Simplifying the Enterprise Edge’ says the NetDevices Network’s tagline. It’s product-the Services Gateway (SG) does pretty much the same. You might question how, and the explanation too comes easy. Let’s begin with a little backgrounder.

While Cisco, Nortel, Huawei and the likes were riding high on the success of their fleet of networking products-namely routers, switches, gateways, hubs, bandwidth managers et al., three Cisco employees realized the need for a combined box that would incorporate the functions of all the said devices. With this thought in mind, and to fill the impending gap in the networking space, they (Seenu Banda, Rob Haragan and Jeff Kidd) founded NetDevices in 2003. After two years of research was born its first product-the Services Gateway, the India center accounting for over 90 percent of the R&D behind it. The product removes the hassles of dealing with a plethora of devices, and the problems attached therein. Consider this.

Imagine a remote branch office of a company going off the global networking radar. Since a plethora of devices, as said earlier, enable access to the network, a fault in any one of them could have caused the breakdown. “An engineer would be required go all the way from the head office to fix the error. And for all you know, it might have required just a simple software re-configuration,” says Uday Birje, Country Manager & Vice President – India & ASEAN.

The Services Gateway comes in handy in such a situation. The engineer can pinpoint the error from the head office itself; the architecture allows him to log in to the remote system even in the event of a complete breakdown, a power connection being the only necessity. This saves valuable resources, as the requirement of traveling to the location is ruled out.

On the flip side, the bundling of all services into a single box arrests significantly the possibility of introducing significant tweaking options for each of the components, but Birje clarifies the stand thus: “We don’t claim to build the best router, or the best switches. Our USP is a gateway product that combines all, much like a PDA does.”

The PDA approach of bundling all services into a single device has helped garner favorable reviews from analysts, and even fetched the company a coveted stall in the Bangalore IT.in IP Zone—an area reserved specifically for companies developing IP out of India. “A lot of people appreciated our product, and we met a number of prospective customers as well,” says Birje.

The India center of NetDevices, incidentally, employs 45 engineers out of a global strength of 60. Talking about any NetDevices product as a result, is as good as talking about the contributions of the India team. In the span of three years—the center was launched almost in tandem with the U.S. head-office, in 2003—the India team has filed for 15 patents.

Among the company’s trademark features in the Services Gateway is LifeLine. It functions similar to a heartbeat measurement device, monitoring the health of the machine. This helps detect errors in advance, and prevent a possible breakdown. Also bundled is ModuLive that enables deployment of a service, like VoIP, or firewall, ‘on the fly’ as and when a customer needs it.

While all this sounds good, it seems a long way before the company makes a dent in the marketplace. Its first product launch happened a year back, but Birje, also the company’s marketing head is reluctant to part with the revenue or the number of devices the company has sold. “Our focus is not revenue,” he stresses. “We are focusing on garnering appreciation and favorable reviews in the marketplace.”

That, in effect, has been the greatest challenge faced by the company. Road shows and whitepapers have helped win appreciation, but not much of a customer base. To bridge the gap, the company is trying to work closely with the customers, adding functionalities desired by them, taking their feedback, and following a services approach. To understand customer sentiments better, the company sends its engineers, who work on the product, for deploying the devices. This works the other way round, helping the engineers gauge customer requirements better and work on improving the product line.

Though this practice might have been the result of having a small, R&D dedicated team in India, it has gone down well with the workforce. “We have seen just 5 percent attrition in the past one year,” says Kannan Jayaram, Senior Technical Manager. In the absence of a dedicated HR team, the functional heads dapple with people issues as well. Among the factors pushing this high retention rate is the frequent visits by the heads in the U.S. Each senior manager visits the India center once every quarter, while each month also sees the visit of one senior executive from the U.S. office.

“It helps all the engineers here get a clear idea of the company’s product roadmap,” notes Jayaram, who reports in directly to Haragan in the U.S. Further, emphasizes Birje, there is no demarcation between the U.S. and India teams. “We are not under pressure from the U.S. office to churn out something over and over again; we work with them on innovative technologies,” he notes.

The small nature of the organization—the India center employs 45 people, ensures that the number of ‘bureaucratic wrangles’ from the idea to implementation stage is almost none—something that expresses itself in the number of patents filed from the center. Also, engineers are given the option of flexi-hours, and assigned mentors when they join. Freshers don’t stand a chance of getting a peek-in though. “We can’t afford to train them the whole hog,” says Jayaram. The company will essentially look at people with 4-5 years experience in its ramp-up in the near future, informs Birje.

Most of the value NetDevices offers to its workforce, in terms of a highly-charged and technically challenging environ, opportunity to interact with customers, personal-level interaction among team members et al. are owing to the (small) size of the organization. How then does it look at maintaining the values as it grows? “We can’t retain all aspects, but yes, it is possible to a certain extent by hiring the right kind of people,” says Birje. One constant thing as far as the organization is concerned, he says, is the need to encourage innovation. That alone will enable talent retention, and help the company stay ahead of competition.

Among its upcoming offerings is a ‘branch-in-a-box’ device—a gateway that can double up as a server offering e-mail, web and IT functionality services. “That will happen three months later, and by then, I should be able to talk about having acquired 20 new customers,” notes Birje.