New Cisco investments in India

Today, October 31 2007, Cisco unveiled Globalisation Center East campus in Bangalore at an opening ceremony presided over by former Indian President Dr. A. P. J. Abdul Kalam and John Chambers, Cisco chairman and CEO.In October 2005, Cisco committed $50 million to build this new integrated campus and $100 million for funding investments in early-stage high-potential Indian companies. Today Cisco committed another $100 million to expand growth of these companies. These investments are only part of company’s overall $1.1bn investment plan for India.

Globalisation Center is spread over 1 million square feet. In it’s initial phase it will accommodate 1200 employees who will be working in research and development (R&D), IT and customer support teams in India. High resolution Campus pictures are available on this page.

By 2010. the company will have 10,000 employees in India, up from 3,000 today. These 10,000 workers will represent 20% of company’s total employees.

In the next video you can hear Wim Elfrink, company’s EVC (Executive vice president for Cisco services) and chief globalisation officer, talking about company’s globalization strategy and the efforts he’s leading to decentralize the way the company conducts business worldwide.

 

Markets and work force

Today, Cisco is moving it’s focus from traditional markets, like Western Europe and Japan to emerging markets, like India, China, Brazil and Poland. These emerging markets are interesting to Cisco because they have the opportunity to directly recruit new talented and fully qualified work force. I found an interesting fact that 65 % of Cisco engineers who work in company’s headquarter in Silicon Valley today, are Asian. New talents from India are not directly coming to Silicon Valley – Silicon Valley is sending old talents to them to hire new ones so they can work in India. The question is will the new ones stay in India? By seeing how much money Cisco is investing in India, I don’t see any reason why those people wouldn’t want to stay in their country. Bangalore is India’s third-most populous city with an estimated 6.5 million metropolitan population. It is commonly referred to as the Silicon Valley of India.

Croatia situation

I wonder will Croatia have it’s own Silicon Valley in the future. Probably not because we are to small as a country and a market. Croatia doesn’t produce such number of qualified work force as India does. We tend to see our market as an emerging market, but we are wrong. We have to go step by step. Our education system must become more effective. Every society that wants to succeed today and in the future, must produce more people who are fully qualified workers. Then we have to become member of the European Union and play our role in EU’s battle against other bigger markets like ones in India and China.

India is taking over. China is riding as fast as India. Maybe even faster.