THE CONTENTS

1. Introduction
2. History of the industry
3. Linkages
4. Industry Structure
5. Demand Profile
6. Suggested Strategies
7. Conclusion

Annexure A - Overview of Products & Protocols
Annexure B - Players Profile
Annexure C - Glossary of Terms
 
 

Network-centric computing is one of the the most trite buzzwords in the IT industry today. The industry direction is toward a world where, thank to ubiquitous data networks and the Internet, computers of all stripes can co-exist and even work in concert.

The idea of linking PCs and workstations into networks began to take hold about ten years ago. Companies like Novell and Sun demonstrated how sharing data over a network boosted productivity. In fact, the entire campaign of Sun Microsystems was based on the now legendary slogan - ‘The network in the computer’. This new form of computation was described by a term that later became an industry mantra - ‘client-server computing’. Diverse computers from different manufactures could be linked and corporate data stored in big iron would soon be parceled out among servers that were smaller, cheaper and closer to end-users bringing rise to the term distributed computing.

When we talk about total networking, the industry can be divided for statistical purposes into three vertical segments with little or no overlap:

1. The hardware part providing the PCs (both the servers and the nodes) and the ‘networkable’ peripherals (printers, plotters, fax machines etc.). This forms the driver segment of the networking industry with all the hardware majors fighting pitched battles to annex an extra point in the marketshare battle.
 
2. The software part consisting of the Network Operating System (NOS). This market is clearly dominated by various versions of Novell Inc.’s Netware which has a market share of over 70% worldwide. In India, this is expected to be even higher.
 
3. Thirdly, we have the connectivity products like ethernet cards and hubs which facilitates the communication between the machines.

The analysis in the following pages focuses on the much-neglected third part which literally forms the backbone of the networking effort. This industry segment is considered to have an "existence-by-default" and in effect, has minimal data available on the growth trends, market shares, strategy of the players and other relevant parameters.
 
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 2. History of the Industry

The computer is the network (or the reverse, if you prefer the Sun Microsystems slogan!) if the number of people jumping into the Internet bandwagon is any indication. Sharing information and resources is the key to any successful venture. For organizations, this means bringing their entire operations under the management of central controller, with the information that may just be scattered across the organization in an orderly manner. Thus the distributed client-server architecture was born.

In India, networking really came to the fore only in the last four years. Thus this segment never went through the slump which hardware and software segments went through sequentially in 1991 and 1992. Early networking efforts were build upon constructing small LANs with ARCNET or Ethernet with the first popular software being Novell’s Netware 2.2 which started with a five user version not requiring a dedicated file server. The technology gap in earlier days were well above three to four years. Even in early 1990s, ARCNET architecture which was discarded by the west due to its speed issues was the first choice for many companies due to its extremely low start up cost.

Early networking efforts were initiated by the industry hardware leaders selling the concept of data, devices and applications that were shareable which would consequently lead to higher productivity. Companies like SMC, Compex etc., dominated the Ethernet NIC market which was considered to be the single important component after the operating system.

By 1992, there was a definite movement towards standardization, especially in the basic networks. ARCNET was getting slowly phased out, Ethernet was becoming the de facto standard, twisted pair hubs combining the advantages of Ethernet topology with the modularity of ARCNET (especially while repairing networks) were getting into popularity. Another trend which was started in about the same time was wiring for an entire building. Computer networks inclusive of the backbone came to be built at the time of construction along with the telephone cables. Twisted pair cables with RJ (Radio Jack) 11 and 45 connections were primarily used for the purpose.

The product details including the various products (hubs, routers etc.) as well the various protocols are given in the annexure.
 
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3. Linkages

Networking is a unique industry in itself in that it does not, and in most cases cannot function as an independent entity. The linkages in the industry include:

3.1. Hardware

Every customer who buys a PC is a potential network consumer of tomorrow. The stand alone PC will first be hooked into a network as a node (it can even be a low-end server) with the insertion of an NIC into the motherboard. As the network grows, traffic management becomes an issue which facilitates the use of hubs, routers and so on. Alternately, the stand alone machine with the help of a modem can connect itself to VSNL server and perform web browsing on the Internet.

