It’s impossible to forecast the direction of technology. When everyone thought mass hard-drive storage was the next trend, it moved to the cloud. When everyone dismissed the original tablets (circa the 2002 Windows XP Tablet PC) they made a huge return in the form of the iPad.
So in the 1970’s, when the technology for IVR was similar to that of the electric car, fully capable but too expensive to be widely adopted, large corporations began to envision the future advantages. And by future advantages, I mean cutting the cost of paying employees to do basic tasks that customers could accomplish through self-service. IVR was introduced to help large corporations handle their call volumes, route their calls, and extend their service hours. After a certain point, IVR became the key gateway for customer care delivery. Because of advancements in technology and corporate growth, these systems exploded in the 1980’s. If you needed help with anything, you called their customer service line. Seems obvious, but to those of us from Generation Y, where you Google, then e-mail, then are forced into resorting to traditional IVR, it’s important to explain.
From the consumer’s perception, the immediate traditional benefits of IVRs are exclusively passed on to the corporation - less people to train and employ and less contact centers to keep running. In fact, recent studies have shown that over 75% of consumers believe that IVR’s were introduced for the business’ benefit. Having automated menus reduces the need for an operator who has to listen to what you want, then determine the correct agent to connect you to. Prerecording the IVR to answer some common basic questions, like address and hours, saves time for the agents as well.
While the businesses did achieve some cost savings, it was at the expense of customer satisfaction. The flaws in this system are obvious: redirected calls to the wrong channel, and being forced into menu options that probably don’t directly address your needs.
In the 90’s, basic speech recognition technology was implemented into IVR systems. Even with recognition technology, the IVR problems didn’t cease to exist. With limits in technology, it was hard to have IVR’s deliver adequate customer service. At the time, there were no alternatives, such as the web, and while outsourcing allowed for more agents at a cheaper cost, it brought on a whole new slew of problems, which we are all familiar with.
Companies that strived for great customer service in this era were forced into
1) developing a more effective IVR
or
2) hiring more customer service representatives. Neither of these options provided a cost effective way to improve service.
But back then, good customer service was a luxury. In the past few years, the industry has done a 180 and customer service directly influences the bottom line, as many recent studies have shown. We are in the era of creating customer experience. Customer care is now a necessity and if you’re not doing it well, your customers are talking it about it and are seeking other alternatives.
So, with a plethora of alternatives to customer care in 2011, why is the Global Speech Technology sector expected to have a $20.9 billion valuation in 2015, an incredible 23.2 percent growth? Why is the IVR industry expected to be worth $1.9 billion by 2015 as well, when there haven’t been any significant implemented changes to the industry since its inception? Possible reasons might range from very recent technology innovations to the ongoing increase in customer care demands.
Either way, it’s clear that the IVR industry is changing and adapting to a new market. The technological changes are already available. New platforms allow speech technology to be adapted into web applications. These applications allow you to communicate with an IVR through your laptop’s microphone, navigating a website and answering your cry for help without ever picking up the phone or speaking with a live agent. This technology is where the market is headed and in a few short years, we should see more accessible speech dialogues from websites. Imagine heading to Amazon.com and without ever touching a finger on your keyboard, using an IVR to find you the lowest cost.
MacBook and then directing the system to purchase it and ship it to your house, all with quick speech technology.
There are a few aspects about the future of speech technology and IVR that we can predict for sure. First, we know that speech technology will continue to evolve and improve. Additionally, having human intervention in speech technology provides limitless potential for the understanding capabilities of speech recognition software. Human intervention even allows IVRs to understand anger and frustration. This will further close the bridge between the understanding capabilities of live customer agents and IVR. The second fairly certain development will be the application of this technology.
Speech is easy – we speak years before we learn how to write and type, and it remains a much easier form of communication for us. It’s also easy to read inflection and emotion from each other’s speech. Perhaps the greatest advantage of speech is that you don’t even have to be literate to speak. Advanced IVR applications will undoubtedly benefit the 1.2 billion illiterate people in the world. With all these benefits, it’s impossible to deny that the future will contain speech applications everywhere we look. Imagine a server at a restaurant carrying around a wireless speech decoder that will passively listen to your order. Instantly it understands that you would like your T-Bone medium rare, and sends your order right to the kitchen, without the server ever having to manually plug it in and with no possible human error.
Given these unlimited possibilities, many of which are almost certain to occur, the real question is what will the new role of customer service representatives hold in the future? While I believe that in the near future, live representatives will remain a large part of customer care, I can easily foresee the role evolving to only handling the truly complex items with the overwhelming majority of interactions being handled by self-service. What is your opinion? Where do you see the future of IVR?
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
TV meets Web ... Web meets TV
Google TV
If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.
So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.
Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.
Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.
Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.
We’re working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.
This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.
