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