Sridhar Jayanthi

Network Associates (NAI) has launched the Sniffer Technologies’ R&D centre at Bangalore. It will invest $125 million for expanding its Indian facilities and increasing headcount at its Indian centre to 200 by end-2003. By this time, additional R&D teams will be in place as well. For the moment, the engineering team of 65 members at the company’s Global Development Centre in Bangalore, working on McAfee products, will supplement Sniffer’s R&D centre. The primary focus will be on quality assurance.

Sridhar Jayanthi, vice president of engineering and head of India operations at Network Associates will spearhead the R&D efforts for Sniffer. The initial focus will be on sustaining engineering, regression testing and QA groups for the existing product line. The technology areas under focus will be network management, protocol decodes, and wide area and local area networking technologies. Down the line, product development and testing of current versions will be done.

Sniffer products monitor, troubleshoot, report and manage network availability and performance. It is a fault isolation and troubleshooting tool with real-time analysis and an expert system supporting over 500 protocol decodes that helps identify the cause of a network slowdown.

In India, NAI has Tata Infotech, Datacraft and Network Synergy as partners. 10 percent of the total revenues of the company in India comes from sales of Sniffer. The company recorded an 80 percent growth over last year. National Informatics Centre (NIC) and Centre for Railway Information Systems (CRIS) are its largest customers in the country. About 2 lakh Sniffers have been installed globally.