The hardware market is such that it can act as a pointer of the future potential of networking. This is because, the early adopters, who have had some experience in computing graduate to a network where as companies sometimes design an entire networking set up in one go.

3.2. Software

As far as networking is concerned, there are two software aspects involved; one is the operating system software and the second is the packages run. The NOS market is ruled by just one player, Novell Inc., through its Indian subsidiary, Onward Novell India Ltd. Novell enjoys market shares well above 80% for its product, Netware, in the legal software market. The number of Netware copies sold in one year is another indicator to the networking market even though the total networking market includes the consumers upgrading their network also.

In the package software market, the networking revolution has lead many software companies to develop multi-user packages which can be shared by all the users in a network. Rampant piracy remains the most critical issue in the software market. The government with its reduction on  duties and other related measures have helped reduce the prices of the packages, but the figures still is well above 60% for pirated software in India (source : Mr. Dewang Mehta, ex-chief, National Association of Software Companies - NASSCOM)

3.3 Employment Aspects

The networking industry has several unique characteristics, some of which are listed below:

1. The number of people employed in the industry (specifically, the organized sector) are quite small and consist mostly of product managers and executives and  technical experts.
 
2. Direct sales is minimal from the companies’ point of view. The distributors handle the sales by offering the right connectivity products of the brands they carry while the networking equipment vendors will act as specialists to offer specific advice when called for.
 
3. The marketing force focuses on brand building and pull through advertisements and on push to the vendors through various incentives. This is especially so since multi-vendor distribution is the order of the day and substitute products are easily available from a different company.
 
4. Salary levels are typically high since industry is hard pressed for qualified manpower. Attrition levels are high, which is typical of IT industry as a whole.

3.4 Miscellaneous Aspects

The industry is very clearly not an export industry because of the fact that there is no local manufacturing. All the local subsidiaries of MNCs act as liasoning offices trying to forecast based on various demand projections. Certain Indian companies have taken up manufacturing of lower-end items like NICs on a small scale. But manufacturing is not going to a viable proposition in the long run due to government policy of duty reduction and scale economies enjoyed by the big manufacturers / unbranded players (e.g.: those in Taiwan).

Government policy has been extremely favorable for the industry with duties witnessing a steep fall to the current levels of 10%. Government has also acted as a major buyer in line with its policy of establishing state-of-the-art technology centres across the country. The IIT, Kharagpur network which is being set up and the IISc FDDI network which is one of the oldest and largest of its kind are just two examples. Education & Research segment of the market which actively depends on the funding of various agencies, both Indian (e.g.: DST and AICTE) as well global(like UNDP and WB).

As far as the customers are concerned, their role in the market is at best to identify the needs. The expertise required to design a network and suggest it to the company is lacking since the Indian customer is still lagging in the learning curve. Thus, vendor selection as well as choice of networking components is typically decided by the system integrator.
 
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 4. Industry Structure

4.1. Positioning

The industry, especially in the middle and higher end is very clearly divided between five players who have been profiled in detail (annexure-2) on four parameters to bring about uniformity in the comparison. The top four MNC vendors account for more than 30% of the total market (see table below). Other notable players include Compex, D-link, Telematics, Fore Systems, Nortel, Eicon, Micom, Symplex and Specialix.

The other two majors, Bay Networks and 3Com have joined hands with IBM to form the Network Interoperability Alliance (NIA) to build a simplified network architecture based on three layers: desktops and servers, edge networking and core networking. This is probably the first formal effort to bring about some standardization in this industry plagued by a profusion of standards for various networking technologies (analysis by Strategic Networks Inc.)

4.2. Technology Advantages

It can be seen from the above profiles of the major five players that this is a technology oriented industry which warrants tremendous amounts of investment on a sustained basis for R&D and subsequent product development. Consequently, the small players in the market get swallowed by the big ones as the industry clearly heads towards a mature oligopoly status. Time-to-market (TTM) thus becomes a crucial factor of consideration with dwindling product cycles. Technological advantages can come in the form of past product development experiences, superior manpower, tie-ups with major hardware vendors for joint development and so on.

