Southern India

This region of the country has been resilient with activity throughout the past calendar year. The enhanced competition among the states of Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu and Kerala, to attract as much investment as possible in the sphere of IT and IT-enabled services led to real excitement through out the year. Bangalore has been the stopover for all these visiting dignitaries like the former Japanese prime minister, Yoshiro Mori, Chinese leader Li Peng, etc. Moreover, the southern states looked at global investors needs and conventions.

The southern region almost saw the establishment of over five new technology companies, last year. Furthermore, almost all the big networking majors increased their investment on their development bases, be it Cisco, Sun, Nortel, SGI, IBM, Lucent, Microsoft, Motorola, Alcatel or Philips.

Distinctly, there were investments on three types of companies—wireless, telecom development and IT. As a result, there were a lot of expansion activities for the networking infrastructure. Further, the entire host of telecom and converged networks came over. These include Huawei Technologies, Ittiam, Mobiapps, Tejas Networks, Ditium, Amber, Ishoni, etc.

Another important feature of South is that it has been the base for structured cabling vendors. Tyco, Krone, Molex, Deltaful, Panduit, TVSNet, all operate from here. Then the top integration king Wipro drove the business from here. Among its others, we have a host of integrators like Network Solutions, PAM Network, Ramco, Gemini, right under the nose. And, it is the hub for the transmission products. ITI, ARM, UTL, BPL, HTL, and Crompton Greaves, all operate in South. All these are the reasons why there has been an increased activity in the South, during FY 2000-01.

Western India

West seems to be the mantra for networking companies in the country. Be it Intel or 3Com, vendors realized the importance to have its presence felt in the financial capital of the country. Probably, that’s because of the fact that this is where the headquarters of the best-breed corporates are based in. This has proven to be the most fertile soil for service providers, especially the ones in the broadband fray. Take a look at the number of data centers operational in Mumbai alone – Cyquator, Enron, Netmagic, Asianfrontiers, Satyam and Global Tele Systems. No wonder why Intel has moved its lock, stock and barrel with its products targeted towards data centers.

Though Gurgaon is still considered to be the Mecca of contact centers, Mumbai is playing catching-up game. Some of the big names like TCS-HDFC combine, Transworks, Global Tele-systems and Sitel have already setup their shop here.

When it comes to network integration, though Mumbai doesn’t have much of national scale integrators like Banglore or Delhi does, the number of regional players are staggering. And already, these local players are in the process of spreading their reach to other parts of the country. With the whole networking industry bullish on the opportunities abound in the banking & finance industry, it is imperative for the players to have a major presence in Bombay to pitch for these projects. The western region alone has some 140-odd banking software companies and its time for their networking counterparts to follow suit. With real estate prices crashing down and action spreading to the outskirts of the city, Mumbai is once again on the verge of becoming an irresistible location for all and sundry in the networking business.

Northern India

The northern region of the country is a step behind the most prosperous regions of South and West, but things are changing fast. The e-governance project of Madhya Pradesh, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, and domestic long distance is driving the networking market, as broadband pipes are being laid by Reliance, Spectranet and Bharti for providing connectivity to corporates and SMEs. The places that are inaccessible through optical fiber can be easily connected through VSATs, as North is also the hub of VSAT service providers like HECL, HCL Comnet, TelstraV-Comm, HFCL Satcom and Essel Shyam.

North is also considered the Mecca of call center operations in India, as one can find Spectramind, E-funds, Air Infotech, GE and Daksh already operational. But there are many large call centers, which are in the pipeline like Bharti Teletech, Hero and others that would be operational in this fiscal, opening up new opportunities in networking.

With lot of corporates moving out from Delhi to spacious locations in Gurgaon and Greater Noida, connectivity is what they would be asking for. And once the connectivity is stored, bandwidth and quality of service will be at the top-of-their mind. North is like a home for networking majors like Cisco, 3Com, HNS, Avaya, Alcatel, Motrola and Siemens. Also
integrators like CMC, HCL Comnet, HCL Info and IBM Global form a formidable group.

Eastern India

The e-governance project of the West Bengal state government is likely to generate networking business in this region, which lags far behind other regions. What is stopping the IT growth in this region, especially the North-East, is a highly inadequate transportation infrastructure and the lack of PCs and telephone penetration. The government sector is easily the largest deployer of networking equipment, followed by the manufacturing sector.