The Wall Street Journal reports networking behemoth Cisco and Mahindra & Mahindra Ltd., a part of the $7.1 billion Mahindra group, signed a global partnership agreement to offer virtual dealerships and cloud computing services in smart cities, and sports and entertainment. “We are looking to cater to a global market size of $5 billion… we expect $500 million-$750 million revenue in the next five years” Naresh Balwant Wadhwa, president and country manager Cisco Systems (India) Pvt. Ltd., said at a news conference. Wadhwa expects about 15% of the revenue to come in from India.”

Both Cisco and Mahindra invested INR100 million, or about $2.2 million in the joint venture, and the first project is the development of a tech park for which Mahindra will the physical infrastructure and Cisco will provide the software. Cisco will also be responsible for the setup of a private cloud for the Mahindra group, namely the Mahindra & Mahindra, Tech Mahindra and Mahindra Satyam businesses.

Tech Mahindra shares jumped 9.3% to close at INR739.35, and Satyam shares ended 3.8% higher at INR64.90 due to investors’ hopes of indirect benefits from the Cisco partnership via sub contracts.

Cisco is not the only one expanding to India. Emerson announced it will design six new datacenters for IT vendor Datacraft in India. The datacenters will be setup in Mumbai, Ahmedabad, Jaipur, Ghaziabad, Faridabad and Ludhiana to enable Datacraft to offer co-location, hosted and cloud services to local Emerson customers. The Asian market is expected to see significant growth within the next few years, and IBM is also jumping on the datacenter building bandwagon. The industry veteran announced it has allocated a budget of $38 million to build a new cloud computing data center in Singapore.

Going back to Cisco, the networking giant has been making serious strides to expand as much as possible from its former core switch business with a lot of new offerings. These include the company’s new Cisco Jabber unified communications app, and its Cisco Telepresence enterprise video collaboration offering.