4.3 Margins and Profits

Networking products are almost never sold alone; typically they form a part of the total networking solution. Margins and profits for the vendor companies are more or less fixed in the industry. This is because of the tie-ups the main networking system vendors have with the system integrators in the country. On the other hand, if it is a major networking order, discounting comes into the picture considering the image boost given by the order. On an average, the main players are assumed to be having a mark up of 30 to 70% depending on the nature of the product.

4.4 Cost factors

The key success factors in this industry are (i) competitive edge and (ii) time. Cost factors are determined by (a) governmental policies and (b) raw material and manpower costs. Governmental policy has been extremely industry-friendly in the last few years with steadily falling duty structures. Networking equipments falls under the category of computer peripherals whose duty structure has been reduced from 35% to 20% as per the latest budget. Raw material costs have also been kept more or less steady, thus the main element of the cost structure is the development costs.
 
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 5. Demand Profile

5.1. Market size

The most conservative estimate puts the market size at a healthy 350 crore with an yearly growth rate of 60%. Thus the pure networking market is about 4% of the total IT industry size (1995-96 revenues of Rs. 9,300 crores). The market is expected to touch anything between 550 to 600 crores ($ 175 million approx.) in 1996-97 with the networking pie taking a larger share of the overall market. With the expected boom in networking, thanks to the internet explosion, the industry expects the market to follow two significant trends:

(a) movement to more upmarket products with the resultant vanishing of products like 8-bit and 16-bit Ethernet cards, simple repeater and so on.
(b) increased growth rates with the market size crossing 1,500 crores in the organized sector by the turn of the century.

The demand conditions have been favored both by an increase in real terms of the size of market as well as indirect factors like the "Internet-rage", multiple partnerships and so on. The diffusion of innovation concept is most significant here with the early adopters acting as the technology drivers. Top system integrators (HCL, Wipro and so on) also aggressively push the higher end products promoting them on the planks of futurability, long term returns and modular growth features.

5.2. External factors

Networking industry has received a major boost thanks to the plummeting PC prices and increasing power of Intel in the chip market. Intel has aggressively pushed the Pentium and later, the Pentium Pro in the corporate computing market.

The industry is expected to again zoom up when the basic service get under way. The basic service providers (starting this year) is expected to put tremendous pressure on the hardware industry for high-end fault-tolerant servers for basic messaging and a host of servers spread across the circle for running the other operations related to the basic services. The telecom segment is expected to be one of the largest buyers of It products and services across the board, with networking acting as the key element along with servers. A case in point is that of Escotel Mobile Communications Ltd., whose WAN will be linking its headquarters with three centres with a total of over 60 computers in a real-time network when it gets under way later this financial year.

The number of networks connected to the Internet doubled in 1995-96 from 40,977 in September, 1994 to 79,986 an year later (study by Internet Society).

Another related factor has been the high incidence of Intranet, which is basically the use of Internet technology (E-mail, browsing, file transfer etc.) in corporate LANs and WANs. Currently 22% of US companies have Intranets established (study by Forrester Research, Massachussets). In 1995, Intranet sales accounted for 43% of the $1.1 billion market in Web servers and this is expected to around $4 billion by 1997 (study by Zona Research, California).

5.3. Market trends

A few selected trends of the market vis-à-vis reorientation of major players, system integrators, market segments and emerging products are highlighted below.

1. The industry majors in the international market have recognized the need to focus on networking with several companies shifting focus from the PC segment to enterprise-wide, mission-critical networked systems.
 
2. The networking majors have been on a large scale merger/acquisition frenzy, in an effort to broadbase their product offerings.
 
3. Worldwide, the industry is witnessing the emergence of ‘Network Computers’ (NCs) pioneered by Larry Ellison’s Oracle Corporation, the world’s second largest software company. An NC is a PC having just enough hardware to log on to networks such as the Internet.
4. One of the earliest models of NC called ‘iBox’ has already hit the market, brought out by a Japanese company with a built-in CD-ROM and modem.
 
5. The acceptance of networking has led almost all the box-sellers turn into system integrator. This can be seen from the high growth in revenue of companies like Microland, Unicorp and Zenith who are among the self-styled ‘networking companies’ of the country. The new breed of system integrators offer total solutions, cabling and even designing the network.
 
