Based in Sunnyvale, CA, Ruckus Wireless, Inc. is a global supplier of advanced wireless systems targeted at rapidly expanding mobile internet infrastructure market. For the company, a fast growing Indian telecom market presents huge business opportunities for promoting its wireless products ensuring faster and seamless connectivity by the operators.
In an interview with tele.net.in, Sudarshan Boosupalli, general manager, Ruckus Wireless, India talks about growing adoption of Wi-Fi in the country, company?s business strategy and future technology trends.
Edited excerpts?
How has the Indian Wi-Fi market evolved over the last few years?
A few years ago, investments in the unlicensed Wi-Fi spectrum band was significantly lower than the investments in other licensed bands. By and large operators took five to six years for firming up their investments in Wi-Fi-based networks. However, with service providers recognising the advantages offered by Wi-Fi technology, the scenario has completely changed.
Wi-Fi has emerged as one of the most progressive technologies as it is easier to deploy, involves lower costs and offers higher throughput. At present, Wi-Fi is all over public places such as coffee shops, malls, and airports. There has been a paradigm shift towards the adoption of the technology. For example, today enterprises are not only considering deployment of Wi-Fi for connecting 200 to 250 employees, instead they are weighing the option of establishing access points for providing Wi-Fi coverage to even smaller groups.
What are the advantages offered by Wi-Fi technology?
Wi-Fi is not merely a technology which facilitates transfer of data rather it is a medium to build networks which offer reliability, ubiquitous coverage and security. Moreover, with multiple devices coming into the ecosystem, Wi-Fi offers stakeholders the scalability to upgrade their networks based on their future bandwidth requirements.
What are the key focus areas for Ruckus Wireless in India?
The company is targeting two markets – operators and enterprises. With growing bandwidth requirements, operators as well as internet service providers are setting-up Wi-Fi hotspots to deliver high speed internet services to users. Similarly, within enterprise various segments such as education, healthcare, retail and hospitality are adopting Wi-Fi in a big way. The two sectors together present huge business opportunities for Ruckus Wireless.
What is the company?s strategy to tap business opportunities offered by telecom as well as enterprise sector?
Ruckus Wireless has adopted distinct strategies to take advantage of business opportunities offered by both the verticals. Within the telecom sector, the focus is on providing operators with products and solutions which will give them first hand information regarding traffic on their network and help them closely monitor their infrastructure assets.
Further, the company engages with senior leadership in the industry on a regular basis to highlight the benefits offered by the company?s product portfolio. Close interactions with senior executives help us occupy a larger mindshare and identify requirements of the operators. In terms of technology adoption, India is at par with other developed countries. In a year?s time, 3G data offloading on Wi-Fi networks will become a reality. In a fast evolving technology environment, it becomes important to learn from global examples. In an effort to offer world-class wireless solutions to the Indian operators, the company ensures that it introduces its global product line in India along with the international launch.
Within the enterprise segment, the focus is on building a healthy channel network. At present, with about 400 to 500 associations, the company has an effective and efficient channel network in place. Going forward, we are focused on selectively growing this channel network to further promote our products in the market.
What are the key challenges before the company?
In the initial years, the challenge was to establish an identity for the brand. Unlike, established players in the industry which were well recognised, Ruckus Wireless had to put in a lot of effort to create awareness about the brand and educating prospective consumers about the company?s offerings.
In early days, the focus was on convincing clients why they needed to invest in new age technology. We reached out to chief information officers and chief technology officers and presented them with our concepts and brought forward the benefits they could accrue by adopting the company?s products and solutions. Slowly, the company grew by word of mouth and succeeded breaking into a market dominated by larger global players.
Till few years ago, another key challenge before the company was to motivate enterprises to abandon the usage of redundant legacy systems. It took the company a lot of time and effort in convincing enterprises to move away from consumer grade products to enterprise products. With growing consumer awareness, sectors such as education and healthcare have witnessed large-scale deployment of Wi-Fi solutions. Moreover, Wi-Fi market has witnessed significant growth with the hospitality sector integrating the technology in their telecom networks. In the last few years, retail and warehousing industry too have made significant investments in Wi-Fi-based products and solutions.
What are key technology areas of interest to the company and its major offerings in the Indian market?
With the growing market for location-based services (LBS), developing products and solutions which would help operators and enterprises take advantage of wireless technology to enhance their business prospects is a priority for Ruckus Wireless. According to various industry estimates, the LBS market is expected to reach $2.5 billion by 2017.
The company?s recent launches include Ruckus Smart Positioning Technology service, the industry?s first cloud-based smart positioning LBS. It offers service providers and enterprises the ability to deliver a wide-range of value added services over Ruckus Smart Wi-Fi networks to help increase their profitability while enhancing users? online experience. For example, the service can be used by retail chains and malls to gain further insights into customer behaviour. Using the service, stakeholders can access information/data such as daily footfalls, time spent by a visitor at a particular zone and location of the visitor. Accordingly, the owner can raise prices for areas attracting higher footfalls. Similarly, using this data retailers can trigger customised advertising targeting visitors with special discount offers to promote various services.
What are the technology trends likely to dominate telecom space?
Access and insights into consumer data is gaining prominence worldwide. Increasingly data is being virtualised on cloud. Operators see great value in this proposition as they now need not necessarily make investments in hardware.
