Networking: R&D going global

Last week Cisco Systems, which first established operations in India in 1995, broke ground on a brand-new, 1 million-square-foot R&D facility in Bangalore, budgeting $50 million for the project and planning to hire 3,000 scientists, engineers and researchers. The technical teams will work on projects spanning the San Jose, Calif.-based company's entire networking technology portfolio.

Another leading networking firm, Apptix, a provider of messaging and collaboration software, on Oct. 11 launched a new applications-development center in Pune, India, where it expects to "quadruple" the workforce of the town in the coming year.

"India has been and continues to be a strategic market for Cisco both in terms of business opportunities and as a base for outstanding engineering talent," said John Chambers, chief executive officer of Cisco.

Much of the technology developed in India will be exported globally, but there is an increasingly developing market for networking equipment for domestic businesses as well.

"New advancements in R&D are changing the environment," a spokesman for Herndon, Va.-based Apptix told Networking. "This trend is not only changing the way that American companies are doing business, but also changing the lives of employees in India, who are faced with collaboration with their westernized counterparts."

Though outsourcing technology jobs overseas was something of an issue for Sen. John Kerry's, D-Mass., losing presidential campaign last year, the trend of outsourcing continues to take on a global hue. A firm called Adrecom, founded by a scientist from the former Soviet Union who originally emigrated to Israel, recently opened a new facility in suburban Cleveland, called Adrecom USA. "We actually recruited them to co-locate from Israel," Thomas Sudow, executive director of the Beachwood Chamber of Commerce in Beachwood, Ohio, told Networking. "One of the most important trends in networking today is network-simulation software -- and Adrecom is one of the fastest-growing firms in the field."

The company's software development is an international affair. "They also have people in Russia and Israel working on the final development of NetKit, their network-simulation project," said Sudow.

The sophisticated software helps network designers simulate the installation of a new network -- at a corporate campus, for instance -- and compare key technologies and architectures before installation, Sudow said. This helps to optimize network resource allocation, avoid network congestion and guarantee quality of service. Potential customers include interchange carriers, incumbent local exchange carriers, Internet service providers and application service providers, among others.

This is not just about business productivity improvement. For many in the technology field, networking has changed the way they view the world. "The world is flat -- and it's technology that has made it that way," Deborah Kline, a spokeswoman for Avaya, the networking systems developer, based in Basking Ridge, N.J., told Networking. "Location has become irrelevant."

The very technology created by networking companies that has changed Fortune 500 companies is now making it possible for them to also easily locate offices or branches overseas without difficulty. This goes for voice and data networking, too. "For example, over the past week, if someone called my office phone, they could reach me whether I was working at home, in Las Vegas, on the highway, or at the airport," said Kline, the Avaya spokeswoman.

Copyright 2005 by United Press International