Networking giant Cisco is tying up with major players in IT services and the telecom industry to give innovation in the domestic market a boost. This is likely to help Cisco scale up its India revenues to the $1 billion-mark.
This year, Cisco?s prime technology focus areas will continue to be video, collaboration, data centre and virtualisation. Last year, Cisco and Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) had entered into a strategic alliance to develop and deliver information technology (IT) service solutions to help customers build and evolve next-generation data centres. Cisco also formed an alliance with Bharti Airtel to create a set of unique products and services including managed data services, hosted unified communications, connected branch services and Cisco TelePresence to cater to customer requirements across small, medium and large enterprises.
The company believes that in the years to come there will be a video explosion in homes and businesses as it is increasingly becoming the most important means for communication. ?Collaboration will drive the next wave of increase in productivity. In the future, collaboration will move from intra-company to inter-company, creating a safe and secure channel for companies that work together to communicate effectively with each other.
Using Web 2.0 social networks, video will increasingly be used in the enterprise world,? said Naresh Wadha, president and country manager, India and Saarc, Cisco. With its five-phase plan for borderless networks, Cisco aims to provide a roadmap to enable the next-generation workspace experience, which has been enabled by systems innovations across routing, switching, wireless, acceleration, and security. Cisco will approach cloud computing in terms of software as a service (like WebEx), platform as a service (like unified service delivery) and foundational cloud infrastructure (like unified fabric and unified computing system).
Highlighting some of the technology trends in the networking market, Wadhwa said, ?Virtual data centres, Collaboration technologies and TelePresence will be the future of enterprise computing.? On the telecom front, Wadhwa said that the advent of 3G in India is likely to provide the much required momentum to the mobile value added services (VAS) industry, expected to grow from about Rs 6,296 crore to Rs 20,000 crore by 2015. Increasing bandwidth would also help improve the quality of video services which in turn will spur the growth for collaborative technologies such as TelePresence, he said.