The Indian Advance

The $409 mn Foundry Networks, which offers an entire range of switches

spanning the spectrum from Layer 2 to Layer 7, is emerging as a serious

competitor to the runaway market leader Cisco. Though its BigIron and FastIron

families were available in the Indian market for quite some time, it was only

last year that Foundry established a direct presence in India through a JV with

D-Link. One year hence, this co-branding alliance has carved out its own niche

and is showing the first signs of getting its teeth in a market hitherto

dominated by the Ciscos and Nortels.

Some of the premier Foundry deployments during the year include ISRO-ISTRAC

in Bangalore, ONGC in Dehradun, RBI in Kolkata well as Bharti Broadband. What is

even more heartening, believes Chandra Kopparapu, vice president for Strategic

Marketing and Business Development, Foundry Networks, has been the gradual

acceptance of 10 Gigabit Ethernet amongst many of the organizations in India.

"Like their counterparts in other parts of world, Indian customers too want

to future-proof their networks and deploy 10 Gig ready switches, and because of

the price and performance, Foundry becomes the obvious choice," confirms

Rajeev Kapoor, general manager-Business Development Enterprise Solutions, D-Link

India. As of today, Foundry has six live deployments of 10 Gig Ethernet in India

including organizations like Lucent Technologies, Anna University, and Crest

Animation Studios.

The co-branding alliance with D-Link has turned out to be a positive catalyst

in influencing Foundry's growth in India. Cisco might be the undisputed numero

uno in the Indian networking space, but D-Link does have a sizable presence

amongst the SMEs. Prior to Foundry's entry in India, the addressable market

size for switches was estimated at around Rs 357 crore. However, in the last

financial year, Fast Ethernet accounted for a total business worth Rs 426 crore,

while Gigabit Ethernet accounted for Rs 58 crore. This implies that today the

addressable market segment for the Foundry-D-Link partnership will be in excess

of Rs 900 crore. And with the current growth rate for high end enterprise

switching estimated to be more than 25%, Foundry has been able to make a dent

despite Cisco's gargantuan presence.

On the technology front, other than the accelerating adoption of 10 Gig

Ethernet in LAN, MAN and WAN, few of the visible trends in high-end networking

today involve Gigabit over copper unleashing a new wave of migration-all

traffic including data, voice, and video converging over IP/Ethernet, IPv6

enabling a new wave of IP devices, mobility and services as well as wireless LAN

moving into mainstream enterprises. With its SuperX series of products, Foundry

believes that it can address all these trends and thereby capture a lion's

share of the market in the next 18-24 months. Says Kopparapu, "Industry

analysts have been predicting a sharp ramp in 10-Gigabit Ethernet customer

adoptions in the late 2005 or 2006 timeframe, coinciding with 10-Gigabit

Ethernet prices dropping to less than $3,000 per port. With its product

portfolio at industry-leading prices starting at $2,500 per 10-Gigabit Ethernet

port already available in India, Foundry's product evolution and

price/performance is ahead of the market price curve by more than a year, he

claims. The company is aware of the Cisco competition-within its SuperX

series, the JetCore family is targeted directly at Cisco Catalyst 4500/6500

while the FastIron Edge is pitted against Catalyst 3500/3750.

Rajneesh De