According to Access Markets International (AMI), a leading New York-based consultancy firm, the structured cabling market in Asia Pacific (including Japan) should hit $1.53 bn by 2010. Only 68% of this market will be made up of residential and enterprise structured cabling, while the remainder will come from the data center structured cabling market.

As per AMI, in 2005 only 13.8% of the structured cabling business in the region came from the data center market. In 2010, the research suggests that data centers will contribute about 32% of the structured cabling business in the region. "A typical data file has more than tripled in size over the last few years," said Dr Ispran Kandasamy, vice president and managing director of Asia Pacific for Systimax Solutions, which commissioned the study.

Witnessing healthy economic development, India has emerged as the fastest growing market in the data center structured cabling market in Apac, including Japan. The Indian data center market is expected to touch $125 mn by 2010, and the overall structure cabling market in India is expected to touch $345 mn by 2010.

"The growth is expected to be driven by a number of factors, including increasing supply and decreasing cost of the Internet bandwidth. More domestic companies are hosting their mission critical applications such as enterprise resource planning and customer relationship management in third-party data centers," says Raju Chellam, VP (Apac), AMI Partners.

AMI expects increasing convergence to be a growth factor as cable operators and telecommunications companies roll out triple play services and solutions covering television, telephone and broadband Internet access over a single network.

Worldwide, the growth trend is projected to continue over the next several years as multiple terabytes of data are moved and stored on enterprise servers in data centers. Keeping ahead on access capability and storage capacity is a daunting task for data center managers. This challenge presents a great opportunity for the regions data center structured cabling support businesses.

The US Scenario
According to another study titled: Structured Cabling Systems Market: 2007, the total US structured cabling system (SCS) market is forecast to grow at a rate of 18.6%, from $6.8 bn in 2007 to $15.9 bn by 2012. This growth is higher than previously reported, as newer network applications are expected to grow dramatically in the future. These include VoIP, data centers and video over IP. The SCS cabling architecture is evolving to a universal enterprise network consisting of the current primary installed LAN networks supporting newer IP sub nets, such as voice with VoIP, data for data centers and video via video over IP."

Even though the current growth market is data centers, the study indicates that the highest growth market in the future will be VoIP. By 2012, the largest market for Cat 6a cables is projected to be VoIP followed by data centers. The largest market for fiber cable is forecast to be LANs, with data centers trailing by the year 2012. The longer cable backbone runs for LANs, compared to the shorter cable runs inside data centers, is the primary reason for LANs to continue to be the largest market for fiber cables.

Page(s)   1  2