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Prayson Pate, Chief Technology Officer, Overture Networks, talks to Pankaj Maru about the company’s new development facility in India and changes in the networking space, among other things. Excerpts:
Recently Overture opened its R&D facility in Bangalore. What role will this centre play for the company?
We opened the Bangalore R&D facility to help augment our overall engineering force and also have opened an office in Massachusetts. Both are contributing to our growth and engineering workforce. Sunil Menon has joined Overture as General Manager for India office; he has done a great job and has given us some genius staff. At present, this centre has a staff of around 35 and over the next 2 years, we will grow twice that count, which would be roughly 25% of our company’s total staff at that time. This centre will be doing some key technology contributions to our new Ensemble OSS architecture.
What expectations do you have from this new facility?
As I said, the team here will be engaged in some key technology developments and contribution to our new Ensemble OSS architecture. The functions from the centre will be very strategic to our the new architecture that includes traditional carrier Ethernet elements, software and professional services. So the team here will be focusing on some of those network elements including Gigabit Ethernet access, as well as some of key software elements that includes Ensemble OSS controllers. These are strategic to our overall direction.
On the enterprise side there’s an increasing adoption of mobility today. How much change are you seeing in the networks?
We are seeing tremendous change in the networks. Our customers are service providers and they have the real problem now as the demand of bandwidth keeps going up. But at the same time, their costs are also going up and it’s very expensive now to lay the fibre underground and equipment in the networks. They are also getting less revenue for services so they have to find a way to change what they are doing.
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And that’s why we are helping them by bringing some power of the cloud to the network edge. By leveraging the power of the cloud, we are going to enable them deliver new services much more quickly and at lower costs. So saving cost is important, but more importantly is being able to roll out new services much more quickly.
As a vendor what kind of competition do you see from other players in the market?
We are seeing some competition but really what we are offering is different from what our traditional competitors have been offering. There’s been lot of focus on making low cost boxes go into the network, but what we are doing is providing a complete solution to our customers combining the networking elements we make with aspect of data centre like storage and compute along with advance software services — all combined together focused on their delivery of new services. So we are not talking to them about a cheaper box, but about how our offering with their existing OSS and BSS systems, can be used to roll out services more quickly.
One of our customer said that it takes them today 18 months and $25 million to roll out a new service. That’s not for the equipment but it’s just for doing the IT work and to tie the services with the back offices. Compared that with Google, which rolls out many new services, many times a year and many times a month. They innovate much more quickly because they are using more modern technology and we are helping them bring that modern cloud technology to our traditional telco customers.
Who are your customers globally?
We sell to tier I and tier II carriers worldwide, including companies likes Verizon, AT&T, British Telecom, Telemax, AAPT, Magyar Telekom (part of Deutsche Telekom) and others.
India is among the emerging telecom markets. Are you not looking at it?
We are not currently selling in the India market, but we would consider doing that in future. And we are well positioned to do that with our Bangalore development office; we are also doing some production in India but we are not quite there yet.
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