The Bangalore Unit of US networking giant Cisco has filed for over 800 patents till date. According to a senior executive at Cisco, India plays a crucial role in the development of new products and solutions at Cisco.
India has come a long way from being just a cost advantage to a skill poll. It has now become a centre of innovation for many companies.
The networking giant has spent approximately 6.3 billion US dollars or 13.4 percent of its financial year 2014 revenues on research and development globally.
“From being a centre for cost advantage to a skill pool, India has today become a centre of innovation for us. The impact that India is creating is phenomenal and every solution that we have, India has an imprint on it," said Pankaj Patel, Executive Vice President and Chief Development Officer, Cisco in a statement to PTI.
He further added, apart from the US and India, there is not a single country where there is investment across all the technology bets that Cisco has.
Patel is the man responsible for heading the 25,000 employees of Cisco towards the development and execution of the company’s 6.3 billion US dollars technology portfolio.
The $ 47 billion networking giant has filed over 19,000 patents and has some 170 labs all over the globe.
The Indian Unit of the US firm started with just ten employees in the year 1996. The unit filed for 12 patents within just two years of starting. Currently, the unit has over eleven thousand employees of which eight thousand are engineers. It has filed about 830 patents till date.
New products for Cisco are being conceptualized, designed and manufactured out of India.
"We had decided to design products in India for footprint, energy consumption and scalability. The ASR 901 was the first Cisco product to be entirely developed out of India and now, it is a huge hit in developed countries as well," said Patel.
According to Patel, Cisco came in India for the costs, stayed in for the quality, invested for innovation and now they are working on creating a new industry.
Cisco invests 1.7 billion USD annually in its unit in India. Although the networking giant gets just 2% of its over $ 47 billion revenues from the country, it is confident that this share will increase to over 5 percent in the next five years.
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