6. Multiple partnerships has become more of an industry standard; a case in point being that of Microland who partners as many as 29 companies. Indian hardware vendors now offer a diverse range of networking products like cabling, switches, hubs, routers etc., from a single source.
 
7. In the client-server market in the country, clos to 63% of the total PCs are going out as nodes in a network, up from 55% in  the previous year (Dataquest, July 31, 1996). This figure is expected to climb up to 70% in 1996-97. Also, the average number of nodes to a server is around 8.5, again up from less than 7 the year before. Thus the market is showing clear signals of moving the network way.
 
8. The surge in networking has given a major fillip to another related segment - Groupware products in the software industry. Most of the applications in the corporate environment is expected to run off the server with Lotus Notes, Microsoft Exchange and Novell Groupwise expected to lead the field.
 
9. Novell, the leaders in networking O/S has initiated efforts in building a ‘Smart Global Network’. The Smart Global Network Initiative (SMGI) aims to connect organizations into a ‘secure, safe and reliable’ network as against the Internet which has a "haphazard information" structure and a lack of security.
 
10. A related development is the initiation of Novell Embedded Systems Technology (NEST) in which Novell is working with more than 50 partners to integrate Netware technology into nontraditional devices such as printers and fax machines. While SMGI provides the framework for a global network, NEST enables devices other than PCs and printers to be connected to a network.
 
11. ISDN is emerging as a powerful tool for integrating voice, data and image through the existing telephone network. It is expected to give a major boost for desktop videoconferencing in India.  ISDN is being currently offered in the metros by DOT with further spread being hampered by time to change the equipment from analog to digital.

5.4. VSAT - the emerging substitute

Very Small Aperture Terminals (VSATs) hold the greatest promise for the country dogged by unreliable terrestrial lines and remoteness of areas. VSATs bring a fast and efficient LAN interconnect solution which has fixed running cost and low maintenance expenses. VSATs can be self-owned (private) for companies widely spread out  or shared if the requirement is smaller (for a few locations).

The current service providers in this niche market are
# Hughes Escorts Communications Ltd.
# Wipro-British Telecom Ltd.
# HCL-Comnet Systems and Services
# RPG Satcom
# Telstra V-Comm and
# Comset Max

The present installation stands at around 1,500 terminals of which HCL-Comnet has cornered a lion’s share of around 1,200. The future in VSATs lie with the value added services given by the various service providers. For example, Wipro-BT is giving Value Added Network Services (VANS) incorporating an E-mail service and a data networking service.

The early adopters in the case has been mostly the MNCs who have had a previous awareness of the service. Ashok Leyland, Hindustan Lever, Proctor & Gamble, Philips and National Stock Exchange are a few of the big names who run their operations based on VSAT network.
 
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 6. Suggested Strategies

The networking market is an emerging industry especially in India. In such an industry, growth strategies for a fragmented industry will apply. In the organized higher end of the market, the top five (elaborated in the previous sections) hold over 30% of the market share.

Creating economies of scale is something every multinational tries to do under such a circumstance markedly in the networking indsutry where development costs are very high and products have to be tied with a whole lot of associates like hardware, software and telecom standards. This is done mainly through a method of mergers and acquisitions, as seen by the formation of Bay Networks and that of Newbridge in the US.

6.1 Product

Companies try to standardize needs under such situations offering connectivity between multiple platforms by having flexibility within a product line or inside a product itself (e.g., having a hub with ports for thin/thick/twisted pair ethernet connectivity). Cost cutting and adding value is done here by using American products imported for local use rather than manufacturing it locally

Product innovation in the future will be in term of better features, speed and ranges. Firms have understood the importance of industry cooperation by typing up with each other for specific product development, sacrificing short term profits.

6.2 Pricing

Pricing will again remain competitive between the players. This is becuase the customer contact of the networking product vendor is more on the technical aspect and not on purchase matters. Pricing and discounts to the system integrator will have to be made attractive as his portfolio also will carry multi-company lines and switching costs are low.

6.3 Promotion

In order to reduce customer confusion, companies conduct various industry conferences and participate in most of the IT trade fairs even though they do not sell directly to the end-consumer. A pull strategy through innovative advertisements works here by being the top-of-the-mind recall product in the customer’s mind when his requirements come up.

