Walking along the labs of the Bangalore development center of Juniper Networks is like watching a science fiction movie. Thousands of routers kept in racks as high as seven feet resemble the control center of a spaceship you often come across in movies. These routers aren’t just samples. They are for real. “These routers can handle the entire Asian Internet traffic,” Sridhar Sarathy, Managing Director, Juniper Networks India says pointing towards the high-end machines.

Located in the sylvan environment amidst lush greenery and a lake thrown in between, the three-year-old development center of the $8 billion Sunnyvale, California based designer and maker of routers, has been mandated to develop an array of products made by Juniper. “We do a full spectrum of engineering activity,” Sarathy says. “We do hardware, software, testing, and technical publication at the Bangalore center.” The primary benefactors of these are the Internet users across the world for whom the Internet has become a source of life, information, and wealth.

Like its peers who have invested in an India center to benefit from the country’s rich engineering tradition, Juniper has immensely benefited by setting up its development center in Bangalore. Sarathy says the center has a major role in every product that Juniper sells around the world. “A substantial part of any product that Juniper ships commercially is done in Bangalore,” Sarathy says. “We want to turn this center into a center of excellence.”

Not overnight, but changes are visible. The center has part or complete component ownership or complete product ownership. “This means we are known as a place where people can come to work where they can get a full range of activity,” says Sampath ‘Sam’ Srinivas, Vice President and Chief Technologist.

Today the activities at the center are divided into two major products-Blade and Enterprise Router. For Juniper, enterprise router is a critical business. A critical part of their new range of carrier class router was developed in India. “Core development of the carrier class router is happening in India. Bangalore is the center of gravity,” Srinivas says. “A large team based here adds new features and customizes the routers for the large enterprises globally,” adds Sarathy.