re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says PollPossible..but that is sometime in the future. And we should talk about the present. But the present state does determine the future state. Atleast for the next 3-4 years, I do not see it happening as yet in India. May be, after that period.... ESS >>>>>>>>>>>>> >>As somebody here already stated, new product >>based companies are opening up in India and it >>will take some time for India to catch up.
re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says PollWow....I did not know I die for them. Again thanx for the info. Do companies like people dying for them? Hey....companies....where are you all? I die for you and I will work for you forever (sounds like an eternal love story).
Actually, I was planning to go jump into the foggy SF bay waters. After I read your post, I feel like I do not need to worry about my job anymore.
ESS >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> And this holds true for all the companies, that you probably die for (Cisco, Juniper, Microsoft, Sun Microsystems, etc)
re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says PollYou talk about the state of the company after it is screwed up. There is Operation Salvage going on in there. And pray how did they get screwed up? No names now but please ask people inside there who have worked for more than 6 years or so (going back to Cabletron days). Dooooes this satisfy your appetite? ESS >>>>>>>>>>>>> Dude, what gives you the impression that Riverstone Networks is an Indian Managed company? Look at http//www.riverstonenet.com/company/...
re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says Pollthanks for reminding me of the Govt owned telecom makers. they have a wide range of smalla and medium products. most of the senior people in india came out of these and defence labs.
re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says PollSorry if this is displaying my ignorance but does India have the equivalent of China's Huawei or ZTE?
My impression is that India has focused on software outsourcing services. Maybe that has greater long term potential? What do you think? ________________________________________________ Peter,
Until not so long ago, starting a product company in India was a huge risk. The cost of capital was very high (with interest rates in the region of 15-20%.
There were (and still are) large government firms which have done some credible work in the telecom area (mostly voice switches), and in sheer size they *might* parallel some of the Chinese players (maybe not huawei).
Software and other design services are a zero-risk game - very little investement, and since most income is in dollars, it is free from taxation. India was in *dire* trouble until not so long ago on the foreign exchange reserve front, and any inflow of convertible currency was more than welcome.
Starting a product company in telecom or other IT technology remains difficult now, but for different reasons. American firms that offshore are able to pay much better than an Indian firm could, and hence poach away good talent. This problem will get worse before it gets better. Even traditional service companies like Wipro, HCL et al, have witnessed serious erosion of talent. Also, it's cheaper to have one's own office in Bangalore, rather than rely on an services company for offshoring.
In fact, there's an interesting trend these day.
1) American company sets up shop in Bangalore (as they had promised their VCs/ shareholders) 2) For the first few months, they engage with one of the service companies and get their engineers on Board. 3) Poach the best of these engineers 4) The services company loses business *and* their best engineers.
re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says PollBEL had sales of $555 mil on 2003. thats likely the biggest player in india in electronics/sw/telecom/defence area. got this from annual report on their website.
UTstarcom the lil brother of huawei and zte has crossed $1bil hasnt it ? ..riding on back of booming chinese internal market.
re: The Chinese Are Coming, Says PollI've just remembered Sam Pitroda - the guy that started out in a poor village near Calcutta, got educated, went to the US and became a millionaire, returned to India to try and create a Lucent type telephone switch manufacturer in India, and then got all tangled up in Indian politics.
I'm playing catch-up on this thread, so I'll condense my responses...
unet (Post 53) said: "Regarding MPLS OAM - some times good ideas can be turned down and the only way is to prove otherwise by deploying and getting customer traction - I bet if MPLS OAM is deployed and proves very useful then IETF would and should consider standardizing it"
Yes, the problem Peter described is a little more complex. The "in crowd" at the IETF blocked the carrier efforts to introduce MPLS OAM two years ago. The carriers went to the ITU - a body which is still perceived as more "carrier-friendly" than the IETF. When the IETF saw that MPLS OAM was gaining traction in the ITU, they suddenly started up a parallel effort. My own opinion of the IETF work is that it may actually be better than the ITU approach. But that's a hard decision to make because the IETF starts by writing code, and the ITU starts with a structure of what they're trying to achieve. I found it interesting to see the MPLS World Congress presentations on OAM by George Swallow of Cisco (explaining the IETF approach), followed by Dave Allen of Nortel who tried very bravely to reconcile the two approaches and position the situation as complementary.
