We are taking a different approach to the market. We are moving towards adopting standard-based products, high-end technologies like 10G and high-end wireless solutions. We provide next business day replacement warranty. We are making the network infrastructure more of a reliability business rather than developing the proprietary technology. HP ProCurve offers lifetime warranty on its products.

How does this benefit ProCurve? 
HP ProCurve believes that network infrastructure is the glue which holds a computing environment together, and consequently well-being of this link is of paramount importance. Most brands in the market offer conditional fixed tenure warranty, some even as low as 90 days. This has been a key concern of all customers, as they do not want their infrastructure and connectivity to be held to ransom because of warranty terms and AMC contracts. This is why HP ProCurve came up with the path-breaking true lifetime warranty, and customers have loved it. This benefits HP in the way of a greater customer share.

Which market segment are you targeting in India? 
The India market is a very vibrant one and we see a lot of growth coming from both the enterprise and mid markets. The government, manufacturing, education, media, hospitality and IT are verticals where we have a strong focus. The SMB, or specifically the mid markets are also a target area for us. HP ProCurve is not focussed on the entry- level home and SOHO segments.

What is your strategy for small and medium businesses segment? 
After having a strong foothold in the enterprise segment, we are now targeting the growing SMB market – as we see a lot of business opportunities in this segment. We are drawing different strategies to capture the booming SMB market in India. HP ProCurve has a separate base of channel partners catering to this specific segment. We are focussing on all key cities, including markets like Coimbatore, Nagpur, Chandigarh and Ahmedabad. We managed to cover 38 cities in the last quarter and we aim to achieve the target of 50 cities in the current quarter. We have also launched a slew of products catering to this segment. For instance, the ProCurve Wireless Access Point 10ag meets the needs of SMBs and smaller enterprise customers. The low-maintenance, plug-and-play ProCurve Wireless Access Point 10ag is designed for companies with small or no IT staff. It is ideal for environments that include standalone small business networks, branch offices and conference rooms.

What is your channel strategy for India? 
We are a 100-per cent channel-focussed company. Barring a few exceptions where we had to bill the customers as the customer could not place the order on a partner, about 98 per cent of our business has come from channel partners. They are our feet on the street. Going forward, we intend to add more qualified partners to our channel network. However, appointing more partners would, in no way, lead to over-distribution. We would ramp up our partner’s technical skills through multiple training sessions. Besides, we would co-brand seminars and programmes with them, and provide them with tools from an advertisement perspective. The bottom line of our strategy would be to ensure profitability of our partners.

Any training programmes for Channel Partners? 
We have launched Adaptive Edge Fundamentals (AEF) and Accredited System Engineers (ASE) trainings for the channel partners in the last quarter across the country. While the AEF will focus on product basic and adaptive technology of the products, ASE will focus on providing training on the high-end products. We started with Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Hyderabad, Bangalore and Kolkata. We have now selected Pune and Ahmedabad in the tier II level. The trainings are open for all the HP ProCurve partners (even the HP channel network). The third-level of training – Masters Accredited System Engineer (MASE) – will be started soon in India. These trainings are also open to customers, academic institutions and are being run by HP Education. 

What is your competition strategy, considering 80% of India’s networking products market is dominated by competition? 
We are already number four and believe that we will be number three very soon. We compete not just on products but also on changing market dynamics. We offer more value through open standards and lifetime warranty. We break the market into two parts. There is Cisco, Foundry, Extreme and Nortel, and there is D-Link, 3Com and Netgear. In our experience around the world and in India, these companies do not directly compete with us very much. We position ourselves entirely against the first group and that is where all of our business happens on a regular basis.

In terms of how we will move, as our customers understand what we bring to the market, we will very rapidly move second to Cisco in the first set of companies. The message we give to our customers is that we are investing heavily in R&D. This R&D is in some of the most advanced areas of technology whether it is security, access management, intrusion protection, mobility, and convergence solutions to routing and core and edge networking. The R&D is based on the ease of use, integrated robust design, and open standards, multi-vendor interoperability

What are the major market trends that you see in the switches space?Small business segment has become more value conscious. The market seems to be moving from the entry-level unmanaged boxes to fully-managed L2/L3 switches. Inter-office connectivity is proving to be the main driver, with demand for WAN. With most companies going wireless, expansion is coming from these offices. Security is an issue of concern. Earlier, consumers worked only on PCs. While other options such as notebooks, handheld devices, PDAs, and phones are all gaining popularity, most of the modern-day switches are converged devices that enable voice, data and video convergence. We shall see an increase in security solution and the networking switch itself will become more capable of providing inbuilt security features.

Government is investing huge amounts for infrastructure upgradation in e-governance projects, doing statewide area networks (SWAN), State Data Centre (SDC) and large government projects and this will surely drive demand.