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With healthy revenue growth and success in creating top-of-mind awareness for its unified communications solutions, the new consumer face may be the more tangible achievement of Cisco Systems in India in FY 07. But the big step was the companys decision to make Bangalore the headquarters for the Eastern Hemisphere by moving senior executives, including Cisco Services chief, Wim Elfrink, to the city. Informally, they call it Cisco East. Growth (by tapping the fast-growing markets in Asia), Innovation (using Indias nascent market to do high-impact innovations), and Talent (Indias abundant technically qualified manpower) were the driving factors behind this move.

On the Indian business front, unified communications was the star growing at 60%, though on a much smaller base. Wireless at 47% was another major growth story. FY 07 also saw Cisco diversifying into new product segments in some of the emerging technology areas like digital media and physical security systems.

On the market front, though it continued to bag state WAN contracts there was a moajor setback when it lost the HP SWAN bid against the Juniper-Nortel alliance. Ciscos new focus is SMBs for which it has created a new portfolio of products, especially in areas like security and unified communications.

More seriously, Cisco lost a few top executives in India. The latest to leave was country head Jangoo Dalal, who joined D-Link. Few other senior executives like Sudhir Narang and Karan Bajwa too resigned and joined Tulip IT Services, incidentally one of Ciscos Largest SIs. DQ

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