Bangalore-based BA Systems, which launched the first made-in-India router last year, is aiming for 10% of the $100-million market in the country for enterprise edge and core routers by 2010.
The overall router business in India is $350 million at present.PJ Singh, BA’s founder and CEO, who is a veteran of the networking industry in the US, said his routers use code developed by the company and are made at a world-class third-party unit in Chennai.
Third-generation architecture developed at his earlier company in the US, low software ownership cost and locally made hardware with full support enable BA to offer routers at prices 35-40% below those made by global majors like Cisco and Juniper Networks.
BA’s first Chennai-made routers went out on May 29 last year. Since then it has been penetrating datacenters, hospitality, and the banking and financial services sectors.
“We want to stay in managed connectivity for complex networks,” said Singh, who opted out of a doctorate in math at a US university to work for and set up some high-tech startups before opting to ride the router wave in India.
Singh said Cisco, Juniper and BA are the only three players in the world with the IP for this class of routers.
“We have written every single line of software code ourselves,” said Singh Singh said BA Systems’ routers have three key advantages over those of the global majors. First, BA has its own intellectual property developed from Day 1 with 3-G architecture and its cost is not passed on to the customer. Two, the local manufacturing. Three, the low support cost.
“Our hardware design has no purpose built or custom-built processing units since we have off-the-shelf components. That’s a very significant hardware cost added on by others,” said Singh.
B Jagadish, vice-president for sales and marketing, said BA has been getting repeat orders from large clients like Netmagic, who run data centres for players like ClearTrip, Taj, ITC and Ramada in hospitality, and Motilal Oswal in stock market segment.
“We have just started creating brand visibility, beginning with the system integration community. We have achieved that in the West and South and are now looking here,” said Jagadish.