Arris International has had its feet in India since the early 90s when it acquired Motorola Home from Google.
As a global player in communications and entertainment technology providing video, voice and data solutions and systems to large names across the world, Arris has its largest R&D presence in the US. However, a new development facility in Bengaluru makes India host to the company’s second largest R&D base. Bob Stanzione, Executive Chairman and Chairman of the Board of the Directors, Arris, reveals the company has grown rapidly over the last four or five years, and is set to touch revenues just under $7 billion this year. Stanzione spoke to BusinessLine on how the India market will contribute over the next five years. Edited excerpts:
Four years ago, we announced that we were acquiring the Motorola Home business from Google, and we completed that acquisition in April 2013. Then last year we announced that we were going to buy Pace, a UK-based company, and we closed that acquisition in January 2016. In both of those large acquisitions, there were facilities in India that were primarily focussed on R&D for our product lines. This year, we’ve combined our development teams at this new facility in Bengaluru. We have 580 people here, and there are nearly a 100 more spread across the region. We also use contractors to supplement the workforce here. The teams here are involved in every product that we deliver.
Your network and cloud business has recently seen new leadership take over. What are your expectations of the management team here?
The India teams are not involved on a project-basis. They help support our clients. So our expectation of the group here is to be very focussed on customers, deliver a high quality product on time and on budget; to innovate and come up with solutions that allow us to be at the cutting edge.
Arris has a history of expansion via acquisitions and India is adding to its start-up base. Will more start-ups feature in your growth story?
We’ve invested in start-ups and we’ve acquired start-ups, although in a limited way. For example, we bought a small Canadian company about two years ago. In some cases, we’ll become a minority investor. Last year, we invested in a company that does cloud-based video services; we invested in it as a partnership with one of our customers. So across the world, we continue to look start-ups and specific technology areas to grow our technology base.
There are start-ups within our company too. A number of ideas are incubated across all our locations. One of our most prolific patent generators is an employee in this Bengaluru facility.
How exactly would you like to see India contribute to Arris’ revenues over the next five years?
One aspect of our growth is definitely the talent here. The capabilities that we find in India are unmatched in many other places in the world. But the other aspect is that although India has not been a large market for the type of products that we’ve built until now, things are changing.
We already supply set-top boxes to a couple of the satellite providers here in India. As the digitisation mandate takes hold, there’ll be higher demand for our high tech products. Broadband penetration is currently low in India and bandwidth is limited. With features like 4k television and virtual reality coming along, demand for bandwidth is going to increase.
All of this should give us opportunities to grow our business in India because service providers across the world are vying for subscribers’ payments and users everywhere are demanding better service and bandwidth.