CASE STUDY: Charting a New Course

With networking vendors getting hit by the slowdown, the scenario today is
not all that rosy. Big names in the business are announcing employee layoffs,
cutting costs and writing-off debts. And also, sales growth projections are
coming down.

However, one company seems to stand out amidst all this. Enterasys Networks
did a business worth Rs 268 crore in 2000-01, in India, and is confident about
increasing its sales by over 100 percent this year. And all this with a
enterprise focus, when the key buzzword had all along been service provider.
Uday Birje, country manager, Enterasys, feels that "We have picked a
segment that is stable. Our focus on the enterprise sector will help us in
meeting our targets". Birje says that Enterasys knew that there would be a
mushrooming of service providers, which will later consolidate. And jumping into
such a market with everything would have only invited disaster.

Though debatable, Enterasys says its confidence on the enterprise comes from
the fact that the enterprise segment is not really cutting their IT spend. More
than this argument, what is perhaps seeing Enterasys through is–its decision
to not cater to a large market space, but focus on new segments which are said
to be quite active, they are–education, healthcare, professional services,
finance and banking.

To bring in more clarity to its new game plan, Enterasys has also come out
with a new business model for itself, which it calls Security, Availability and
Mobility (SAM) to offer comprehensive products and solutions to the enterprise’s
rapidly increasing demands. "We are now trying to shift our focus in the
LAN switching market, planning to include WAN", says Birje.

In addition, Enterasys is also getting a very strong channel in place, where
it says it will get partners which are strong and specialists, rather than
getting too many of them. Large recent orders from Reliance Industries, Haldia
Petro Chemicals, Indian Oil, Silverline Industries, Advanced Radio Masts,
Digital India and Mahindra British Telecom, suggest that Enterasys strategy is
paying off.

No wonder, when others are downsizing investment plans, Enterasys hopes to
make at least twenty new investments in the Asia-Pacific region.

"We have only one competitor, and that is
Cisco"

Ibrahim Ahmad