Eleven months after the acquisition of networking company Force 10 Networks, Dell India has ramped up its R&D centre in Chennai with an addition of over 100 employees, and is now looking to increase its share in the Indian networking space.
The company, which recently bought Quest Software, Perot Systems and SonicWall, has been diversifying as part of its on-going plan to reduce dependence on the declining personal computer market.
“We are definitely planning on increasing our focus on India. It is the fourth largest market in the Asia Pacific after Japan, China and Singapore, and we believe the India networking market to be somewhere around $200-300 million,” said Dario Zamarian, Vice-President and General Manager, Dell Networking.
“While we don’t create specific products for India, we will certainly take advantage of the design of products built here,” he said, pointing out that their competitors were Cisco, HP and Huawei.
Dell Networking already has a strong presence in the country with the R&D centre here being made a Centre of Excellence, which will focus on end-to-end product solutions and development of networking switches and routers.
“Already, this has become a critical hub for research, most of the work on the Force 10 operating system, which serves as the backbone for most of networking, is done here.
This will continue now as a Centre of Excellence, for example, just in the last quarter, over 30 patent applications were filed from here. Chennai will now work with the centres in Texas and San Jose,” said Sreedhara Narayanaswamy, Executive Director and Center Head, Dell Networking R&D.
