India's digital awakening will boost growth: Aruba co-founder Melkote

Last year, Keerti Melkote sold the US wireless networking company he co-founded, Aruba Networks, to Hewlett Packard Enterprise for $3 billion. Melkote hails from Hyderabad. He holds a BTech in electrical communication engineering from JNTU, Hyderabad, and a Masters in science in electrical engineering from Purdue University . Before co-founding Aruba in 2002, Melkote worked at Cisco and Intel. On the sidelines of APAC Atmosphere 2016 held here recently, Melkote, who is now part of HPE Aruba, shared the company's plans for India. Excerpts

When we talk about smart cities and innovation, the focus seems to have now shifted to Asia...Growth is getting democratized and it's no longer the domain of some sections. Technology allows you to bridge the gap; you need to ensure the workforce is educated enough to go in that direction. China, Korea and Japan have already come up. But in India, corporate spending wasn't that high. That's changing now and that is what is leading the economy . When we talk about digital economy , it is also an idea economy . Some idea that comes along and you create technology that completely disrupts the old world economy . In India Paytm, for instance, is revolutionizing the idea of payments.

You recently upgraded your facility in Bengaluru.What are your plans for India?
Bengaluru is a vibrant tech market and our R&D centre here is the biggest. Aruba's India R&D has been a major contributor in delivering critical commitments in various mobile-first product portfolios including unified access infrastructure, management and policy . The centre has been associated with endto-end product design and some of the world's largest unified access networks are tested here. In India, the government is working towards providing infrastructure that is conducive to the growth of startups and entrepreneurs under the Digital India and Make in India campaigns.Maharashtra, for example, is setting up many wi-fi hotspots for entrepreneurs to make use of. HPE Aruba has the best-in-class technology that can enable such initiatives and we are working towards assisting such programmes.You are an angel investor to many Silicon Valley startups.

What's your take on startups in India?
I'm mentoring one startup in Pune, one in Mumbai and some in Hyderabad. Two startups have qualified under the Billion Dollar Babies initiative of The Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE).The idea is to take global a company that has the potential to hit billion dollars in valuation.