TechInterview
Cisco seeks to widen reach
Amit Malik, vice president, East, Cisco India and SAARC
Cisco, one of the leading networking, communi cations techno logy and services companies in the world, seeks to strengthen its foothold in Bangladesh. Bangladesh is one of the fastest growing segments for many technology and telecommunication companies, such as Cisco. According to Amit Malik, vice president - East, Cisco India and SAARC, who looks after the company's business in this region, there is a lot of activity happening here. During his recent visit to Dhaka, in an exclusive interview with The Daily Star, Amit spoke about the future of this market and his company's vision. "The growth rate here is higher than in any other region at the moment. From a technology adaptation standpoint Bangladesh is at the forefront of adopting technology, which is a very interesting sign," Amit said. "We are seeing a leapfrog in terms of technology adaptation, whether it is a new age contact centre, IT solution, voice solutions, unified communication, IP telephony." Cisco has recently completed and is working on some large projects in Bangladesh. "We are working with some of the large banks here with our contact centres solutions, voice and IP solutions which have been widely accepted not only in banking sector but also in the education segment," he added. Amit mentioned that Cisco has been doing good in the banking and education sector and they are also working with the government and the telecommunication sector. He also sees Bangladesh as a very big SMB (small and medium business) market. "There are so many customers here that are going to be the large enterprises of tomorrow. The manufacturing sector has still not taken up where we would expect them to be on the verge of taking off," Amit said. Cisco's approach for the SMB market is a little different from their competitors where most of them scale down their enterprise class products Cisco believes in bringing products ground up. Cisco spends approximately 4 billion dollars in terms of research and development only to build SMB products. Last month Cisco introduced a range of products for the SMB market. "We are playing across the spectrum from SMBs to enterprises all across the pyramid. Before, we used to say we have end-to-end solutions and we play across the network, now we play across the pyramid as well. Right from the small business solutions to the top notch enterprise solutions, we've got everything to offer," he added. "No one knows the total size of the SMB market, but it's huge. When you are going for such a large market, marketing is probably the best we got and one of the things that can be mentioned here is the Cisco Network on Wheels (NOW), which we have introduced in India," he added. The NOW is a 25-foot mobile van equipped with the latest SMB customised Cisco networking solutions including advanced technologies such as Security, Wireless and Unified IP Communications aimed at helping Indian SMBs leverage the power of networking technology for business growth. "From a Bangladesh perspective immediately we are not leveraging that because the NOW helps when there is a wide spread of geography, the business here is very highly concentrated in Dhaka and we are seeing Chittagong coming up. There are various other campaigns we are running, like the SMSO, a strategic marketing programme where we train our partners and get them certified for SMBs," he said. "SMBs are a different breed, you need to understand them much better. They might have enterprise aspirations but their needs are different from enterprises. They want plug and play solutions more hand holding. That's why we introduced a new certification called Select Certification," he added. Another technology that Cisco is pioneering is Telepresence, which is a technology that allows a person to feel as if they were present at a location other than their true location with the help of hi tech seamless video conferencing. "Telepresence is definitely on the plate but there are bandwidth constrains and that is the bottleneck, whether the customers need it, yes, and probably the customers are willing to pay for it. But what they definitely want is video," Amit informed. The present traffic condition is creating that demand, because it takes 2-3 hours to commute only 10-20 kilometers. So there is a demand for conferencing solutions, but solutions that are not too much bandwidth demanding have to be looked into. Cisco also provides bandwidth optimisation solutions, by which we can practically leverage 2 times the existing bandwidth. "For the video solution perspective, we have an entire portfolio right from a low end desktop telephony to high definition Telepresence. So there are many solutions for the customers to pick and choose." Cisco over the last few years have been moving more into solutions approach, going more of an architecture level approach, so today they have solutions for all kinds of customers and going into transformation. One of the transformation projects is Connected Communities. "If I have a crystal ball and gaze in what would be a vision for Bangladesh, I am sure Dhaka is going to be so choked there is going to be new cities developed. Even there is a huge movement in urban areas and lot of new cities are coming up," Amit said. "So when I say smart cities, the entire city is connected and everything can be controlled starting from the sewerage, traffic, electricity, water supply everything is centrally managed." This may sound a little futuristic now, but when we talk about it couple of years from now it becomes a need. Cisco is also trying to work as a consultant and one of the arms that are doing that is Cisco Advisory Services. One of the new areas that Cisco is focusing on and will make a big impact in the years to come is the IP surveillance. For example, what happened in Mumbai is what happens when your CCTV footage is local. So nobody in the outside world would know what's happening. But if it on IP, you can give it to the police, armed forces, special securities or headquarters so that anybody can observe given the rights from a remote area of what's happening. So anybody who's coming to rescue will be well informed before they enter the premises. In India police departments in many cities are talking about using IP surveillance now. This may also be adopted by Bangladesh.
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