NEWS & VIEWS: "Wireless will not wipe out wireline"

Dr Ispran Kandasamy, vice president and managing director, Asia Pacific,
Systimax Solutions

Systimax is a leader in structured connectivity solutions. Its parent
company, CommScope is the world's largest manufacturer of broadband coaxial
cable for HFC applications. Kandasamy was in India recently. He has been leading
Systimax's growth in the Asia-pacific region since 2001. He spoke to
VOICE&DATA about the industry trends and the company's plans for India.
Excerpts:

What are your scale-up plans for India? Any plan to scale up R&D or
manufacture in India?

We expect to increase our business in India by 20—30 percent in the next
year. However, currently we have no plans to start manufacturing in India. In
view of our projected growth, we will expand the existing sales and marketing
team in India by four fold.

Why did you shift your Asia-Pacific HQ to Singapore?

Until now all the key marketing decision makers for the Asia-Pac region were
either in Europe or America. We are now saying to our businesses that we are
going to make all our decisions within the region. So we are going to grow the
HQ team and we need space for that. The Singapore office has space for that
growth.

Many cabling companies are moving into structured cabling...

Such a path has many pitfalls. There are hundreds of cable manufacturers who
step into the structured cabling market, but their solutions merely meet the
specs. These basic solutions are priced for a different market and we don't
play that market. Our solutions are focused on customers for whom technical
performance matters and who look beyond price. And local cable manufacturers
cannot cater to the customer outside a limited geographical area. We have the
advantage of global reach.

Then, is moving to wireless a logical extension for you?

With wireless, we are adding to our solutions. And in doing this, we are
still fundamentally focusing on our core strength, which is communications
infrastructure. Businesses now have an option to communicate differently using
mobility. It is just an extension of our key strength. I can't speak for other
companies. All I can say is that it makes perfect sense for our business. And
while the Systimax group was with AT&T, this is an area we were very strong
in. So in a sense, we are just coming back to it.

What range of the infrastructure will you cater to?

Our corporate strategy is to stick to infrastructure. We are there only
between data-in and data-out, and we focus on device-to-device communications
infrastructure. We have decided not to get into the devices business. We will
only provide the devices to connect to the network-mid-standard devices if you
like. But we will not end up providing devices like IP switches.

What is your R&D expenditure?

As a corporation, as CommScope, we spend about two percent of our revenue on
R&D. For Systimax the figure is significantly higher.

What do you think will be the future trends in communications
infrastructure industry?

Fiber came with a lot of promise but has not caught on yet. And in our
experience, fiber has continued to disappoint whereas copper has continued to
surprise. In the network space there is no competition between wireless and
wireline. We don't think one will wipe out another.

We already offer solutions that are copper-fiber hybrids and wireless is
complementing the wired networks. That would remain the trend for a long time.

Alok Singh