Surender: We sell on reliability, security, and interoperability

Here's a clue for those who forgot what Dax Networks does. Last year, it
Wi-Fi-ed the Dal Lake in Kashmir. And now, with significant telecom and
e-governance projects in its kitty, there is a ready strategy in place to
approach the switch, router and cabling markets. Country manager K Surender
tells Goutam Das of Dataquest how Cisco's reputation as a high-end vendor and
India's rapidly maturing networking market have provided them with more than a
golden opportunity.

Cisco remains the undisputed king of routers and switches with 84% and 70%
market share respectively. How are you planning to take on Cisco?

The market is getting matured now. We believe that next year onwards, Cisco's
market share may drop down to 60% because that's what the trend has been. We
are promoting a concept called Mission Critical Routing Parameters (MCRP). We
tell our customers to judge our solutions based on four parameters, namely
reliability, security, interoperability and 'fail safe' — in case a router
fails, the network uptime should be quite high-the router should have self
defending mechanisms built into it. Once the customers are convinced on that,
price difference then will make the sale. Moreover, as long as the products
comply with standards, it doesn't matter what brand enterprises use. All that
they have to ensure is interoperability.

What is the positioning of Dax?

Our objective is to take a premier position in a niche market segment,
namely on the edge. You have a head office, a regional office and a branch
office. The head office is the core. In the regional office, you have the
aggregation — the one that gets linked to the core and the branch. Then at the
branch office, you have the edge routers. We have 75% of the products what Cisco
has. So, we are quite comfortable on the aggregation and the edge. Here, we
offer a better price performance than what Cisco offers.

Being a small vendor, what visibility strategy have you adopted?

We have our operations in 11 cities. But we conduct two seminars every year
and take it to 20 cities. In effect, we have 40 seminars a year. Thereby, we
come across more as a consultant than a vendor trying to push his product. This
gives us lot of visibility. We have a subscriber base of 300,000 to our
newsletters, which is like a user forum. We are confident this will work for us.