GLOBAL laptop major Dell has forayed into the data centre networking business with the

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acquisition of Force10 Networks. This would be among the drivers for Dell to bring the whole bouquet of its services to India and go beyond PCs, servers and storage, a senior company official, said.

Suresh Vaswani, executive vice-president, Dell Services and chairman Dell India, said: “India is playing a strategic part in driving Dell’s transformation globally into a solutions and services enterprise. We earned $1.4 billion revenue last year in the country and have been growing at an average growth rate of 34 per cent over the last five years. A majority of our revenue here comes from sales of PCs and IT products including servers and storage. What we will do in the near future is to bring the full services of our capabilities to India.” Through a series of acquisitions and in-house capability additions, Dell now operates in the whole spectrum of IT solutions starting from PCs to server, storage, data centre networking, back-end application services and mobility. The company’s 50 acre Sriperumbudur facility, which is producing PCs and a small portion of other IT hardware, has enough additional infrastructures to manufacture products beyond PCs, he added. Its current capacity is about 1.6 million units a year.

Dario Zamarian, vice president and general manager of Dell Networking, said: “Networking is a key element in Dell’s data cen

ter solutions approach. It's the logical third component to our server and storage portfolios. It was not just the missing link but also a must have. We had a networking offering before and Force10's technology would help us to strengthen it further. It is a natural pplication services and mobility complement to Dell's exist ing data center strategy and enables a strong solu tion alignment with our server, storage and systems management portfolio.“

Dell closed the acquisi tion of Force10 in August.

The latter has a research and development centre in Chennai employing close to 250 people. Dell would double the headcount over the next 12 months, Vaswani said.

Force10 is a global tech nology provider in data center networking for serv ice provider and enterprise customers. The company ended last financial year with about $200 million revenue, over 1,100 end Bloomberg customers and 600 em ployees. Majority of its cus tomers are based in North America. Force10 has been present in Chennai since 2005. It raised funds from 12 investors including NEA, USVP and Motorola since inception in 1999.

The company specialises in ethernet and network ac cess products. It competes with the likes of Cisco and Juniper Networks.