Network Gen. launches in India

Network General Corporation, operating in the network management space, has announced the launch of its Indian operations and plans to invest $10 million within the next three years.

The company will soon move into its new 20,000 sq.ft research and development facility in Bangalore from McAfee's premises from where it presently operates.

Network General, a recent spin-off from network security major McAfee Inc, was formed from the Sniffer Technologies division of the parent.

Silver Lake Partners (which recently raised second round $3 billion fund) and Texas Pacific Group (which has also just raised its second round $5 billion fund) agreed to jointly acquire the business unit and the acquisition was completed in July, this year. Silver Lake is the same VC firm which funded Flextronics.

The R&D centre at Bangalore is the second largest facility after San Jose and both these centres will equally share the work.

The Bangalore facility is currently 70-strong and is likely to grow to over 100 people within the next three months. Network General's flagship product suite called Sniffer, which is used to monitor and identify problems within the network, has about 6,000 customers worldwide with about two lakh installations.

According to Bruce Fram, president and CEO, Network General, "We are a profitable company. Our presence is not new in India. We were founded as part of McAfee in India in January 2003. After the recent spin off, India will definitely play a key role in our R&D. We are already hiring for high level technical positions. The team in Bangalore will be responsible for product development, customer-facing engineering and various cycles of quality assurance."

After the spin-off, nearly 500 of McAfee's employees moved into Network General. Today, a majority of the Network General's employees in India are also from McAfee. The fact that they have also worked on Sniffer will help Network General.

In the network management market, Network General claims to be a leader with a 22.6 per cent market share, followed by its closest competitor, Agilent (which is a spin-off from Hewlett Packard) which has a 18.7 per cent market share.

Network General business comes from four of its core products like Sniffer Portable (for field service engineers), Sniffer Distribution (for enterprises), Neasyst (for small and medium businesses) and Infinistream (a software that reports network traffic).