By Nishant Arora

San Francisco, Nov 3 (IANS): As the $49 billion global networking giant Cisco realigns its focus towards software, it is the Asia Pacific and Japan (APJ) region -- particularly India -- that will help it set up advanced data centres and deploy Cloud-based security solutions for governments and enterprises, top company executives told IANS here.

Cisco has crossed over $1 billion in revenues in India, reporting 20 per cent growth last year. According to the company CEO Chuck Robbins, who recently visited India, the country is set to become one of the top four markets for Cisco, apart from the US, Japan and China, in the next few years.

"Rapid digitisation is helping India grow at a faster pace than ever before. With the government's key initiatives like Digital India and Make in India firmly in place now, Cisco sees a massive growth in the country," Irving Tan, President, Asia Pacific & Japan, Cisco, told IANS.

For Tan, the Indian banking sector and growing e-commerce players are driving the need for next-gen security solutions and Cisco, being a networking expert and now armed with top-of-the-line, Cloud-ready security solutions, is going to be a preferred choice for the local enterprises.

"The advanced UCS S-Series storage-optimised server, the state-of-the-art endpoint data protection solutions, 'ONE Enterprise Cloud Suite' and second generation firewalls, Cisco is ready to provide the Indian government and enterprises a complete ecosystem for a secured, faster and hacking-free experience," Tan added.

The next big technology wave that Tan sees in companies realising the need to set up advanced data centres.

"This is a huge area of interest for us. The data centres of the future will have embedded security throughout. Cisco's strategy is to provide a data centre architecture that enables customers to 'Analyse, Simplify, Automate, and Protect' (ASAP) their data," Tan added.

A network that is ready for automation, Cloud-based data analytics with security is what makes Cisco different from other Cloud-based vendors.

The company, which has over 11,000 employees in India, is going all out to attract new customers via its vast network of partners to make them understand the growing need to adopt secured gateways.

According to Vicki Batka, Managing Director, APJ Partner Organisation at Cisco, the company is already providing customised solutions to its web-scale IT customers.

"We are frequently organising local meetings with partners and customers to discuss the need for choosing state-of-the-art security solutions - from hardware to software - at a time when data breaches are rising rapidly from Japan to India," Batka said.

Apart from Advanced Malware Protection (AMP) for Endpoints, Cisco has also launched three advanced security software suites: Threat Defense for Data Centre, Threat Defense for WAN and Edge and Policy and Threat Defense for Access.

"We are embedding security across the line -- be it network, end points or anti-virus software -- all the way up to the Cloud to provide our customers a solid malware threat defensive mechanism," noted Dave West, Vice President and CTO, Asia Pacific and Japan, Cisco.