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With the government pushing many of its ambitious projects such as Smart Cities, Digital India or Skill India, networking giant Cisco is warming up to play a bigger role in the country. In June, the company’s outgoing CEO John Chambers and incumbent (that time CEO-designate) Chuck Robbins flew to the country and announced a series of initiatives, reiterating the California-based company’s commitment to be part of those initiatives. In an interview with Bibhu Ranjan Mishra¸ Cisco’s president for India and SAARC, Dinesh Malkani says why the company is so optimistic about India. Edited excerpts
What makes Cisco so bullish about India?
We believe that every market has an inflexion point, and in India the inflexion point probably is today. This is happening because a number of things are coming together. The first is the whole understanding that digitisation can help businesses, citizens and people in general is starting to get elevated. Businesses today are seeing that if they do not reach out to their customers in a very different way, they are going to miss out on opportunities. And it’s not just in India, digital disruption is happening all across the world. In India, there was a lot of talk around that but I think over the last 12 months, things have changed significantly given that what we are seeing in the retail space, in travel, transportation. So clearly when consumers start consuming services over digital platform, you know that the market is ready.
How real are the government’s initiatives around Digital India or Smart Cities etc? Do you see they are moving in the right direction?
Yeah. If you measure it by the amount of activity, I think it is real. Today for any country, it is as important to have digital infrastructure. We are glad that digitisation is one of the top agendas of the prime minister. Now the key question is how long it will take and in what areas it will happen? But the vision is good; much-needed. It’s one that will transform the way that things typically operate in the country.
Many of the things that the govt. is talking about requires lot more collaboration. How is Cisco reacting in that front?
I think these are not the kind of activities that the government will do on its own. This will clearly lead to public private partnerships (PPP). In the entire digital architecture, there will be a number of key players. We have roll out programmes to work closely with the independent software vendors (ISVs), and we have many local partners such as Infosys and Wipro etc.
How open are you to work in PPP kind of projects where the revenue models are not fairly established or returns on investment could be based on usage?
We have participated in many such opportunities over many years. But, the models are changing because of the fundamental shift that is happening now. When supply is ahead of demand, then one has to desperately look for people to use the services. Today, it’s the other way round. You can see that in the e-commerce or transportation space. In such situation, PPP model has a better chance of becoming successful. If you look at our Visual Network Index (VNI) report, we are predicting that by 2019, the number of internet users in India will double and we will also have 1.6 billion devices that will be connected to the network. So quite obviously, they are going to look for avenues to consume and these avenues are going to be provided either by private organizations or the government or by PPP models.
Will it also spur a lot of opportunities for smaller players, especially the startups?
I am very excited about the whole momentum that is happening in the country in the startup space. We are actively working with smaller companies where we do some seed investments, mentor and give them a lot of exposure. India is clearly one of those markets that we believe the start-up ecosystem is going to continue to grow.
Are you making any additional investment in India?
We have recently made a commitment of additional $60 million of which $20 million will be spent towards expanding our networking academy through which we want to skill 120,000 more people. We are also expanding our centre in Bengaluru for which we have taken additional space. We have been scaling our investment in the country fairly significantly. It used to be 1200 people in 2007 and today we are touching almost 11,000.
Has the demand environment for technology consumption actually picked up in India?
Because of the disruption that is happening, people need to leverage technology capability a lot more than they used to do in the past. I am seeing growth continue in the IT industry in general. If you look at Gartner or IDC reports, they are very bullish on the market. The reason is also the reprioritization of the budget. Clearly, businesses understand that technology is the key enabler now-a-days. That is resulting in increase in spends in the IT.
