'50 % of our development will be from India'

Started in the 1984, Canada-based Sangoma Technologies is a connectivity
hardware/software provider that is seriously looking towards India for
formula-ting partnerships with big system integrators in the region. It is also
planning to get more than 50 percent of its development work done in India. Zia
Askari of CyberMedia News spoke with David Mandelstam, President and CEO at
Sangoma, about the com-pany's India strategy.

What is the current focus of Sangoma and how do you look at India as a
market for your products?

As India is one of the most sought after markets in the world, we have a
clear focus to-wards increasing our business as well as development pre-sence in
India. As we engage with a lot more customers over here, we would be doing more
than 50 percent of our develo-pment from India.

This country is a like a jewel in the Asian crown. The cou-ntry's networks
have grown quite a lot over the past seve-ral years and all this has lead to
complex pro-blems that have to be solved at the network and carrier level. Our
products can help them do that.

How do you plan to tap the Indian market?

We started our Indian ven-ture by partnering with Delhi-based IT Globe and
providing our WAN card to Midas for its CorDect product. They have done
extremely well with that product and now they are successfully taking it outside
India to other geographies as well.

Moving forward, we would like to continue working with IT Globe and as we
have seen with many other companies, we would be doing a lot of our development
effort from India. Though this development will be taken forward by IT Globe, we
will be involved at the strategy and at the implemen-tation levels. All our
development efforts in India will be handled by IT Globe.

What kind of partnerships are you looking for in India?

We are working towards having partnerships with different big system
integra-tors like Wipro, HCL and GTL in the Indian region. We are going to work
with HCL by providing them with bill collection information. HCL is
participating in a very big BSNL national tender for call data recording (CDR)-a
feature in a telephone system that allows it to collect and record info-rmation
on incoming and out-going calls. The overall size of this tender is some-where
around Rs 2,000 crore. Our partnership will help HCL in better posi-tioning
itself to compete with other vendors.

We are also likely to work closely with Wipro for a couple of its futuristic
networking products. We would be integra-ting voice-based strategies such as
VOIP on ADSL for TDM voice.

Are you looking at expanding your base in India by establishing your own
presence?

We are quite happy with the way IT Globe has taken forward our initiatives,
so we will continue to work closely with them in the near future. IT Globe
already has a pre-sence in all the prominent cities, like Bangalore, Hyde-rabad,
Ahmedabad, Pune and Bhopal. We would also be looking forward to adding Mumbai to
that list.

However, I will not rule out the possibility of having Sangoma's own
presence in India, if we achieve the critical mass of customers over a period of
time.