Structured Cabling: Wiring Apac

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.

China Outruns the Overall the Market

China is expected to show a 37.5% CAGR in the data center structured cabling
market, while the overall structured cabling market will demonstrate only 13.6%
growth.

AMI Research projects the healthy growth in China to be driven
by the following factors: Cable TV is set to play a pivotal role in Chinas
converged media environment as triple play services begin to be delivered over
cable TV infrastructures. China has the largest cable TV network in the world;
Chinas online game sector will see very high double-digit growth rates in the
coming years as more Chinese gain access to the Internet. China is a big hub for
game distribution, which involves huge amounts of data. This, in turn, raises
demand for data centers, according to AMI.

The most rapid growth in Internet usage last year came from
blogging. China now has 20.8 mn bloggers. Top blogging sites are hosted by Sina,
Qzone and Microsofts MSN. Other new Internet services that are gaining
particularly wide acceptance include personal Web pages similar to those on
MySpace, video-hosting and video-sharing based on the Web 2.0 standards, as well
as a service called Wit-Key that allows users to post their questions for
solution tips from online pals.

The popularity of video-hosting and video-sharing services has
led to a surge of 76 mn users by the end of 2006, more than traditional Internet
services in e-commerce, automobile or real estate networks.

Mature Markets Continue to Grow

According to AMI, in mature markets such as Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia,
South Korea and Japan, the data center structured cabling business is expected
to register a robust CAGR of approximately 15-26%, with Singapore (25.3%) and
Hong Kong (25.8%) leading the pack.

Hong Kongs growth leadership is driven by its Digital21
Strategy. The Hong Kong Government is making special provisions for data center
and call center locations, thus playing an active role in promoting data center
facilities in the Special Administrative Region (SAR).

On the other hand, AMI Research suggests that Singapores
healthy growth in the data center structured cabling market is being driven by
the following factors: SingTel, the countrys biggest telecommunications
operator, has jumped into the triple play bandwagon with the launch of its
Generation Mio service; iN2015, the nations new infocomm development master
plan, includes the Next-Generation National Infocomm Infrastructure, (NII) which
will be put in place by 2012. The NII is capable of delivering broadband speeds
of up to 1 Gbps while offering extensive connectivity around the country. The
infrastructure will also be IPv6-compliant and will enable an exciting host of
new broadband-enabled services and applications, such as immersive learning
experiences, telemedicine, high definition TV, immersive videoconferencing and
grid computing.

Also, the Singapore government will roll out further e-services
to provide better citizen-to-government interaction. This is expected to require
more data centers.

Companies who deploy higher performance cabling experience less
network downtimea key issue for IT managersaccording to the latest report
by AMI research. The key conclusion drawn from the survey is that a number of
factors, including bandwidth-hungry applications, businesses demand for
increased network uptime, and the need for efficient network management and
monitoring, should be driving the selection of cabling infrastructures and
investment in higher performance systems, rather than initial cost.

Sufia Tippu

maildqindia@cybermedia.co.in