Hoping to cash in on the government’s stress on digitisation, a delegation of senior executives from US-based networking technology company Cisco will meet officials from the Department of Industrial Policy & Promotion (DIPP) next week to discuss the company’s expansion plans in India and the country’s policy priorities.
John Kern, Senior Vice-President, supply chain, Cisco, will lead the team that is scheduled to meet DIPP Secretary Ramesh Abhishek on March 23, a government official told BusinessLine.
“The company has submitted that the team would want to discuss in detail the investments made by Cisco so far in India, the investments in the pipeline and the policy support it was likely to get from the government,” the official said.
Cisco wants to invest in a wide-range of digitisation initiatives such as providing community Wi-Fi, establishing connectivity in smart cities, providing tools for e-governance and citizen services, increasing broadband access and helping in Digital India.
“The company is already working with several State governments on their digitisation programmes and has intentions of increasing its investments in India several-fold,” the official said.
Cisco’s CEO Chuck Robbins said during his India-visit in October 2015 that he expected the country to contribute to 10 per cent of the company’s total revenues in the next few years. Last year, the company announced that it will invest over $100 million in India to support the country's ambitious plan to connect thousands of its villages to the internet and create jobs.
“The DIPP would be interested in finding out how far the company had progressed in the execution of the plans that it already announced,” the official said.
The company has set up six innovation centres in Bengaluru, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Jaipur and Gujarat to co-innovate with customers, start-ups and partners to build new solutions, products and work on Internet of Things and other digital technologies.
The company recently announced a collaboration with Reliance Jio to help the telecom company further expand its existing multi-terabit capacity with the first All-IP converged network in India.