The story of Indian networking

By Pradeep Kar, Founder, Chairman & MD, Microland

The transition from mainframes to client-server architecture came in the 80s when the price of computers fell. Utah-based Novell seized the opportunity. Novell’s NetWare quickly became the default networking technology. It led to the emergence of the Local Area Network (LAN), connecting offices, universities, and even residential properties. When Microland was launched in August 1989, Novell was already inching toward having an installed base of half a million networks. The challenge with setting up LANs in India was the lack of trainer professionals. We addressed that challenge. To overcome the challenge, we knew that a Novell partnership was crucial. So, we pursued a partnership with them and trained customers in India on NetWare. As a result, Microland became a pioneer for networking in India. That is how the story of Indian networking began.

India managed to get the finest companies in the world of networking from Day 1. We had partnerships worked out with Compaq (1992), Synoptics (1993), Cisco (1993), Netscape (1996), and CheckPoint (1996), each providing best-in-class network capabilities to our customers.

Networking has evolved since those days. LANs have gone to WANs (Wide Area Networks), and from twisted-pair cables and coaxial cables to becoming wireless. Radio, Satellite, Bluetooth, Infrared, Wi-Fi, Mobile, NFC, and now high-speed 5G have made networking unrecognizable from what it was back in the 80s.

The latest in networking technology is Software Defined WANs or SD-WANs. They are application-aware, flexible, cheap and secure. IT administrators love it because they have a high level of control over their SD-WAN implementations.

SD-WANs are behind the growth of Managed Network Services from $185.98 billion in 2019 to a forecasted $356.24 billion in 2025 (NASSCOM figures). We are at the forefront of this massive change. Gartner has recognized Microland as a Leader in its Magic Quadrant for Managed Network Services for two years in a row. Global organizations rely on us to keep their networks optimized, available and secure, especially as they begin to extend their organizations on the back of the Internet of Things (IoT).

Although SD-WANs are powerful, they still rely on the Internet for Quality of Service (QoS). This can be tricky and vendors have to devise ways and means to overcome this challenge, especially for IoT environments. Some of the QoS issues are about to get sorted with 5G which will be able to connect millions of devices at extremely high data rates.

IoT and 5G are together set to supercharge the results technology can deliver. With the growth in IoT and the introduction of 5G, the story of India’s play in the networking space will take a massive leap.

This is part of our PCQuest 35 Years Series on the Yesterday, Today & Tomorrow of Technology.