Gururaj Deshpande unveils India start-up

Fakir Chand in Bangalore

Gururaj 'Desh' Deshpande, the billionaire founder and chairman of the US-based Sycamore Networks Inc, has set up Tejas Networks India Limited in Bangalore to address the multi-billion dollar intelligent optical networking market globally.

As a strategic investor in the technology start-up in his individual capacity, Desh has also roped in his Sycamore Networks to invest substantially in the Indian set-up along with the US-based ASG-Omni venture capital fund, and a host of other angel investors to boot.

Desh, and his associates, however, declined to divulge details on either investments being made, or the holding pattern of the company's paid-up capital even after the first round of funding to the media in Bangalore on Tuesday.

Officiating as non-executive chairman of his incubated company, Desh will be the driving force behind the development of intelligent optical networking products for the global market, and services for the emerging telecommunications market in the Asian sub-continent.

"Focusing on the development of optical networking systems, Tejas will leverage the expertise of its veterans, including chief technology officer Kumar N Sivarajan, the co-author of Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective, to deliver products for major telecom as well as the emerging network backbone providers in India and worldwide to handle high-capacity data and the growing Internet traffic," Desh affirmed.

Tejas has also tied up with the Massachusetts-based Sycamore for distributing its products based on five different platforms in India and the Asia-Pacific region. "We will also build a centre of excellence in Bangalore to support SNI's products," declared TNIL chief executive officer Sanjay Nayak, who was till recently the managing director of Synopsis India Limited, the wholly owned subsidiary of the US-based $850-million Synopsys Inc.

Tejas Networks will address the needs of the new telecom infrastructure and will focus on the development of leading-edge products and solutions for the global intelligent optical networking markets.

Giving an account of the emerging world in the wake of technology convergence and integration of global markets, Desh said the new economy would soon be known as the 'networked economy'.

"We believe the networked economy is here to stay. No one doubts that. It's changing the way we work and live every day. And just as the computing business is driven by memory and microprocessors, Sycamore believes that the wide area network bandwidth will become the primary driver for the new networked economy," Desh claimed in his address.

The fact is, service providers world wide are racing to provide scalable bandwidth to offer their customers new services, drive revenues, and gain a competitive edge. "Data demands on the public network continue to grow at explosive rates. But the ability to carry the data far outstrips the available bandwidth," Desh affirmed.

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