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As most enterprises went in for outsourcing their services to concentrate on their core competencies, selecting the right partner remained a key concern. The network integration (NI) market grew by 25% from Rs 4,164 crore in FY 2004-05 to Rs 5,219 crore this year.

The vendors provided network engineering solutions to help clients obtain the value from their existing information and knowledge assets while ensuring their ability to quickly, efficiently, and securely transfer information. They also helped selecting, integrating, and maintaining commercial-off-the-shelf products and developing custom solutions for customers' needs, which helps them to improve productivity and decrease costs.

Services Portfolio
The services that vendors offered include network design and migration, systems and database administration, proactive monitoring for network performance and availability' enterprise backup and recovery and video and data network consolidation.  Therefore they helped enterprise network services from concept to completion.

The suite of services that customers got include efficiently merged data, voice and video communications over Frame Relay, ATM and or Internet Protocol networks. This has provided customers a single point of network control with fewer points of failure, a simplified network topology, remote dial-up capabilities and Internet access.

Datacraft has completed the first phase of its prestigious SBI project. The company completed networking 10,000 SBI branches in January this year and would integrate another 4,000 branches this year in second phase. Also it has set-up more than 100 PoPs overseas for a CDMA service provider. BFSI contributed around 35% to its revenues followed by telecom with 20 percent and BPO with 30%.

HCL Comnet bagged some key deals in stock broking segment and education segment. The banking segment continued to see traction led by a big VSAT order from a leading bank. Tulip did complete connectivity for all Delhi University colleges on wireless VPN and for newly launched channel Times NOW across India. It also provided connectivity for close to 200 Samsung dealers. But major orders carried out were from HDFC Bank, Bajaj Allianz, AC Nielsen, Sanghi Cements, Gujarat State Chemicals and Fertilizers, Sony, Luxor, Cargill and Fortis.

Wipro Infotech did a major NI project for a large mobile operator involving 600 location LAN/WAN network for customer care and billing operations with major re-design of their existing mission critical network. In telecom software the company integrated 3G applications testing for a leading telecommunications company in APAC region. Also it has implemented a prestigious MPLS provisioning platform. The project involved migrating from a legacy system to a next generation OSS system.

The company also tied-up with  with Riverbed, RiT and Packateer. All these relationships were significant because they complimented Wipro's offerings in the networking space.

Integrators have tried to deliver value by planning and building infrastructure solutions, connecting organizations, people and systems. They offered networking integration skills, project management capabilities and knowledge enhance control over end-to-end business process transformation and a multi-vendor network infrastructure while improving productivity, reducing complexity and strengthening RoI.

Some of the verticals where network integration made an impact include health care, financial services, retail and manufacturing. And these industries have been benefited as vendors helped companies in providing assistance to executives in making strategic networking decisions. It also helped enterprises procuring and provisioning networks, equipment, and applications on a rapid pace.

Banks were completely dependent on vendors for all their applications that include ATM transactions, branch banking, Internet or telebanking. Same was the case for auto, manufacturing, consumer electronics, FMCG and other sectors.

Manufacturing followed by the financial sector had been driving complete outsourcing of infrastructure integration and management market. But government buying, telecom service providers and the IT companies have also been pitching in with their contributions, driving this market.

In government sector, there is a wave of development today, which introduced exponential jumps in the IT manaers' ability to deliver better performance, react more quickly, and lower costs. Current e-government efforts are focused on simplifying, standardising, and increasing the value of the IT infrastructure already in place.

Problem areas
The security and manageability was one of the pertinent problems in integration area. The enterprises faced numerous challenges that include managing and controlling communication costs, building technical domain expertise and retaining them and managing the technological changes while protecting investments and providing continuum to existing infrastructure

As newer technologies emerge and branches are added at a rapid pace, the task of maintaining such networks becomes more difficult. Confronted with the complexity of networks on one hand and shortage of staff on the other, in addition to the threat of ever increasing competition, Indian corporates faced with a dilemma of 'To outsource Network Management or not.'

Pricing pressure
In networking domain, the bandwidth prices have come down heavily. But still Indian prices are at least three times higher than Australia ,China or US. This factor somehow became major decisive for vendors while pitching for NI projects, as enterprises are asking for lower prices for integration projects.

NI became the single point of contact for customized technologies that offered an entire solution kit that addressed the business requirement and the full networking life-cycle. The demand was in favor of vendors who provided equipment as well as the applications to run on them. Therefore the concept of end-to-end or one-stop solution providers gained momentum last year. It saved the frustration of working with multiple partners and the NI was able to offer a total suite of related solutions.

Most of the network integrators offered managed services as well. The market moved towards remote management services and outsourcing companies have been a major attraction for most integrators.

Though the Indian market has witnessed steady growth, there are many irritants that need to be removed. In the current scenario, equipment vendors and connectivity service providers have greater clout in the market than the integrators.

New technologies
There are some new emerging technologies that took place in network integration area last year. This includes WAN optimization for improving application response time and reducing bandwidth on WAN links, campus wireless networks to improve productivity for mobile workers, mobile connectivity for extending the enterprise applications at all locations and teleworking by employees with wide spread availability of high speed broadband Internet.

The NI market has been growing steadily and is expected to grow at the same pace.

Rahul Gupta
rahulg@cybermedia.co.in