6.4 Distribution

Current policy of multiple distribution should be continued. In the future, manufacturing of hardware will become more and more unviable. As more companies turn into system integrators, distribution of networking products will be a pre-requisite for going into the market. Under such circumstances, companies can aim at creating lower end resellers on a case to case basis.

The technology lag suffered by the country might diminish in the months to come, especially in view of world-wide product launches which are getting commonplace. The question here is the absorption capability of the local market to these technolgical innovations.
 
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 7. Conclusion

The corporate world is no longer talking in internetworking terms, but it implements WANs or LAN-to-LAN connectivity. Corporates formulating restructuring blueprints include VSATs in the action plan while the five networking majors continue with their massive growth rates.

The networking industry has always gone by the overall trend of the IT industry. Accordingly, the networking industry is also figuring multinational brands fighting it out. The vendors here are all Indian, but they are banking on the strength of the foreign brands. Just like in PCs, in workstations, in software and in other segments, the current battles are fought between, say, Bay Networks vs. Cisco vs. 3Com.

"O/S pioneer Novell perceives the networked environment (and not in the PCs or clients on a network) as the domain where all the intelligence is concentrated. The interface to a network could be any device - a telephone, a toaster, a PC, a photocopier with the resultant outcome of client-network computing" (Eric Burkholder of Systems Engineering Operation, Novell).

The networking industry is bound to grow in an exponential manner with a projected billion devices connected to the global network by the year 2000. In India, the market is in a phase of transformation. What started with LANs now include internetworking, VSATs and even network services. The constraints against which a vigil has to be kept will be managing high bandwidth and speed to cater to information transmission.

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A.1. The Products

Networks are popular because they are easy to install and maintain especially as the software progresses. The core of networking implementation is the connectivity or the ‘physical layer’. This is the hardware and transmission medium that systems use to communicate to each other. It includes the copper wire that carries electrical signals and the network interface card (NIC) that resides inside each computer.

The physical layer also involves other more complex devices that expedite building a small local are  network (LAN) into a large wide area network (WAN). These devices include networking hubs, repeaters, routers, bridges, gateways, and switches. The basic network can be expanded into a multiple-segment LAN or a WAN using these hardware devices.

A.1.1. HUBS

The networking hub is a centralized distribution point for all traffic on a single leg of the network. In-bound traffic (data packets) from an NIC arrives at the hub which receives and rebroadcasts them to the other computers connected to the same hub. But the network hub is not smart, hence it sends a copy of the data packet to all connections on the hub.

Based on their attributes, hubs can be classified into:

A.1.1.1.  Stackable or non-stackable hubs: The former can be stacked and connected (usually through a proprietary interface port) so that they appear as a single hub.

A.1.1.2. Active or passive: Active hubs connect to the network backbone while passive hubs connect only to the active ones.

A.1.1.3. Intelligent or non-intelligent: This refers to the MIS staff’s ability to manage the hub remotely. Intelligent hubs, costing much more than dumb ones, come with the SNMP (Simple Network Management Protocol) firmware you can access remotely. SNMP is a polling protocol that allows one to obtain network performance and status data from hubs.

The basic networking 5-4-3 rule (five segments, four hubs and/or repeaters, three populated segments between two machines) is very much applicable in this regard.

A.1.2. REPEATERS

Signal attenuation and consequent garbled data reception due to long distances can be avoided by employing repeaters. The basic repeaters amplifies all signals (data and noise) over the network. The signal repeater on the other hand, collects the inbound packet and then retransmits the packet as if it were starting from the original NIC.

A.1.3. BRIDGES

The bridge takes connectivity to a further level by examining the physical destination address of the packet and then deciding whether or not to let the packet cross. The bridge connects two LAN segments (say that of marketing and accounts) and monitors traffic over the two segments its connects. Certain higher-end bridges can also support remote management.

A.1.4. SWITCHES

The Ethernet-switch is essentially a high-speed bridge and can switch packets physically from one segment of the LAN to the another in a matter of milliseconds. This effectively isolates traffic on each network segment and gives the illusion of having the entire bandwidth of the network for each segment. These are expensive and are used when the network is going to have a large number of workstations on a large number of segments.

