TELECOM
The Indian IT and telecom revolution has probably left no one to stand and take notice of the day-to-day happenings. With a population of more than one billion, India has attracted most of the top-level manufacturers and designers to set up their shops here. Apart from a huge consumer market, this country offers a large pool of cheap intellectual people to manufacture products inexpensively and export them to other countries. For RAD Data Communications, the Tel Aviv, Israel-based Access Solutions vendor for IT and telecommunications, India has been no exception. In fact, RAD is one of the early movers in the industry to embrace India as its market destination. In 1991, RAD products were first introduced by MRO-Tek. Later in 1996, RAD and MRO-Tek inaugurated a state-of-the-art joint venture in Bangalore’s Electronics City. This joint venture is specifically intended to locally manufacture RAD products and tailor-make them to the specific requirements of the Indian market.
Founded in 1981 and a member of the RAD Group of Companies, RAD Data Communications is an industry leader in the development and manufacturing of access solutions for data and telecommunications applications.
The company’s installed base exceeds 10 million units and includes more than 150 carriers and operators around the world. These customers are supported by 23 RAD offices and approximately 300 distributors in 164 countries. RAD’s solutions serve the data and voice access requirements of service providers, incumbent and new carriers, and enterprise networks. Most of the designing and manufacturing activities take place in Israel. At the same time, RAD has manufacturing facilities in India, China, Brazil and Argentina. RAD employs over 1,000 persons worldwide and has 23 international offices in Europe, USA, CIS, Asia, South Americas and Australia. The company manufactures and supplies over 250 access solutions. In India, RAD products drive over 350,000 miles of connectivity for the leading carriers.
Jayant Deo, President, RAD Data Communications Pvt. Ltd., says, “With the boom in the telecom sector that India has witnessed over the last 5–6 years, RAD decided to leverage its market leading position in India and grow with it. Certain segments of the market – large government and private carriers in particular, large corporates and industry verticals like the Defence, Railways, Utilities, etc., need close interaction with RAD as a leading designer and provider of access solutions – and that segment is addressed by the RAD India office directly.”
In fact, India is a strategically important market for RAD, the second-largest market after USA. According to Jayant, RAD is the market leader in the access segment with over 40- per cent market share. RAD’s strategy to grow with the telecom market in India is highly relevant due to its technologies and products that are just right for India. On the one hand, there exists a huge copper network that is not very well maintained and, on the other hand, higher-end services such as video-on-demand are coming in. Therefore, rapid transformation and upgradation of carrier networks from legacy to new-generation platforms is taking place. In the views of Jayant, RAD’s cross-generation access solutions perfectly suit these growing demands of the Indian market, e.g. RAD’s pioneering technology “TDM over IP (TDMoIP) OR pseudowire” bridges the gap as legacy networks migrate to NGN.
RAD has bagged almost all the carriers in India including Bharti, Hutch, IDEA Cellular, Tata Teleservices, Reliance, Spice, Aircell-Maxis, as well as VSNL, BSNL, Reliance, Bharti-Airtel, and large corporates, banks, government institutions, transporation and utility companies. In fact, these segments account for 65 per cent of the total business of RAD.
He adds, “The advantage of RAD products is its“cutting-edge innovation for the market while offering complete integration with existing installation. For our customers, it helps in the protection of their legacy investment at the same time being able to offer advantage of value addition to their own customers at very cost-effective basis.”
Worldwide, the channel development strategy consists of appointing multiple distributors in every region. However, India is the only country where RAD has been working with a single partner since 1991. To my reckoning, RAD India is very contented with the progress, as they term the partnership as “a meeting of the like-minded entrepreneurs”. With no mood to introduce any new partnerships, Jayant says, “This 15-year long-standing relationship is proof of the strength of this partnership. From the market standpoint, our strategy will be to lend all support to our partner so that we can leverage it to expand the market.” The biggest advantage with MRO-TEK is that the company takes full accountability in terms of appointing dealers/stockists as well as System Integrators or VARs and managing the channel. At present, MRO-Tek deals with over 15 regional dealers, and all of the leading 6–7 system integrators. MRO-Tek is in-charge of implementing incentive policies to motivate these channels. Therefore, it provides ample scope to the vendor to be more committed to developing overall business opportunities in India.
In terms of support also, partners are the first tier of RAD’s customer support and RADcare program, who are trained by RAD professionals. MRO-TEK, with presence in 24 locations, serves as the immediate point of contact for all the services in India relating to installing, configuring and operating RAD products. However, RAD’s specialized team of pre-sales and post-sales staff is also there to provide support for key accounts.
A healthy strategy yields a healthy result. RAD’s market share in the Indian market is a witness to its strength. In the volume sales segment, Jayant says, “Our market share for leased line modems is over 40 per cent. Our plan to increase it beyond 50 per cent is well on its way to success in 2007. In cellular-backhaul solutions, our market share is well over 75 per cent and we plan to consolidate this high market share with the addition of more leading-edge solutions to the benefit of our fast-growing customers. Solutions for transportation and utility sectors are also high-growth areas for us in 2007.”
Finally…
Coincidentally, with a 34-per cent growth of sales target in 2007, which is double of its worldwide growth target, RAD is well on its way to meet the optimism of Indian think-tank for 2007. 2007 has been declared as the Year of Broadband in India. And, RAD does not want to miss the bus. The company is planning to launch its leading-edge access products to coincide with the broadband growth in India, viz. GMUX-2000, ETX550, ASMi54 and IPMUX range during the Convergence India Exhibition, which will provide the company the lead to address this high growth market
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