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California-based firm ready to create a ‘Ruckus’ Business sense

The ZoneFlex wireless LAN product from Ruckus

Only days after its latest ‘SmartMesh’ WiFi technology for enterprises was unveiled worldwide, the California-based Ruckus Wireless landed in India last month. Partnering with the Bangalore-based Indian end of Dell, Ruckus will offer its flagship ZoneFlex wireless LAN solutions to corporates with a bold promise: to be cheaper, simpler and more effective than the competition.

The key technology differentiator claimed is the company’s patented software- controlled antenna array called BeamFlex, with either six or 12 antennas, which effectively reduces the need for wireless access points by a quarter, by automatically directing WiFi signals towards the user, away from spots of interference. The solution promises some of the highest throughputs in the industry for WiFi networks to the 802.11n standard: sustained speeds of 80 Mega bits per second and peaks of 300 MBPS.

For some time now the technology media in the U.S. has been highlighting the possible disruptive effect of Ruckus’s offerings on the economics of creating extended wireless LAN deployments.

Ruckus was also the pioneer in bringing triple play -- voice-data-video -- to home wireless networks. For its corporate offerings, it achieves its promised edge by a seamless mix of wired and wireless connections, says Sudarshan Boosupalli, General Manager (India Operations) for Ruckus.

Its arrangement with Dell will help Ruckus leverage the latter’s strength as a one-stop business solutions provider. “Our corporate customers will benefit greatly from the wire-like reliability and superior performance of Ruckus Smart WiFi solutions,” says Nitin Bawankule, Dell’s Director, Software and Peripherals.

With a barking dog as its logo, Ruckus clearly plans to ‘make a noise’ in the India-based wireless networking business, which CEO Selina Lo characterises as “a hyper growth market for technology and a significant opportunity for us”. Let’s hope their technology bite measures up to their bark.

Bangalore-based search technology specialists continue to come up with some of the Web’s more useful and (what’s more pertinent) localized resources.

Four Interactive, creators of “Ask Laila”, arguably the first Indian local information service, have extended the tool to take in the mobile phone.

Reliance and Vodafone (and soon Airtel) mobile users in Bangalore (also Chennai, Delhi and Mumbai) can get answers by SMS to a simple text message spelling out the search. For example: “ATM Dairy”. The service will return two answers; you can ask for more. What’s more, Laila understands local lingo and abbreviations: kmngl for Koramangala. Mobile users can SMS queries to 58989; smart phone users have the option of going to the mobile webpage m.asklaila.com.

Hint: Having tried out the service, let me explain what one has to do. First send an SMS: set city Bangalore. A reply will come: You have set Bangalore as your city. We will send results only for Bangalore.

You can then send a second message in the format what, where. For example: Banks, CMH Rd. It cost me Rs. 2 each time. You can hit ‘m’ for additional results.

Guruji, another Bangalore-based search service that pioneered the Indian language search engine, has added Gujarati to Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu and Hindi ( www.guruji.com ). Guruji, founded by IITians Anurag Dod and Gaurav Mishra, created a special ‘crawler’ to trawl the Web for India-relevant information.

And Ninety Degree, the combined air-train-bus travel portal created by Bangalore-based Kushnood Naqvi, Kiran M.S. and Abhinit Kumar continues to expand its database of Indian places — now well over 5000 ( www.90di.com).

As a holy book said, seek and ye shall find.

ANAND PARTHASARATHY

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