Search the Internet          Tips  Sites: Finance, Investment

Wipro ties up with Sitara Networks

Fakir Chand in Bangalore

Wipro Infotech, the flagship division of the Rs 22-billion Bangalore-based Wipro Corporation, has tied with the US-based Sitara Networks Inc., to launch the latter's Quality of Service (QoS) products in India for providing effective solutions to the bandwidth problems of enterprises and Internet service providers across the country.

Claimed to the first of its kind joint initiative in India, the tie-up envisages both the partners to approach institutional customers, who use high bandwidth and Internet protocols, for maximizing their return on investments (RoI) by deploying QoS products of Sitara.

Being a 4-year-old global leader in QoS solutions, Sitara products are designed to address the inherent limitations of Internet Protocol (IP) by enhancing its network performance. Keeping in view the needs of the emerging convergence era, both partners will promote the concept of deploying such broadband solutions by enterprises and service providers.

"Our patented QoS solutions will bring value to the businesses as broadband technologies are poised to take off soon in the sub-continent. The product network will not only help companies to overcome the bandwidth shortage, but also position them in control of their IT infrastructure by allowing them to decide priority of various types of traffic and applications," stated Sitara vice-president for Asia-Pacific operations Ehud Weizman.

The focus markets for the initiative will be banking and finance, corporates and governments, software exporters, ISPs and application services providers (ASPs).

"Both partners will target those markets which benefit by deploying QoS products," Weisman added.

According to Wipro Infotech president Suresh Vaswani, the two technology partners will also set up a Sitara-Wipro centre of QoS excellence in Bangalore as a critical resource base for Indian IT professionals and corporates who intend to achieve higher network performance, ensure availability of mission critical applications, and deliver additional revenue-generating services to their end-users.

"We intend to provide an end-to-end resource under one roof to enable customers to have the business advantage through Sitara solutions," Vaswani said.

Though Sitara's products have specific implication for Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), the partners are waiting for the legalisation in India, as VoIP through the public networks is not permitted legally. With virtual private networks (VPNs) and campus networks including intranets and extranets use IP for voice and data transfer, the partners will be targetting this segment too for improving their performance levels.

Both the partners, however, declined to state the upfront investments being made to promote and launch the products. Large enterprises like Wipro Ltd and the ISP netcracker.com or Wipronet are expected to be one of their first customers as charity begins at home.

With Sitara QoS products and services costing anything between couple of millions to Rs 5 million, revenue projects during the ensuing first financial year of operations in 2001-02 have also not been disclosed.

As Sitara has filed its documents with the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in the US for an IPO listing on the Nasdaq during the current year, its officials pleaded inability to share either its revenues generated nor the equity holding stake in the company, founded by Malik Khan, a network visionary and former vice-president of Motorola Inc.

Money

Business News

Tell us what you think of this report