The fact is that the MPLS WG has presented the first batch of MPLS Foundation Standards to the IESG, and OAM is not in there. What message does that send to carriers about the "carrier grade" nature of MPLS?
unet said: "As I remember reading some ITU/or IEEE meeting report that the cost of adding OAM&P to Ethernet is considered to defeat the value proposition of Ethernet - cheap. Once OAM&P is added to ethernet it is no longer cheap."
I can't comment on specifics as I haven't seen that report, but this sounds like a classic misunderstanding of CapEx vs OpEx. Sure, by adding some OAM to Ethernet the equipment might cost more. But you cannot use an enterprise class Ethernet switch in carrier environments anyway - there have to be significant redesigns. Adding OAM at that stage is a drop in the ocean.
But what you get with a good OAM capability is a much lower OpEx. Without OAM services still work, but if they *stop* working for some reason it's much more likely that the carrier has to send an engineer in a truck, instead of fixing the problem from the NOC. Truck rolls mean lower margins. And without OAM you use your customer as the fault detection mechanism. Not good. Every economic study I've seen states that OpEx overtakes CapEx within a short period of time (it's the time factor that differs between reports, not the basic issues).
Abby (Post 54) raised the issue of backwards compatability.
Well, all the carriers I know are obsessed with regression testing, and that's kinda the same as being obsessed with backwards compatability. In fact it's the IETF approach that often results in evolutionary dead ends. Some would say that cutting off a dead branch of development is the most efficient way to move the technology forward, and in the enterprise space I suspect that's true without too many reservations. In the carrier space we're operating on a different timescale, and a different network scale too.
Abby (Post 54) raised an issue about incumbent carrier ojectivity.
But we know from history that greenfield carriers tended to jump into technology and business models that didn't make sense. How many are left standing (Chapter 11 doesn't count :-) ?
I too used to criticise incumbent operators as being dinosaurs. But in this case the dinosaurs inherrited the Earth. The good news is that they're now at war with each other, and (at least in Europe) we're seeing real signs of evolution to a more customer-responsive approach.
Abby (Post 54) said: "I personally know VPs in SBC, Verizon, and MCI who are all disillusioned with the standards process, as I have described in the other thread."
Well if they're VPs, and they really want to fix the standards process they need to start approving travel budgets and project time for their engineers to attend standards meetings. The biggest complaint I hear from carrier engineers is that they have to cover two or three different standards groups, and never have the time to read through email threads. They end up being passive observers of the standards process, instead of taking an active part. I know one major carrier sends ONE engineer to the IETF because of budget limitations. ONE POOR GUY! I'd love to see his trip report :-) Tell your VP friends that they need to stop expecting to see payback for investment in standards work within six months. That just isn't realistic - especially in the IETF.
Abby (Post 54) said: "Looking at this from another angle, look at the cable MSO's. Carrier-based customer-driven standards is how they operate. One would be hard pressed to ignore the success of this industry in the middle of a bad overall telecom market."
But MSO are using MPLS nowardays. The standards to which you refer are the low level protocols for the cables and the modems. That's analogous to DSL on the Telco side, where the same level of success could be claimed. Let's face it, Ethernet has an exemplary track record of being customer driven - but the customer in that case was, and still is, the enterprise. When enterprise customers wanted cheaper wiring we got 10BASE2, when they wanted structured cabling they got 10BASET. Market-drive speed requirements gave us switched operation, full duplex and speeds up to 10Gbit/s. Today Ethernet needs to respond to its newest customers, the carriers. OAM please!
But the present state does determine the future state. Atleast for the next 3-4 years, I do not see it happening as yet in India. May be, after that period....
ESS
>>>>>>>>>>>>>
>>As somebody here already stated, new product >>based companies are opening up in India and it >>will take some time for India to catch up.