Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

The network integration industry is currently revolving around two hot topics-collaboration and energy efficiency. Organizations are focusing on reducing the carbon footprint within their premises and at the same time increase employee productivity by deploying collaboration enabling solutions.

Today network integration has become the single point of contact, and customizes the right and related technologies to offer an entire solution kit that addresses the business requirement and the full networking lifecycle. Interestingly, in the networking business not only are the networks becoming bigger but the technology is also getting complex.

Over the past years, various technologies have matured and are now available for enterprise deployment. India is emerging as one of the most lucrative markets for such technologies, given the phenomenal growth of applications such as e-learning, telemedicine, and e-governance. Innovative technologies like wireless, telepresence, and unified communications have been the key technologies in the market this year.

Driven by Technologies
The major technology drift that industry stakeholders are watching very closely is the concept of cloud computing. The emergence of cloud is certainly the most significant technological advancement in this field, and most technological breakthroughs have been aligned towards the vision of the cloud.

Integration of networking, compute and storage platform for seamless and unified virtualization is one of the most significant developments seen in the last one year. Several standards have been ratified, which have helped bring in standardization in technology being offered. Application networking and content delivery technologies are maturing and have been deployed extensively over 2009.

With the ratification of 802.11n standard, high speed Wi-Fi is now a reality and this has given a fillip to wireless providers. Customers have started showing interest in deploying Wi-Fi as an alternative to wired connectivity.

The much visible advancement is in the area of IP telephony and unified communications where SIP protocol has been widely adopted by all vendors. Many technologies are IP enabled, which mean the same IP infrastructure which organizations have deployed for years can be leveraged for the new technology deployments.

Digital media systems, physical security solutions, and intelligent building management systems are now being transported over the same IP infrastructure. In the current scenario, companies are most gung-ho about the dire need for server virtualization, driving the adoption of latest data center networking technologies that seamlessly merge server and network infrastructure into a unified platform.

Network admission control that allows organizations to maintain a flexible leash over the security hygiene of users is getting established as an essential technology and rapid adoption can be seen in this area too.

Emerging Trends
The major technological trend in this space include: focus on virtualization and application provisioning and delivery. Also a renewed focus on integrated network security which as a technology is expected to scale up the next utility and efficiency level. Also IPv6 has been a much spoken about technology for some time, but it is expected that this year will see serious preparing for the adoption of IPv6 by customers.

Business trend include a continued, sustained focus on reducing IT costs and business cost using IT, pressure to deliver applications consistently in demanding and hostile end user environment and resource consolidation to drive efficiency and scalability in the enterprise.

Moving to Green
Enterprises are extremely sensitive to environmental concerns today, since it has been realized that going green is synonymous to reducing costs when it comes to consolidation and virtualization. All the players in the network integration space are seeing the importance of this initiative taken by almost all of its customers and they are very active on the 'go green mission'.

Tulip Telecom has reduced its dependence on diesel gensets and are working towards extensive solar system installations. Moreover, Tulip's wireless equipments are solar compliant and power efficient.

Wipro has done a lot of investment in this area wherein by using technologies like telepresence, cloud collaboration, data center virtualization, rich media conference, etc, the company is able to substantially improve collaboration.

HCL Comnet has launched a green computing initiative, which is a combination of service around virtualization, consolidation, energy efficiency audits, and the use of energy efficient hardware from our OEMs.

Points to Ponder
More than ever, IT organizations are under pressure to improve profitability by linking technology implementations to business objectives. It is believed that as the backbone for IT communications, the network element of enterprise architecture is increasingly critical. Customers are looking for technologies and existing business processes to enhance communication, foster collaboration and boost revenues.

Security and manageability have been two major concerns for network integration. Enterprises face several challenges including managing and controlling communications costs, building technical domain expertise along with retaining them and managing technological changes while protecting investments, and providing a gamut of services to the existing infrastructure. With the emergence of new technologies the task of maintaining networks become challenging.

The other big concern is how to keep pace with changing technology, and going for the right solution/architecture that allows organizations to seemingly accommodate new technologies to meet future business requirements and also safeguards the investments already being made.

Emerging Verticals
The main and big verticals continue to be ITeS, BFSI, and the telecom sector. With BFSI, the demand is shifting from retail, banking to core banking within areas such as compliance requirement, regulatory requirement and market requirement which are all growing in the banking sector. The other segments that are growing very rapidly include small and medium business, new media providers, community service providers, and new generation of offline mirror model e-business.

Other emerging verticals are manufacturing, healthcare, and the service industry in general. Retail is also drumming up a lot of interest.

Government will be a major buyer of network integration business from various network integrators. NeGP on government's agenda will be a big business opportunity for all possible network integrators. Given the magnitude and PPP mode of operation it will mean a lot of business for all major NI players.

The Way Ahead
During a phase when almost every sector was witnessing strong aftermaths of the economic slowdown, network integration was one such segment which witnessed substantial growth. Many small players made it big in the integration market. The larger integrators differentiated themselves with end-to-end offerings with more managed service kind of solutions.

Since emerging economies are leading the way to global recovery, the Indian network integration market has performed pretty well in the last one year and the individual growth curve did not see any impact of the recession in 2009. With literally hundreds of mega systems, including network integration project lined up in 2010, the industry fully expects to register a better performance.

Arpita Prem
arpitap@cybermedia.co.in

Page(s)   1