Gaurav Ahluwalia, country manager, India, Reichle De Massari (R&M)

R&M has been operating in India through its distributor. What prompted the company to look to Asia for business?
The Asian market has been growing at a rapid pace. After much evaluation and analysis, the company decided to venture into the Asian market. We already have substantial business in Europe and Middle East markets in the enterprise and carrier space. Here we would be focusing on India, China, Japan and Korean market. And from the India office, we would be tapping Sri Lanka and Bangladesh too.

Now that the company has decided to enter the Indian market, what are your plans for expansion?

Gaurav Ahluwalia

We are still evaluating the market and would start with enterprise customers who care for quality products rather than cost. We would definitely increase the headcount and open a liaison office and other regional offices to cover all of the Indian market.

What kind of market share are you looking at?
We would not be flooding the market with our products for sure. We would go slow here and concentrate on the niche market segments. Both in Europe and Middle East, we started from scratch and gained a big market share riding on the quality and design features of our products. I would like to repeat the success story here also. Initially, with top enterprise customers 4-5% share, which should go up to 10-12% as our products gain acceptance here.

What new standards and technologies have been introduced and are selling in the market?
10GBASE-T based on IEEE 802.3an standard is currently introduced to the market. This new standard is likely to be released in June 2006. Today's main applications are Gigabit switch uplinks for data center interconnect. In the horizontal zone, it is being installed to support high bandwidth applications now and also to prepare for future applications coming in the next 10 to 15 years. These links are less than 100m where fiber solutions are much higher in cost.

Why is the market acceptance for Cat6 cables more than that for Cat7?
For new installations, 10GBASE-T is starting to be specified in projects, especially from customers who want to ensure that their system will be ready for future high bandwidth needs. 10G is also important in data centers, in the backbone and for companies which work with very large data files, such as medical imaging. Cat6 and Cat7 cabling is in the market for the last seven years and will therefore be a significant installed base during the life cycle of 10GBASE-T products.

Due to the increased signal bandwidth of 10GBASE-T from 250 to 500MHz based on cat6 cabling, the advantage of cat7 is diminishing. Without question, due to reduced attention and improved shielding characteristics, cat 7 cables provide performance for the future, and the additional cost is minimal compared with the overall costs. The problem is with the cat7 connectors.

Two standardized but mutually incompatible systems are available: either IEC 60603-7-7, which is based on RJ45, or IEC 61076-3-104 based on a completely new design. This means that you have to decide on one system or the other, both of which are standardized but which also have all the disadvantages of a proprietary solution.

And, as long as the terminal equipment is not fitted with the corresponding cat7 connectors, hybrid cables will be needed. And at the very least, the end with the RJ45 plug will downgrade the channel back to cat6 again. This explains why until now, the market acceptance of cat7 has been very low, with only a 0.4% market share in 2004.