India being a consumption market holds lot of promise in networking space. Digital India has increased the spending in networking space and it is expected to continue for some time. Some of the many initiatives by the government like Smart Cities, up-gradation of railways, highways, newer airports in smaller cities, new banking licenses, ESI hospitals, Wi-Fi on campus, emphasis on Domestic Tourism etc are expected to increase spending in the Networking space.
Demonetization has triggered the digitization wave and this has caused an increase in the online transactions. The network infrastructure thus needs to be upgraded to support the increased traffic efficiently. Growing number of startups require high band networks at reduced costs and we are seeing rapid transition from 10/100 to 1Gig and similarly from 1Gig to 10G. The best part is SMB/SME customers are opting for affordable high end technology; this is very encouraging for vendors in networking space. Other factors that are increasing spending on networking space are -State Governments undertaking surveillance, Wi-Fi, automated traffic lights and the like. Demand for Anytime Anywhere connectivity will lead to increase in deployment of wireless internet connectivity which will be met by deploying different methods like City/Village Wi-Fi or 4G connectivity. Agreeing to this, Sanjay Sehgal, V.P. SMB & Telecom Business, TP-Link India says, “With the thrust given by Govt. of India for digitization post demonetization and with GST ready for rollout in next quarter, I feel the Networking industry is looking forward to good business in 2017-18.”
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“Roti, Kapda, Makaan and Wi-Fi” is the new term now. Wi-Fi is more of a need than a luxury.
Marthesh Nagendra
Country Manager
NETGEAR, India & SAARC
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Networking Market in India
Digital India Programme aims to transform India into a digitally empowered and knowledgeable society. With a focus on building Digital infrastructure, growth areas would be building networks for High-Speed connectivity and the internet, Public internet access system, cloud facility etc. This will lead to large scale deployment of network infrastructure over the next 2-3 years thereby leading to growth for networking industry. The Switching market had witnessed growth last year and is expected to grow around 5 to 6% in year 2017. Investments in the government, education, telecom, professional services and BFSI were the key drivers for the growth of switching market. Also increased spending from the enterprise segment due to technology upgradation drove the overall switching market. The Wireless market witnessed little decline due to various factors, but is expected to grow around 4 to 5% in year 2017. Education, professional services and telecom were the major contributing verticals for wireless market. Wi-Fi hotspots at public spaces and increased adoption of Wi-Fi by education institutes to facilitate world class infrastructure will continue to see growth in the coming quarters. Technology upgrades to 802.11ac to support higher bandwidth requirement will also follow a growing trend. The demand for Wireless in the future will be accompanied by the growing emphasis on the IoT and Smart devices and workplaces.
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“Customers and partners across key verticals will continue to view the network as fundamental to their businesses and reverberate and shape 2017.”
Dinesh Verma
Managing Director
India & SAARC
Juniper Networks
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As we approach the reality of the Digital Cohesion era where applications increasingly interconnect and self-assemble into mega-services, immense new possibilities in terms of product offerings and tailored services will continuously present them. And among these significant changes will be the movement of compute and storage out of devices into the cloud, making networking even more critical with new approaches needed for automation, security, interoperability and performance. Dinesh Verma, Managing Director, India & SAARC, Juniper Networks opines, “4G network roll-outs, growing cloud investment, huge growth potential in mobile and Internet penetration, owing to professional services, banking and discrete manufacturing units have accelerated the growth of switching market this quarter. APAC service providers are investing heavily in 4G and even 5G to respond to this insatiable consumer demand for mobile Internet. Nevertheless, customers and partners across key verticals will continue to view the network as fundamental to their businesses and reverberate and shape 2017.”
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“With the thrust given by Govt. of India for digitization post demonetization and with GST ready for rollout in next quarter, I feel the Networking industry is looking forward to good business in 2017-18.”
Sanjay Sehgal
V.P. SMB & Telecom Business
TP-Link India
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Trends Shaping-up the Indian Network Hardware Space
The increase in mobility, voice and video consumption, combined with virtualization and the doubling of data every 2 years (‘2×2’), make it easy to see why Organizations prefer high bandwidth networks – in order to avoid bottlenecks. 33% of all SMB networks already used 10-Gigabit switching in early 2016; and 75% will be deploying 10 GB before the end of 2017. And 100% of SMBs (up to 500 employees) foresee the need to deploy this switching technology now or in the near future. According to Marthesh Nagendra, Country Manager, NETGEAR, India & SAARC , “Roti, Kapda, Makaan and Wi-Fi” is the new term now. Wi-Fi is more of a need than a luxury. The tremendous growth in India’s Hospitality industry and quality product offering has helped us to grow in this segment.”
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“The roll out of 4G has turned out to be a game changer in recent times. More & more new users are now opting for 4G internet, and this has led to increased customer base for connectivity devices.
Tushar Sighat
Executive Director & CEO
D-Link (India) Ltd
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There are almost 50 programs undertaken by 20 different government departments through Digital India program. This requires Computerization, Extensive use of mobile devices, IoT, Cloud to upload, download and analyze data. This agrees well with the network hardware industry as connectivity is at the core of all such initiatives. Boost in manufacturing through Make in India is going to provide impetus to the complete economic chain of activities in the country. The IT hardware manufacturing Industry will have a major role to play here with Digital India Initiatives announced by the Government. The pillars under the Digital India initiative are going to be huge demand generator. Demand arising out of Digital India initiative coupled with the existing demand in the domestic market is a huge opportunity for the domestic manufacturing industry.