A.1.5. ROUTERS

A router directs traffic by logical addresses rather than by physical addresses.
The two specific benefits here are:

i. facility to direct traffic on a TCP/IP network by routing packets with predetermined IP address (a logical address) masks along a certain route.
ii. facility to direct packets that it does not know how to route, to another ‘default’ destination.

A.1.6. GATEWAYS

A gateway expands on the functionality of the routers by performing data translation and protocol conversion. It is needed to convert Ethernet traffic from the LAN, to SNA ( Systems Network Architecture) traffic on a legacy system. It then routes the SNA traffic to the mainframe. When the mainframe answers, the reverse process occurs. Thus a gateway operates at the highest layer of network abstraction.

Ultimately, it is the user’s understanding of the networking hardware, his environment and its application combined with a vendor’s product-specific knowledge that forms the key to making a network device work.

A.2. The Protocols

The leading high-speed technologies of the day include ATMs, FDDIs and 100 Mbps Ethernets. Higher-quality telephone connection, faster workstations and the need for high throughput to support the Internet and WAN operations have contributed to their growing acceptance of these technologies, some of which have been with us for years.

A.2.1. ASYNCHRONOUS TRANSFER MODE (ATM)

ATN is the specification from ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) standards, which provides for cell really services. ISDN is a standard promoted by the CCITT to cover data, voice and image services. ATM is defined as a multiplexing technique in which transmission capability is organized in undedicated slots filled with cells with respect to each application’s real need. It has the potential to mix different kinds of networks (data, voice, video) into one unchannelized physical network.

ATM is a connection-oriented protocol using a virtual path and virtual channel identifiers to users and the associated connection. Its implementation is ubiquitous and is highly suitable for networks used for a variety of applications with traffic of different types.

HCL-Comnet is setting up India’s first ATM network for IIT, Kharagpur. This network will be spread over more than 50 acres, connecting 26 departments. It will connect 1,500 users and 400 nodes. It will have 50 ATM-switched ports and 150 Ethernet ports, having an aggregate bandwidth of 6 Gbps, expandable to 30 Gbps. This network, one of Asia’s largest, will be among the world’s 50 largest ATM backbones.

A.2.2. FRAME RELAY

A frame is a group of bits sent over a link that contains its won control information, such as address and error correction. Frame Really addresses the problem of transmission delay by discarding traffic through the discard eligibility (DE) bit, which is carried in a frame. It is a fast packet-switching protocol used solely for data transmissions up to 2 Mbps.

A.2.3. FIBRE DISTRIBUTED DATA INTERFACE (FDDI)

FDDI is a standardized, dual-ring LAN topology that used fibre-optic cables. Since optical signals can travel long distances with no signal degradation, FDDI has an advantage over traditional copper networks. An FDDI network is point-to-point, employing a dual ring to support transmission and reception of traffic through concentrators. It also has a bypass option that provides connectivity in the case of power failure in a node. Current drawbacks of FDDI include limited bandwidth, and non-availability of multimedia applications.

A.2.4. 100 MBPS ETHERNET

There are two versions to the new ethernet - Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN. Fast Ethernet (100Base-T) is similar to normal ethernet and uses CSMA/CD applications, but requires its own cabling.

100VG-AnyLAN is supported by companies including HP (its primary proponent), Cabletron, Compaq, Thomas Conrad, IBM, AT&T Microelectronics, Texas Instruments and ODS. Here, hubs are used to link machines instead of wires or cables. The hub controls all access to the network through a control scheme called Demand Priority.

In terms of sheer speed, ATM is the fastest system available, the trade-off being the high start-up cost. For most UNIX or PC LANs, Fast Ethernet and 100VG-AnyLAN are the cost-effective upgrade options. FDDI has been available for many years, but hasn’t really caught on while Frame Relay is still an expensive option.

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Annexure B -  Players Profile

1. CISCO SYSTEMS INC.

(a) General Information: CISCO is one of the leading suppliers of internetworking products worldwide. The company has been functioning in India from its liasoning office set up in early 1995. They are now planning to set up a fully-owned subsidiary in the country with an initial investment of around $1 million. CISCO’s turnover last year was $2.04 billion.

