Telco Systems, a wholly owned subsidiary of BATM Advanced Communications Ltd, recently set up its regional headquarters in Singapore. The office here will consist mainly of operations and sales departments although there are plans to open up technical and research departments soon.

Dr Marom explaining why Telco Systems chose Singapore

The company provides networking solutions to the carrier and enterprise markets and is looking towards working with telcos and other telecommunications firms in the region to make a transition to IP-based networks. Dr Zhi Marom, CEO of BATM Advanced Communications Ltd, believes that all telcos will be making the switch from traditional methods like Time-Division Multiplexing (TDM) to IP-based communications systems to support future data, voice or video communications.

Dr Marom, who was in town for the announcement, said that Singapore was chosen because of its excellent infrastructure and robust telecom market. "Singapore's small size and good infrastructure, educational institutions, people and government support are what attracted us to Singapore in the first place," Dr Marom said.

According to the company's Vice President for Asia and Japan, Mr Leigh Wilson, the company plans to invest US$10 million in the region over the next two to three years, although this figure is dependent on the success of the company in finding the right partners in the region. The company hopes that its Asia Pacific operations will contribute about 15% of overall company revenues by 2007.

Finding the right partners is the greatest challenge facing the company in this region. According to Dr Marom, the company is already in partnership with several vendors that are both users of the company's products and OEM partners. However, they are also here to look for the right technology partners and potential partners in the educational arena.

"Given my background in education, we are very eager to be able to team up with universities and other research institutes to research and develop the next generation of communications technologies," Dr Marom said.