Tushar Sighat, Executive Director & CEO, D-Link (India) Ltd opines, “The roll out of 4G has turned out to be a game changer in recent times. More & more new users are now opting for 4G internet, and this has led to increased customer base for connectivity devices. In wireless space, adoption of 11AC technology – the latest standard in Wi-Fi is on a rise. The fifth generation of Wi-Fi technology – 11AC, delivers incredible speed and wide area coverage of up to three times as fast as the current “N” Wi-Fi.”
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“We ensure healthy margins for the Channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the Channels.”
Mandar Joshi
Head Channel Business
DIGISOL Systems Ltd
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In addition to 11AC, another technology that has been making a lot of noise in recent times is Web of things or Internet of Things (IoT). So moving forward, all device shall be interconnected & can be accessed from anywhere through the internet. Given the number of existing internet connected devices, IoT will act as an obvious extension for today’s connected world. D-Link is already working on devices that are IoT enabled & has introduced a series of products based on IoT like Smart Plug, Audio Extender, Motion sensor etc.
Key Verticals Generating a major demand for Wi-Fi Routers, Network Gears
Internet is omnipresent and all verticals need high speed access. All verticals including Construction, Manufacturing, IT, Retail trade, Health care, Hospitality, Education, Transportation and warehousing, Entertainment, Public Administration and Other services are growing at the rate of at least 10% YoY and are investing heavily in Wi-Fi Implementation. The Indian wireless gear industry is observing a gigantic demand when it comes to data consumption on smart devices. A flood of budgetary smart devices in the market (smartphones and tablets) has further catalyzed this demand significantly. Public Wi-Fi Hotspots, outdoor routers as well as Wi-Fi range extenders, network management, switches are some of the networking hardware witnessing an unprecedented demand in the segment. Gopal Joshi, Vice President Sales, India & SAARC, Zyxel shares, “While every vertical is contributing a healthy growth for the wireless hardware segment, some of the major verticals generating demand in this front include- Information Technology, Telecom, Government, SMBs etc.”
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“Some of the major verticals generating demand in this front include- Information Technology, Telecom, Government, SMBs etc.”
Gopal Joshi
Vice President Sales
India & SAARC
Zyxel
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Benefits for a Partner
Businesses are profit-driven, so the primary objective should be shepherding a promising product to market. Netgear has a vision and mission to innovate and deliver new and exciting solutions. Partner engagement and Support is an essential thing to building the partner loyalty. NETGEAR is committed to enhance Product and Solution knowledge to its channel partners as this will enable the Partners to have better sales pitch, build the sales funnel, and increase the revenue stream to produce an overall increased Return on Investment.
Mandar Joshi, Head Channel Business, DIGISOL Systems Ltd excerpts, “With changing times and the changing channel, partners need to scale up and need to reach to end users. They need to cope up with changing technologies and changing business model. We feel that profitability of the partners plays an important role in motivating them to sell more. Our solutions have the width; we have a wide range of products such as routers, switches, in addition to accessories like LAN extenders, media converters, SPF modules, etc, to meet the varying needs of the market segment we focus, whereas others are focusing on niche segments with limited products. We ensure healthy margins for the Channels and also introduce new products with newer applications to increase the scope of growth for the Channels.”
As far as TP-Link is concerned, 2017-18 is going to be a big year for TP-Link SMB business and they have a slew of projects lined up for release in the coming quarters. It will be soon launching a partner portal for India which will provide tools and resources to partners to make sure that they are trained and certified to implement our SMB offerings to customers. Partners will be incentivized not only for the business they do with the company, but also for referrals, case study submissions, conducting POC etc.
Juniper’s business is deliberately dependent on our partner, with our partner/channel strategy built on three key pillars intended to drive growth for our partners. Namely, they are the ease of doing business through enhanced partner programs including increased specialization, accreditation, marketing and learning; a focus on next-generation high growth areas key to revenue acceleration such as private, public and telco cloud, data center transformation, security and software defined networks; and last but not least ultimately profitability – in which it reward partners for growing their business with Juniper through quarterly rebates, rewards for partner teams and increased budgetary support through Juniper’s Market Development Fund.
Software Defined networking market in India
While most industry experts believe that enterprise networks in the future will be a combination of SDN and traditional networks, Software-Defined Secure Networks (SDSN) is Juniper’s vision in network security evolution, as businesses continue to look for greater value when it comes to Network Virtualization. With the success of early NFV deployments and the continuing challenges for operators to deliver even more services with flawless performance, end customers will require new levels of flexibility. As such, there will be a push towards bring your own license (BYOL) and pay as you go models tailored to supporting cloud-based infrastructures for different application needs.
SDN is still nascent in India and are predominant in large enterprises. Industries, such as IT, BFSI, healthcare, telecom, defense, and manufacturing among others, to adopt this emerging technology for effective network utilization, improved efficiency, and automation of tasks. Complex network traffic patterns, increasing cloud computing services, need for mobility services, need for efficient infrastructure, and advent of big data analytics are the major factors driving the software defined networking market growth.
Finally…
Partners need to keep on innovating as technology is evolving they have to evolve and stay tuned with it. Today market dynamic is changing rapidly and Partners need to be in pace with new requirements which is applications driven.
Written by Satinder Kaur