(b) Indian tie-ups: CISCO’s leadership in the market stems from its tie-up with the networking systems division of Wipro Infotech Group. Other distributors include Datacraft ICIM Ltd., Microland Ltd., and Tata Unisys Ltd.

(c) Targeted Growth for 1996-97:  50%

(d) Future Plans: New product line for the SOHO segment called Ciscopro. This will include a set of routing and switching products that will meet the needs of small offices and businesses, such as Internet access, telecommuting, distributed databases and high-speed document transfer.

2. CABLETRON SYSTEMS INC.

(a) General Information: Cabletron is a leader in the high-end intelligent hubs market.

(b) Indian Tie-ups: Delsys Infotech, Network Solutions Bangalore Pvt. Ltd., and Proactive Data Systems.

(c) Targeted Growth for 1996-97: 60%

(d) Future Plans: Cabletron recently unveiled Synthesis, which is an architectural blueprint for migrating users from traditional router-based networks to virtual enterprise internetworks. It merges ATM, virtual LAN and switching capabilities with interconnectivity and management technologies, allowing customers to deploy virtual enterprise internetworks using a combination of high-speed witches and Layer Three virtual routing services.

3.  3COM CORPORATION

(a) General Information: 3COM has consolidated with its recent takeover of Chipcom Corp., adding to its tally of over 10 acquisitions and 96 networking products. This Santa Clara corporation is into adapter cards, repeaters, bridges, switches - both data as well as workgroup, remote access servers and routers.

(b) Indian tie-ups: CMS Computers, Pertech Computers Ltd., HCL Comnet Systems and Services Ltd., Modi Olivetti Ltd., Melstar, Exelan Networking Technologies, Godrej & Boyce Manufacturing Company Ltd., and Building Network Automation.

(c) Targeted Growth for 1996-97:  50-60%

(d) Future Plans: The company plans to leverage on its wide spectrum of distributors to cater to specific segments and to offer its integrated solutions encompassing components for LANs and WANs, which includes switches, hubs, routers, and protocols like 100Base-T, ATM, X.25, Frame Relay and ISDN.

4.  UB NETWORKS

(a) General Information: UB Networks is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Tandem Inc. And was previously known by the name Ungermann-Bass Ltd.

(b) Indian tie-ups: UB has already encashed upon the expertise of its Indian distributor, Wipro Infotech Group’s R&D division. The Indian partner has designed and developed a Geoswitch 155 Mbps full-duplex connectivity to each ATM-connected desktop or server. The second distributor is the outcome of the recent tie-up with Advantec.

(c) Targeted Growth for 1996-97:  min. 50%

(d) Future Plans: This US company has set up UB Networks Ltd., with Wipro Infotech Group and Advantec Network Systems as its distributors.

5.  BAY NETWORKS

(a) General Information: Bay Networks Inc., was formed from the merger of SynOptics, the hub vendor and WellFleet, the router vendor recorded a turnover of $1.7 billion.

(b) Indian tie-ups: Datacraft ICIM, HCL Hewlett-Packard, Integrated PC Solutions, Microland, Microworld Electronics, Ramco Systems, Unicorp Industries and Wipro Infotech.

(c) Targeted Growth for 1996-97:  50%

(d) Future Plans: In India, Bay plans to provide our business sales resources required to help customers build and implement enterprise internetworks, with our products range of market leading LAN and ATM switches, hubs, routers, remote access and Internet access solutions.
 
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Annexure C - Glossary of terms
 

1     AICTE           All India Council for Technical Education
2     ARCNET       Advanced Resources Computer NETwork
3     ATM              Asynchronous Transfer Mode
4     CCITT           Comité Consultatif Internationale de Telegraphie ét Telephonie
5     DST               Department of Science and Technology
6     FDDI             Fibre Data Distributed Interface
7     ISDN             Integrated Services Digital Network
8     LAN              Local Area Networking
9     NEST            Novell Embedded Systems Technology
10   NIC               Network Interface Card
11   NOS              Network Operating System
12   PLC              Product Life Cycle
13   SMGI            Smart Global Network Initiative
14   SOHO           Small Office Home Office
15   UNDP          United Nations Development Programme
16   VSAT           Very Small Aperture Terminals
17   WAN            Wide Area Networking
18   WB               World Bank

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