What's Up at the R&D?
Innovation is on top of the mind for all cabling vendors. From merely delivering core products to its customers in India, they have progressed to developing unique products or solutions to suit the Indian market.

Tyco has been focusing on developing high bandwidth, high speed, and high performance systems and solutions. The R&D has also looked at addressing customer's need for fast installation, secure, and space saving solutions. So right from plug and play modular systems in both fiber and twisted pair to high-density connectivity management system and cable management systems, and intelligent infrastructure management systems that allow real time tracking of several parameters, have been the core developments.

The R&D labs at Systimax Solutions brought forth unique reverse patching technology to improve cord management. The VisiPatch 360 System can support both 10 Gb/s and 1Gb/s applications. The company's R&D labs also developed an entirely new approach for its product design process, referred to as the "360-degree" approach. This approach looks at performance from every angle-bandwidth, speed, product reliability, and product usability among other things. It uses thoroughly researched methodologies based on the way customers work and live so that it will be possible to address those customers' current and future needs.

D-Link complemented its strong pack of solutions with R&D related to Power over Ethernet (PoE) and mid-span patch panels. Having introduced DPOE-24P, our 24P Midspan Patch Panel, D-Link's R&D is working on spectrum of PoE products. Efforts are on for introducing superior jacks with built-in collapsible dust covers. There would be a range of installation-ready pre-terminated fiber solutions.

Molex invests 6% of its overall revenue into its R&D. The company has set up its R&D Lab for SCS products in Bangalore and is focusing on inventing new products to ease customer's user experience. Innovation strategy is to create products to improve performance and utility aspect. Some of the solutions developed at the R&D center are rack and cable management product solutions, I/Os and jacks, voice patch panel, range of angled loaded and unloaded panels for hi-density patching, and enhancements for intelligent cabling solutions.

Panduit is also keen on introducing innovative products keeping in mind India-specific cost sensitive markets for high quality solutions. The company's R&D is focused on bringing a range of localized products for the Indian market. It is planning to introduce India specific cable connectivity solutions by mid-year.

For Belden, the first major new product that came in 2006 was the 4th generation wireless solution that has the capability to do triple play network (data, voice, and video), with seamless mobility and extended bullet-proof security. The WLAN is a plug and play solution, making it easy to install in the market. This high-end enterprise class solution is targeted at the high end customers, retail chains, hospitals, college campuses, and enterprises looking at a "total wireless office".

Belden also introduced a very high-density wire management solution in January that enables IT managers to maintain their network in a more organized and professional manner.

Siemon invests 7.5% of its gross sales back into R&D every year. The company is striving to introduce innovative products every quarter. It has plans to launch few of the latest offerings in the Indian market this year.

PLM Makes Heads Turn
In terms of technology, the Indian cabling market trends are at par with the global market and may, in some cases, even surpass international trends. With more and more ITeS installations, knowledge centers, BPOs with high number of MACs, and their need for tracking IT in real time, justified huge deployment of intelligent cabling or physical layer management (PLM), leading to a sizeable growth in adoption of this technology last year.

Although it is still small in terms of number of deployments, intelligent cabling is finding wider acceptance.

The intelligent infrastructure management solutions allow IT managers to track MACs in real time while offering security, better asset management and RoI; high density connectivity management systems. Such solutions include factory terminated plug and play connectivity products, high-density cable management racks and accessories.

Intelligent cabling is attractive as it promises to reduce the cost of network ownership by solving issues like unplanned downtime, inefficient manual moves, adds and changes, redundant ports, inaccurate records etc. It increases network management efficiency and network security considerably.

The Power over Ethernet (PoE) technology, though nascent at present, is set to take off in a big way, especially in areas where traditional cabling is difficult to deploy. These find applications in wireless environments for powering WAPs, remote surveillance cameras, etc. Currently, leading vendors including Tyco, Systimax, ADC Krone, and Molex are offering PoE over mid-span that is largely preferred for existing installations and few end-span solutions for new installations.

10GE, Yet to Grow
With the recent ratification of IEEE 802.3an 10Gigabit Ethernet standards, Category6A started gaining market acceptance. Cat6A can support 10GE for the full channel distance. Initial deployments for Cat6A were in data centers but now it is being considered for horizontal cabling as well.

Apart from supporting bandwidth intensive applications, these systems have been successfully deployed for 10G applications where bandwidth is not a constraint. In India these are used more widely for backbone applications. However, the 10GE market is still in its infancy and is likely to mature in another 3-4 years.

India is predominantly a UTP market with 98% of the market preferring UTP solutions, especially on the horizontal side. The absorption of shielded products is low by volume. UTP products are preferred for business solutions and command over 90% of the market. Shielded products have so far been used mostly in noisy environments (high EMI, RFI, etc).

However, there may be an increase in demand for shielded products for the 10G system. Shielded systems are standards complaint that ensure 10G performance, reduced alien cross-talk, have higher data rate capability and bandwidth of 625 MHz to cover all encoding schemes proposed by IEEE.

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