in person
Debraj Dam
Vice President—Strategic Business and Partner Alliance, Digilink
“Many old
installations would be revamped this year to support new apps”
W
hat were the trends in network and structured cabling in 2010 and what is expected in 2011?
Digilink is a well recognised brand in the structured cabling market, and provides an entire range of structured cabling solutions for enterprises and small and medium business. Its basket of offerings also includes the indigenously designed and developed VoIP and suite of Layer 3 products to suit the unique characteristics of various markets. Debraj Dam, Vice President— Strategic Business and Partner Alliance, Digilink, speaks to Prachi Shirur of eGov magazine on trends in the Indian networking and structured cabling market and how the company is addressing the government segment in the country.
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egov / www.egovonline.net / January 2011
Calendar year 2010 started with a big change in the cabling domain, after the new standard ANSI/EIA/TIA 568-C.0 was ratified in June 2009. The use of lower bandwidth (10/100Mbps) cabling got replaced by 1G and 10G Ethernet. Now, with IEEE working on the 40G and 100G Ethernet, cabling market is looking forward to have 40G and 100G in place. Most of the old installations supporting lower bandwidths are expected to be revamped this year with those supported newer and higher bandwidths as the applications are becoming more and more demanding. In terms of fibre, OM4 was introduced in 2010 but the market started looking for OM4 cables in the last quarter of the year and is expected to capture big share in the data centre market segment. Data center is one of the fastest growing segments in today’s ICT technology space. It is generally believed that data creation and retention requirements in large enterprises are growing at 50 percent per year. This growth is due to a multitude of legislative and financial agreements in the United States and other
countries. These are dictating how much information must be stored, how it is stored, and for how long. For example, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act requires publicly held companies with a market capitalisation greater than $75 million to retain documents related to financial statements for seven years, effectively requiring top management to sign for the financial accuracy of the company’s annual reports, and being held accountable for the practices and procedures in their IT departments. The new Rule 17a of the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) establishes strict requirements for brokerages and stock exchange members. Under the new rule, a six-year retention period is required for transactions, e-mails and instant messages. These and other laws and international agreements have fuelled the growth in the network and structured cabling market.
How big is the global networking and cabling market and what are the figures for India? The global networking market is very huge and India’s share is very small, but in recent years we have observed that India’s share is increasing day by day. The increasing requirement of bandwidth, along with the office automation to be in line with world standards, has led to the market growth for SCS. The traditional way of crimping the cables is outdated as the industries are getting more updated with the tech-
in person
nical advancement in all sectors. People today realise the importance of channel performance and look forward to structured cabling solutions. Large corporates and governments have taken a major lead by investing money in the ICT sector and in the modernisation of existing and other critical national infrastructure projects. In India, our yearly financial budget is also encouraging for industrial growth which in turn improves the SCS growth in terms of both volume and value in the market. The structured cabling market is expected to be around Rs 1,400 crore in the year as per the IDC report, which indicates a growth of approx 15-18 percent over the last year. Digilink emerges as the product leader in the India structured cabling market and prominent player in global market this financial year due to the increasing demand for emerging new standards and technologies in the cabling industry. Many enterprise and campus networks and data centres are in the planning stage, which again are expected to be active in the early half of the calendar year and will boost the market share.
What is the USP of Digilink’s cabling solutions? How did Digilink fare in 2010? With globalisation, the industry is more conscious about the quality and performance of products with respect to their requirements. In order to satisfy the customer, it is the prerequisite to match their quality expectation. We are one of the prominent players in the market with Future First technology, quality, performance, support and total cost of ownership. Digilink’s complete end-to-end solution with best quality products, 10 years of product warranty and performance and product warranty of 25 years after site certification gives an edge in winning the customers’ mind share.
Our products include TG800, TG500, G600 and E400 in copper; OP∞, OP3 and OP2 in fibre; and trunk cable assemblies, MPO connectors, fibre management solution in data centre segment. We offer high-density aluminium die cast patch panels. Our residential cabling solutions have cable specially designed for residents, face plate to match home decor, data connectors for electrical plates and customised IMD face plates. Further, there is the fifth generation future ready intelligent physical layer management hardware solution and sixth generation of software. There are also patchless solutions for communication room in copper, including CAT6A or 10G. In terms of standardisation, we always take care that we provide the market with latest standard and set a benchmark for all. In this regard, we always keep spending on research
today provides complete range of products for structured cabling products and systems. We are among the first to start green initiative in the SCS industry in India to provide superior quality products with RoHS compliance which can improve our customers’ network life cycle. It will help the customer for better RoI through device preservation and network efficiency. It will also help us as an OEM manufacturer to recycle the technology products by re-manufacturing.
What is your plan for covering the government market segment in India? Digilink is committed to be an integral part of the central government’s NeGP initiative under 27 MMPs and other central and state government projects to provide green products
“Crimping of the cables is
outdated. People today realise the importance of channel performance and look forward to new cabling solutions”
and development for our products. We always get our products tested by globally renowned third party agencies like UL and ETL to match the latest international standards.
Digilink recently became the first manufacturer of networking solutions to achieve compliance with a new international carbon footprint standard. Please tell us more about your green initiatives. Being the only Indian manufacturer, Digilink
to save energy, increase efficiency and quality of the network life cycle and hence improve the connectivity of public utilities to citizens and different government departments in the center as well as in states. It helps the government in improving network efficiency, business productivity, e-Governance and multi-channel service delivery. We are working very closely in partnership with key stakeholders in different central and state government agencies. Our products are in line with the go green India initiative.
Thought bytes On ICT usage in agriculture: The great challenge in agriculture is the mobilisation of frontier technologies for improving the productivity, profitability and stability of small-farm agriculture. Among the frontier technologies, ICT is extremely important since it is a transformational technology. We will be able to attract and retain educated young women and men in farming, only if farming becomes intellectually stimulating and economically rewarding. It is in this context ICT plays a very critical role. On tech trend: The technology trend during 2010 was good. There was a greater spread of ICT as well as space and renewable energy technologies. I feel that in the coming years of this decade we will see technological leapfrogging in rural India, thereby ending the urban-rural digital, technology and gender divides.
MS Swaminathan Chairman, MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, and Agriculture Scientist and Member, National Innovation Council
January 2011 / www.egovonline.net / egov
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