Networking

B. Jagadish Director – Marketing, BA Systems

by VARINDIA 2010-04-05

As the network industry is well on its way to becoming one of the most powerful growth engines in the coming years, more and more networking vendors are jockeying to make their presence felt in the space. One such vendor, BA Systems, which got into the networking space in the recent past, manufacturing routers for the enterprise and SMB segments, is a channel-friendly company, which considers India as the most happening place in the security space.

The stakes for BA Systems in India are high.

“India is the key market for BA Systems. BA Systems is an Indian company, headquartered in Bangalore, with a US office in San Jose for technology transfer and operations management,” says B. Jagadish, Director – Marketing, BA Systems.

“The company’s strategy will be to deliver a low-cost, world-class, service creating line of enterprise routers. The objective is to capture 20 per cent of the existing enterprise router market in 3–5 years,” says Jagadish.

The BA Systems’ sweet spot is clearly the Indian SMEs whose exacting requirements are met with the BAS solution but at the price points which the incumbent competitors will be unable to match. Functionality is the key driver. BA Systems provides all functionality required in an integrated multifunctional device with Remote management within the emerging New Economy India Enterprise budget as a total solution delivering End to End Clean Secured Managed WAN pipe.

“Our customer development would be in the Financial Segment, Hospitality, Banking/Stock Broker Networks, Enterprise core to edge remotely managed networks and we would address these enterprise customer base through Channel Partners (SI) and Service providers,” says Jagadish.

“We expect that in our class of Enterprise mission-critical network implementation, the product requirement is around US$100 million in India and growing at approximately about 30 per cent CAGT.

BA Systems expects to capture about 20 per cent of the market in the next 3–5 years of this pie,” says Jagadish.

There are many vendors jostling for a position with regard to Routers. BAS product strategy is to provide the world’s lowest-cost line of enterprise routers, with open interfaces, offering customers service creation ability and ease of management. “The key technical accomplishment is BAS success in developing a high-performing enterprise router based on an open off-the-shelf hardware components with software developed in India under US technical guidance,” says Jagadish.

Enterprise routing has become a “commodity” market, and the only viable position for a new entrant is as the low-cost producer. BAS has already designed and developed, and will be able to manufacture and deliver, an enterprise-class router at a price point lower than any other competitor in the world, including Cisco, Juniper, Huawei, other Chinese vendors and even open-source suppliers.

“The next great equipment the company will emerge from India, given the technical talent, resources, market size and geopolitical position India holds. BAS is an Indian company, headquartered in Bangalore, with a US office in San Jose for technology transfer and operations management,” says Jagadish. The company’s strategy will be to deliver a low-cost, world-class, service-creating line of enterprise routers. The objective is to capture 20 per cent of the existing enterprise router market in 3–5 years.”

BA Systems has the Intellectual Property Rights on the Multi-threaded Multi-process Modular Operating System with unique packet processing technology. The Core Team has pending Patents and Trade Marks. The BOS–BA Systems Operating System is embedded with Carrier Class features such as Safe Roll Back, Graceful Restart of Autonomous process, IP Tracker, SLA Monitoring Tool, the world’s best Route Reconvergence speeds and highest throughput in these classes of devices. Our unique intuitive Remote management software has built-in user- friendly GUI, eliminating the need for trained high-cost engineering for maintenance for India Enterprise Customers.

SMB/SME customers require WAN gateway devices which provide WAN link redundancy plus security, bandwidth management, VPN and centralized management. They currently suffer the reality of multiple devices, daisy-chained with multiple management platforms with minimal, if any, centralized management. Functionality is the key driver. BA Systems provides all functionality required in an integrated multifunctional device with Remote management as a total solution delivering End to End Clean Secured Managed WAN pipe. Financial Segment: Cooperative Bank, Stock Broker Networks Hospitality Segment: Premium hotels integration of wired-WiFi solutions SI – NOC: Network operating centre infrastructure with high aggregation and Remote Management of WAN/LAN devices Service provider: Managed Services rollout for SMB/SME customers.

The above is some of the progress made by BA Systems in the Indian market.

As far as the channel model of BA System is concerned, the company makes a different proposition. The company does not wish to overload the channel. It believes in having selective channels. Elaborating on the channel model, Jagadish says, “We don’t believe in quantity but quality. The products are very technical. So, we need partners with the right skill sets, with a good understanding of the networking, which is needed to address the market.”

BA Systems has roped in only a microscopic minority of 19 regional partners. “We have a National Distributor and we would be appointing regional partners who would be servicing solution providers. We have about 19 of them currently and expect to have about 100 successful partners selling BA Systems’ solution over the next 12–15 months’ time frame,” says Jagadish.

BA Systems uses Microsense and Mass as its distributor. The company is looking forward to its relationship with the distribution giant to build up business in India. “We have SI distribution partner fundamentally with inherent strengths of being a technology solution provider with a speciality in a particular market segment and at the same time a distribution arm supporting presales/post-sales/logistics provider for local Systems Integrators,” says XYZ.

“We have Microsense and Mass as our National/Regional SI Distribution partners specialized in WiFi-Wimax hospitality and Stock Trading financial networks respectively,” adds XYZ. “We have partners like Allied Digital, Gemini, Sai Info, BEekay Infonet, Nettech, BNA who sell to Enterprise customers who need to End to End Secure Managed WAN Pipe.”

The BA Systems solution is available at half the price of incumbent vendor and at double the margins to channel. “We focus more on saving Nett Margins to our Channel partner as our Software is carrier class and eliminates the need for onsite and highly skilled/trained manpower which drives operational costs up otherwise.”