The Hindu : Karnataka / Bangalore News : Indian engineers help to create network chip

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Tuesday, Jun 20, 2006

Karnataka

Karnataka - Bangalore

Indian engineers help to create network chip

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore: "When you are number two, you try harder," that was the classic advertising slogan for U.S. car rental company, Avis, when it took on market leader, Hertz.

Most people associate Hewlett Packard with printers and personal computing products — not with the nitty-gritty of networking.

But, the company's independent networking unit, ProCurve, is the world's number two company in the enterprise networks market (after Cisco) and the fastest growing player in Asia, says Amol Mitra, its worldwide Director for Product Marketing.

He was speaking here on Monday at the India launch of ProCurve's new combo of wired and wireless networking solutions.

The offerings aim at "sharpening," that is, putting intelligence into the edge of the network rather than at its core.

They are fuelled by an Application Specific Integrated Circuit or ASIC, whose software was substantially developed by the company's 65-strong Bangalore development team.

The chip, with over six million devices on board, enables the company to aggressively price its products and provide what an analyst from Forrester, calls "champagne networking on a beer budget." ProCurve, whose engineers created the world's first network "switch on a chip," six years ago and the first Fabric switch (so called, because it binds the storage networking elements like cloth) earlier this year, has had an India development presence for just under two years.

`Fastest growing'

This is already the fastest growing networking market in the Asia-Pacific region with the installed number of networking ports growing at 35 per cent rate, Mr. Mitra said.

Printer friendly page
Send this article to Friends by E-Mail

Karnataka