development centre by adding headcount, investing $10 million and also deepening its presence in the domestic market.

“We plan to add around 100 high calibre engineers in the embedded software space. We will complete investing $10 million in our new centre here by September this year and, going by the trends, the investment may go up,” Prakash Sripathy, the company’s vice president, told IANS in an interview.

According to him, the San Jose-headquartered company is at a transition point, chalking out new growth plans worldwide.

Force10 has filed the necessary papers with the US capital market regulator to come out with an initial public offer (IPO) of $143 million.

In India, apart from expanding its research centre, Force10 is also thinking of deepening its market presence by developing channel partners and turning the Indian operations to a revenue centre.

Ruling out new development centres in India in the near term, Sripathy said the primary target was to grow out of the 44,000 sq.ft centre housing the company’s India headquarters, development lab and data centre at the Olympia Technology Park here.

According to him, the company currently has around 200 own employees and another 100 engineers as contract resources.

The Indian development centre develops nearly 75 percent of Force10’s software need and, in the case of hardware, around 25 percent work is done in the country.

“The Indian outfit is working towards developing and launching eight products in 2011 for Force10’s global markets,” Sripathy added.

Referring to the growing market for the networking products and solutions, he said the trend augurs well for companies like Force10.

“While hardware costs are coming down the operational expenses and revenue are on the rise for companies. Compared to competition, the cost per port in our boxes are nearly one third of what the competition charges and is also energy efficient,” Sripathy claimed.

In the global market Force10 competes with the likes of Cisco and Juniper. In India, Force10 sells its products through Dell and IBM and has plans to look at other channels like tying up with system integrators, Sripathy said.

Citing market research studies, Sripathy said the Indian data centre market was estimated to be in the region of $200 million and logging around 14 percent growth.

According to him, the company is yet to enter the Indian government segment and has a good presence in the enterprises segment.

(V. Jagannathan can be contacted at v.jagannathan@ians.in)