Juniper founder back, to focus on India

Juniper founder back, to focus on India
ENS ECONOMIC BUREAU

MUMBAI, JULY 18: The flow from Silicon Valley is in full swing. After Sabeer Bhatia of Hotmail, Kanwal Rekhi, Exodus founder B Chandrashekhar and Sycamore's Gururaj Deshpande, Pradeep Sindhu, founder of Juniper Networks Inc of the US, is in India with a promise to change the shape of internet infrastructure in India.

There is a difference. While companies of other Indians who became famous in the US information technology arena are yet to make any big investments in their country of origin, Sindhu has gone one step ahead and set up his shop in India. ``I've come here at the right time,'' said Sindhu, referring to the opening up of the telecom market last week.

Sindhu, who is also the vice-chairman of Juniper, is determined to make his mark in India. Juniper, the company he founded along with two others in 1996, has set a blistering pace in the technological frontiers tapping the enormous optical bandwidth explosion in the world's Internet service providers' core infrastructure. The company, which made its initial public offering only in June last year, made its mark on the Nasdaq Stock Market of the US with its market capitalisation zooming from around $ two billion to around $ 52 billion. Compares this with the market cap of local software blue chips Infosys and Wipro which is below $ 15 billion.

Sindhu, who left India in 1975 after graduating from IIT Kanpur, sees tremendous scope in India and says ``two years down the line I see a major internet revolution here.'' Juniper is a leading provider of purpose-built systems -- routers -- that meet the scalability, performance, density and compatibility requirements of rapidly evolving, optically enabled internet protocol networks. The company's purpose-built systems provide new IP infrastructure solutions for the world's leading service providers.

The Juniper founder is a technocrat -- he holds a doctorate in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon University -- and played a central role in the architecture, design and development of M40 internet backbone router. He is currently responsible for the company's technical road map and plays an active role in day-to-day design and development of future products. Before founding Juniper, Sindhu, who was born and brought up in Delhi, was key member of Xerox PARC technical team and worked on design tools for VLSI and high-speed interconnects for shared-memory multi-processors. This work led to the commercial development of Sun Microsystem's first high-performance multi-processor system family.

Says Sindhu, who passed through Mumbai after setting up the India base in Delhi, "To achieve our worldwide market share objectives, Juniper Networks recognised the need to establish a strong sales, service, and support presence in India, where growth in the Internet infrastructure market is among the highest in the world. We believe that our regional and local service provider customers will benefit from our presence in India, as will our multinational service provider customers such as Cable & Wireless, Qwest Communications, and UUNET."

For a company which is four-year old, Juniper has not done badly. As against a modest revenue of $ six million in 1998, the company's 1999 revenue touched $ 103 million. Sindhu says the company has clocked a revenue of nearly $ 200 million in the first six months of 2000.

Sindhu, who sits in Sunnyvale, California, is excited about the opening up of Indian industry. ``There should be less of bureaucracy. India needs more infrastructure... better roads, telecom and other support systems. When private players come in, there will be competition and prices will also drop,'' Sindhu said, adding, ``we're looking at India on a long-term basis. India has approximately 1.5 million internet users today. This number is expected to triple this year.''

He doesn't want to restrict his activity to internet infrastructure in India. ``We are also planning to set up a software development base in India,'' Sindhu said. Watch out Narayana Murthy and Azim Premji. The entry of US-based Indians into the local market is set to rewrite the Indian IT story.