Tejas celebrates 10 years with new products for 3G/BWA backhaul

First, I must thank my friend, Arnob Roy, president-engineering, Tejas Networks, for sharing the details of Tejas celebrating 10 years of telecom product innovation in India. Tejas has been leading the Indian high-tech industry evolution for the last decade. It has played a significant role as bandwidth creators for telecom services in India.

I still remember feeling quite thrilled — back in early 2001 — when I first passed by Tejas’ office in Bangalore, even more so as I’d just met Sycamore Networks at the ITU Telecom Asia 2000 (in early December) in Hong Kong, when I was Editor, Global Sources Telecom Products.

Last week, Tejas completed a decade of telecom product innovation, and celebrated the event by announcing new products for 3G/BWA backhaul, besides having its chairman, Dr. Gururaj (Desh) Deshpande, here for the event.

In case you are unaware, last month, Dr. Deshpande was appointed as the co-chairman of US President Obama’s National Advisory Council on Innovation and Entrepreneurship. He will support President Obama’s innovation strategy by helping to develop policies that foster entrepreneurship, create jobs, and drive economic growth. He is a serial entrepreneur, and founder or mentor to many for-profit companies, such as Cascade, Sycamore, Tejas, Airvana, and so on.

Tejas in India
Outlining Tejas’ success in India, Sanjay Nayak, CEO and MD, said the company had reached the top-10 spot in its segment globally, besides being a leader in India-bandwidth enablers across all operators. Tejas has also achieved global success — it is used by operators in networks in over 50 countries, besides being the OEM product provider to many global equipment majors.

Tejas has also been developing technology leading products such as those enabling 3G/BWA transition. For those interested, the company has launched 10+ products from India over last five years. Also, 192,000 Tejas’ systems are lighting over 5 million km of optical fiber. The company has also seen profitable growth, wtih five-year CAGR of >65 percent (revenues of Rs. 620 crore). It has 730 employees (in seven countries) with over 450 in R&D.

Tejas’ contribution to telecom growth in India has been significant. It has proved that India can build world-class product companies. Over 75 percent of fiber towers in India use Tejas’ multiplexers. The company is a leading Ethernet over SDH provider – 562,000 Ethernet ports shipped last year alone. It is also enabling low-cost mobile services – 20 percent annualized drop in bandwidth prices since 2000. Finally, Tejas has also won the world’s largest tender for SDH/optical equipment.

Portfolio of packet optical products
Now, Tejas is playing a pivotal role in 3G/BWA by launching a portfolio of packet optical products. It has enhanced its 3G and BWA backhaul solution by launching the packet optical transport platform (POTP) family of products for 3G and BWA backhaul.

The products are based on packet optical transport technology — an integration of optical transport and packet switching technologies. Said to be future proof, they have been architected for seamless migration from 100 percent voice to 100 percent data (and anything in between) — saves on repeated capex investments. They are also suitable for migrating networks that currently support 2.5G and are rolling out 3G services. Finally, the products offer reduced opex, and are much easier to manage and for offering new services.

The TJ2K family for 3G and BWA backhaul is for pure-packet green-field BWA networks. It offers lowest per-bit transport cost and scalable to terabit capacity. Other benefits are: sophisticated data handling with 50ms protection against faults, continuous service monitoring for minimizing opex and seamless integration with existing IP/MPLS networks.

Evolving as thought leader
Dr. Gururaj (Desh) Deshpande, chairman, said: “Propelled by its world class talent, I am thrilled, but not surprised to see Tejas Networks achieve this tremendous success. Over the last decade, Tejas has evolved as a thought leader, addressing the most complex needs of the telecom operators today. Tejas has also established that a product company based in India can serve the highly competitive domestic market and at the same time produce high quality, leading-edge products relevant to the rest of the world.”

“I am confident that with the right impetus, India can produce several other product companies like Tejas Networks and establish a $100 Billion high-tech product industry over the next decade.”