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Cisco keeps its promises to India
By siliconindia
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Wednesday, 31 October 2007, 19:30 IST
Bangalore: Cisco unveiled its Globalisation Centre East campus in Bangalore at an opening ceremony presided over by former Indian President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO.
Cisco also announced that it is extending venture investment initiative in India by another $100 million to drive growth with high-potential Indian companies This venture investment in India is consistent with Cisco's long track record of driving growth in the information technology (IT) market through investment in the innovation economy. In 2005, Cisco designated an initial $100 million in venture funding for this purpose as part of its overall $1.1billion investment plan for India.
As the first of several potential iniatives Cisco is pursuing within the new $100m investment goal, Cisco is collaborating with Satyam Computer Services to explore a new venture investment. This planned new venture will focus on optimising, deploying and managing integrated healthcare management solutions globally, bringing together the market reach, capabilities and experience of both Cisco and Satyam.
Cisco today employs over 3000 people across India, and the first phase of the Cisco Globalisation Centre East campus will initially be able to accommodate 1200 personnel. Spread over 1 million square feet on the Outer Ring Road in Sarjapur, Bangalore, the first phase will accommodate staff from Cisco's Globalisation Centre, research and development (R&D), IT, and customer support teams in India. In October 2005, Cisco committed $50 million to build this new integrated campus.
The campus also houses the largest campus datacentre outside the U.S. and will provide a focal point for demonstrating next-generation virtualisation technologies and service oriented network architectures that support customers' global environments. The second phase of the campus is expected to be completed by October 2009 and will house an additional 2000 staff.
The Bangalore opening ceremony also showcased potential future applications of Cisco TelePresence technology, which allows groups in different locations to meet around a virtual table. As a hub to support Cisco?s growth in emerging markets, the new centre will house multiple TelePresence facilities to help scale teams to support customer engagements globally. In phase one, the campus is capable of supporting 12 simultaneous TelePresence sessions, with a total of 20 TelePresence units planned to be installed across the first 4 buildings.
Cisco first established operations in India in 1995 and today employs more than 3000 people in the country across its Globalisation Office and R&D Centre in Bangalore, and sales offices in New Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, Chennai, Kolkata, Pune, Hyderabad and Colombo, Sri Lanka.
Cisco and Wipro today announced that they have entered into a strategic alliance to jointly develop and deliver information technology (IT) service solutions to help both companies meet their customers? needs, particularly in fast-growing markets around the world. Under the agreement, Cisco and Wipro together will build new IT infrastructure service solutions that combine Cisco's networking solutions with Wipro?s infrastructure and managed services portfolio. The companies also announced the establishment of the Cisco Solution Centre at the Wipro Campus in Bangalore, India, which will develop and showcase new services and solutions, such as Cisco Unified Communications, that will take advantage of the network platform to help enterprise customers drive innovation and business growth.
In conjunction with the opening of Cisco's Globalisation Centre East in Bangalore, India, Cisco today announced the Cisco I-Prize, a competition open to entrepreneurs and innovators around the world. The Cisco I-Prize aims to bring together global teams to develop technology business ideas using Cisco's collaboration technologies and to run those ideas through Cisco's process for identifying emerging technologies to take to market. The winning team may have the opportunity to join Cisco as founders of a new emerging technology business unit. Depending on the value of the idea, Cisco may also invest up to $10 million over three years to fund the new business unit.