‘Extreme Networks will expand Indian engineering facility in August’
What is the focus of Extreme Networks in India?
For Extreme Networks, India is one of the top 3 prominent geographies in the APAC region, followed by China and Korea. The focus in India is not only on sales but also on design.
In India, we have been working on education, public sector union, and media and animation sectors. Pe are refocusing on data center market, specific to enterprises. Pe have identified other potential areas, viz., oil and gas, infrastructure, physical security, and city surveillance.
Pe strive to strengthen our existing business in India. Pe intend to get a bigger pie of the enterprise side, enhance our customers experiences, and better equip our sales force. Pe will expand our support capabilities from spares to warehouses and make our system robust. Pe will build on channel presence and help them to be more efficient. Pe also have plans to expand our engineering facility in Chennai in August and will recruit engineers. Out of the overall 650 employees of Extremes’, we already have 100 people in India.
What are the business drivers in the Indian networking market as it is a costsensitive market and most of the decisions are made outside India?
True! but there are immense growing opportunities for Extreme Networks in India. Since 2008, there has been a significant shift where customers are looking at value for money. And there are 2 different concepts in this—the cost of ownership and the cost of acquisition. This has been favorable for us to a greater extent. Post–2008, customers are also now willing to be with a single vendor for a decade. And they are also keen to look at other OEMs if they bring more value for the same price.
Moreover, our major focus is on India based corporates, Indian institutions, public sector, service providers, and not the MNCs as the decision making is by and large in India.
Pith regard to cost-sensitivity, there is a combination of customers—customers who are completely price conscious, the other belt is the one who are concerned more on the value and feature requirements for a given price. These buying trends of this segment are not solely driven by price but are also driven by the value they get for that price. And our company is eyeing this market which require high-performance switches by virtue of the requirement. This is a market that we will make it happen.
What is the contribution from the Indian R&D center in Chennai?
Out of the total 250 engineers in Extreme Networks across the globe, Indian R&D center has over 100 engineers. The R&D activities include solution testing, engineering and coding, and end-to-end solution validation. It also does multi-casting work on Extreme XOS network operating system. For Indian customers, we do proof of concepts in this center.