Mobility, 5G-tech will bring transition: Cisco India

Cisco India, a division of the $47.14-billion revenue Silicon Valley-based networking solutions giant, has said that it is all set to add the next three billion people to internet. It will be achieved with sound platform on mobility innovations backed by 5G technologies.

Cisco India president (Engineering and Site Leader) Amit Phadnis told Deccan Herald that it is a challenge to bring on board the next three billion as the company will have to keep the speed and analytics in the back-end.

“It took 25 years to bring these people to internet. But, the next three billion will come within three years. The large portion of this will be added from the Asia Pacific region. Here, mobility will play a vital role and 5G will enhance the digitisation process,” he said. Areas like mobility, cloud and computing technologies help Cisco develop networking products to enable the digital transformation of enterprises that depend on technology-enabled networks.

“Our mobility solutions through IP-enabled technologies will help us in delivering services, bringing automation, IoT and Industry 4.0, among others,” he said.

He said the company is looking at 5G from a technology perspective. “5G is part of our entire mobility technology group, which will enhance consumer experience, and it is led by Starent Networks, which we acquired recently. We have a small group working on this in India. Service provider access group, mobility team, mobility core routing team and Wi-Fi team play vital role in this,” he said. During the GSMA Mobile World Congress, Cisco also announced its collaboration with Ericsson and Intel to develop its first 5G (fifth generation mobile networks) router.

Profitable quarters

Cisco India has set new benchmarks in its growth history in India by registering seven consecutive profitable quarters, as the economy is growing backed by digitisation and manufacturing.

“India has emerged as the great growth centre for the company globally, especially in the Asia Pacific region. We are looking at great opportunities thrown open by the Make in India and Digital India campaigns. Also, there is immense potential for the smart cities and IoT space in the country,” said Phadnis.

“We have registered 18% (Q4FY14) , 6%(Q1FY15), 11% (Q2FY15), 6% (Q3FY15), 5% (Q4FY15) and 40% (Q1FY16) growth. In the last one year, our market share has grown in all technologies,” he said. In terms of market share in India, Cisco is No.1 in seven out of the eight segments that it tracks, and it has gained a huge market share in six out of the eight segments.

“We are also seeing significant traction for our solutions in the enterprise space, especially UCS, networking and security solutions and smart cities,” said Phadnis. While North and South Americas were flat, and Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) declined 1%, Asia Pacific, Japan and China grew 17%.