Patton begins India operations

NR Sethuraman

Chennai

April 14, 2008

After having its presence for around 10 years in the country and distributing
products through channel, US-based data communications products manufacturer
Patton Electronics has launched its Indian operations out of Chennai.

Burt Patton, Executive VP, Patton Electronics and Director, Patton India
said, “After seeing the boom in the networking and telecom sector, we made a
strategic decision to capture the Indian market.”

The company is backed by investments from Patton-Inalp Holdings of
Switzerland, Patton Electronics and Microsense, Patton Electronics's former
marketing and distribution partner in India. Patton India has been largely
formed with Microsense employees, who previously handled Patton's product
portfolio and S Kailasanathan, Director, Microsense is the Chairman of Patton
India.

The products of Patton cater to applications such as network access,
voice-over-Internet (VoI) and connectivity. Some of them are IP WAN routers,
universal rack systems, network termination devices, multiplexers and modems.

The company would initially invest $1 million in building a distributor
network to sell its products imported from the US. “We plan to bring not only
the Patton manufactured products but also other products of European and
American brands, as a part of triple play alliance, where Patton is a member of
that alliance along with large multi-national equipment manufacturers,” Patton
informed.

Triple play alliance is a group of networking and telecom equipment
manufacturers, which is headquartered in Munich, Germany. These players work
closely with each other on engineering software development in order to deliver
completely interoperable solutions on voice, data and video for the carriers and
enterprises.

Their go-to-market strategy is to address in a systematic way with system
integrators (SIs) of India and multi-national vendors who provide complete IT
and telecom infrastructure to the companies. “We will primarily target the
regional and national SIs, who cater to the enterprises. We have a global
channel strategy, where we integrate with the integrators in order to provide
industrial requirements. Patton has channel certification programs, where we
would train the partners and sell only through them. The non-certified partners
(resellers) would sell through those certified partners,” Patton informed.

The company has also proposed to set-up its own manufacturing unit in
Chennai. “We would invest around Rs 12 crore over the next 18 months to set-up
an assembling and testing unit near Chennai, and plan to invest at least Rs 40
crore in India,” Patton said. He informed that the Indian plant would also
manufacture products for global sales.