Xylan Corp Mulls Local Design Unit

The $220 million Xylan Corporation, providers of high-bandwidth switching systems for end-users and carriers, is planning to set up a design centre in India.

Xylan Corporation's director-corporate communication, David Rodewald, in a statement to Business Standard, said, "We are looking into a design centre in India, but we are very preliminary in this process. We are not ready at this time to make an official statement about our intentions for this center."

However. it is learnt that the California-based transnational has firmed up its plans to set up this centre in India and it is highly likely that Bangalore will be the base for this design centre. Senior officials of the corporation are expected to be in India by mid-October to finalise the investment plans and the kind of the design work which is to be carried out in their Indian centre.

Xylan is one of the leaders in the complete transformation of computer networking to switched, high-speed connections, and is in the process of providing powerful, convenient and inexpensive switches that can replace hubs and routers.

The Indian centre is likely to be involved in designing chips and advanced architecture which will be helpful in developing products aiding in any-to-any translation, integrating LAN switching, asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) switching, layer-three switching, and wide-area switching over a wide range of interfaces and media.

The Internetworking major's flagship products include the OmniSwitch and PizzaSwitch with the former offering a flexible, powerful and reliable switching platform and combines an innovative hardware architecture which serves as a basic network building block.

Complementing this is the PizzaSwitch which offers a family of mid-range LAN switching products and it switches locally among Ethernet segments and devices and links them at high-speed to servers and backbones, using Fast Ethernet and ATM. Xylan Corporation for the second quarter ended June 30, 1998 reported a revenue of $159 million compared with $93.1 million for the same period during 1997, indicating an increase of 71 per cent.

For the year ended December 31, 1997, Xylan reported a revenue of $210.8 million, up from $128.5 million for December 31, 1996.