Brocade investing $300 million in India for tech innovations

US-based networking products' major Brocade Communications Systems on Wednesday announced an additional investment of $300 million (Rs.1,870 crore) in India over the next five years for innovations in the technology hub here.

"We will invest $300 million in India over the next five years for new IP-based (intellectual property) innovations in networking space from our new development centre here," Brocade CEO Lloyd Carney told reporters.

The networking solutions of the $2.23-billion Silicon Valley firm help global telecos and enterprises provide a range of communication services worldwide.

"We will also showcase proofs-of-concept and pilot projects for customers and partners at the centre, where networking innovations will be developed based on the new IP architecture," Carney said on the occasion.

Asserting that India was the ideal test bed for the new IP architecture, as enterprises and services providers were receptive to open standards, Carney said his customers were well-positioned to leap directly to the new IP technologies over proprietary, legacy networking equipment.

"Besides developing next-generation networking solutions, this centre will, with our partners, networking industry and thought leaders across the country, offer our products to new verticals such as banking and finance, education, media and state-run enterprises," Carney added.

The company's Indian subsidiary also operates Vistapointe and Connectem, which it recently acquired for extending its leadership in software networking and virtualised network functions.

"As we believe India to be an early adopter of new IP technologies, we are embarking on our next growth phase in the region," said Carney.

According to global IT research and advisory firm Gartner, the Indian data centre infrastructure market, comprising server, storage, and networking equipment, will touch $2.03 billion in 2015, making the country the second-largest market and the second-fastest-growing market for networking products in Asia Pacific.

The Indian government is investing $19 billion on its "Digital India" programme over the next four years, with a significant spend on the network to build state-wide area networks, new data centres in each state, smart cities, and a cloud-based platform to drive connectivity for all its 1.3-billion citizens.

"The India market is going through a transformation with investments in private cloud, public cloud, as well as a network refresh due to the 10 and 40 Gigabit Ethernet adoption across the enterprise, government, and other sectors," Brocade India regional director Edgar Dias said.