On a Cloud Watch

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