Ruckus leading the wi-fi revolution in India

Sudarshan Boosupalli,
General Manager, India and SAARC Operations of Ruckus Wireless details the journey of Ruckus in the country and how it has grown over its competition to gain a foothold in the wi-fi space

It has been 6 years for Ruckus in the India market now and it has come a long way from 'who is Ruckus' to gaining the # 2 or #3 position in the market.“India is a strategic market for us; we have our development (R&D) centre where most of the work on large controllers takes place. We also have our Support centre in Bangalore where we have a sales and pre-sales team responsible for the whole country,” says Sudarshan Boosupalli, General Manager, India and SAARC Operations of Ruckus Wireless.

This speaks volumes of the full-fledged entity that Ruckus has grown into in the country today. 

The journey so far... 

It has been an amazing journey for Ruckus since their inception in the India market in February 2008. In fact when they first entered the India market, wi-fi as a technology either did not have too many takers or was not ideally considered as a main IT infrastructure. It was a redundant technology for many. "When we were here, no one knew us, as globally too we are a very small company. It was challenging to convince a customer against giant players like Cisco or Motorola. During those times, when a networking product was deployed in an enterprise, it did not really care whether that particular equipment worked or not. The network was all connected through Ethernet," reminisces Sudarshan. 

But the market started to evolve and so does wi-fi as a technology, from 11g to 11n and then to 11ac. Every customer and vertical, be it healthcare, education, hospitality, IT-ITeS or the service provider market claims to have wi-fi as an important technology in their eco-system today and they are using it pro-actively. After the 3G auctions that happened 2 years back, service providers have starteddeploying wi-fi hotspots across the country. Given the growing number of subscribers using 3G and the limited spectral bandwidth available, it is not long before this poses as a big challenge in the form of network congestion. Service providers are thus planning a 3G offload strategy as a network congestion reduction solution by which data can be offloaded from a mobile network onto a reliable, cost-effective and consistent solution like wi-fi network.

 "As a pure wi-fi player, we have grown considerably over the years and have seen wi-fi growing as a technology. We do not do anything else but wi-fi. We know how to make wi-fi, and know to make the best wi-fi solutions on the planet. We give 3x or 4x the performance on reliability and coverage,” says Sudarshan.

He further explains, “When you go and set up a wi-fi network, there are four things that matter the most to a customer. First is the Reliability – that it should work all the time; next is Ubiquitous Coverage – it should not be always the signal strength but wi-fi should work in any corner of the office; third is Security – in a BYOD environment, a customer should be able to integrate his device into asecured network without the fear of losing data; fourth isTriple play Capability –voice, video and data,all should run on wi-fi; and the last is Scalability –  a customer should be able to build his network as it grows and should be able to scale up.”

Keeping these parameters in mind, Ruckusbuilds extremely secured patented features into its products, for which it has grown to be a preferred brand above the rest. “We ask our customers to do a POC (proof of concept) before deciding on the vendor. Where our competitor recommends a customer for 100 access points, we can guarantee them 70 and that will be more than sufficient,” sums up Sudarshan. 

A hundred percent Channel Company, Ruckus does a number ofcustomer events and becomes a referral point for many important projects in different verticals and customer segments. And because of the name that Ruckus has earned in the market today, there is not a single govt tender that has gone unnoticed by the company, elucidating the fact of how fast Ruckus has grown. 

samrita@varindia.com