If there’s one entertainment device that people know and love, it’s the television. In fact, 4 billion people across the world watch TV and the average American spends five hours per day in front of one*. Recently, however, an increasing amount of our entertainment experience is coming from our phones and computers. One reason is that these devices have something that the TV lacks: the web. With the web, finding and accessing interesting content is fast and often as easy as a search. But the web still lacks many of the great features and the high-quality viewing experience that the TV offers.
So that got us thinking...what if we helped people experience the best of TV and the best of the web in one seamless experience? Imagine turning on the TV and getting all the channels and shows you normally watch and all of the websites you browse all day — including your favorite video, music and photo sites. We’re excited to announce that we’ve done just that.
Google TV is a new experience for television that combines the TV that you already know with the freedom and power of the Internet. With Google Chrome built in, you can access all of your favorite websites and easily move between television and the web. This opens up your TV from a few hundred channels to millions of channels of entertainment across TV and the web. Your television is also no longer confined to showing just video. With the entire Internet in your living room, your TV becomes more than a TV — it can be a photo slideshow viewer, a gaming console, a music player and much more.
Google TV uses search to give you an easy and fast way to navigate to television channels, websites, apps, shows and movies. For example, already know the channel or program you want to watch? Just type in the name and you’re there. Want to check out that funny YouTube video on your 48” flat screen? It’s just a quick search away. If you know what you want to watch, but you’re not sure where to find it, just type in what you’re looking for and Google TV will help you find it on the web or on one of your many TV channels. If you’d rather browse than search, you can use your standard program guide, your DVR or the Google TV home screen, which provides quick access to all of your favorite entertainment so you’re always within reach of the content you love most.
Because Google TV is built on open platforms like Android and Google Chrome, these features are just a fraction of what Google TV can do. In our announcement today at Google I/O, we challenged web developers to start coming up with the next great web and Android apps designed specifically for the TV experience. Developers can start optimizing their websites for Google TV today. Soon after launch, we’ll release the Google TV SDK and web APIs for TV so that developers can build even richer applications and distribute them through Android Market. We've already started building strategic alliances with a number of companies — like Jinni.com and Rovi — at the leading edge of innovation in TV technology. Jinni.com is a next-generation TV application working to provide semantic search, personalized recommendation and social features for Google TV across all sources of premium content available to the user. Rovi is one of the world's leading guide applications. We’re looking forward to seeing all of the ways developers will use this new platform.
We’re working together with Sony, Logitech and Intel to put Google TV inside of televisions, Blu-ray players and companion boxes. These devices will go on sale this fall, and will be available at Best Buy stores nationwide. You can sign up here to get updates on Google TV availability.
This is an incredibly exciting time — for TV watchers, for developers and for the entire TV ecosystem. By giving people the power to experience what they love on TV and on the web on a single screen, Google TV turns the living room into a new platform for innovation. We're excited about what’s coming. We hope you are too.
Sunday, June 20, 2010
Structured Cabling
While the recession last year took a toll on the structured cabling industry in India, propelled by the slowdown in production in international markets. In FY 2009-10, the segment revenue declined by 2%. Key players have seen a mixed growth, with leading companies like Tyco, Systimax Commscope, Molex, Belden, Sigma Byte showing negative growth, while Dax Networks has shown growth of approximately 169%, and players like Digilink and ADC Communications India showing no difference in growth rate from the last year. However, industry experts believe this upward curve is only set to grow, especially with 3G and WiMax coming to India, while 4G (LTE) and other successful NGN technologies like 100G, are being deployed globally.
Emerging from the Ashes
Structured cabling players believe that this is an appropriate time for them to cash in on investments and make a killing with new innovative offerings. Due to cautious economic controls in place in India, the Indian market experienced far less decline than other mature markets. This is also due to the fact that the cabling market in India did not suffer the brunt of the economic downturn-for them it was mostly a slowdown-due to the global wave effect.
Also, certain segments like manufacturing, infrastructure, healthcare and ITeS did reasonably well. However, as the economy moves into recovery mode, industry players foresee larger volumes of business transactions and with it higher data, and voice transmission requirements emerging this year. The last 7-8 months have also seen a growth in data centers and NOCs for telecom operators picking up-which are two major growth drivers, and it is hoped that the BPO–IT–BSSI segment which is strongly affected by global markets comes around soon, too. Players also believe that the requirement for bandwidth will drive the growth for structured cabling.
While ADC India Communications registered revenue of Rs 53 crore in FY 2009, Belden saw a revenue of Rs 41 crore -down from Rs 47 crore in FY 2008-09. Belden's revenue for the quarter ending March 2010 was Rs 11 crore, with a y-o-y slump of 12.8%. However, the company is hopeful of a revenue of Rs 55 crore in FY 2010-11. Schneider Electric's revenues for FY 2009-10 was Rs 35 crore, which remained unchanged in FY 2010, with a market share of 2.7%. However, the company is targeting a revenue of Rs 50 crore for FY 2010-11.
DIGILINK registered a revenue of Rs 215 crore in FY 2009-10. R&M grew by a modest 21% during the fiscal to touch Rs 80 crore from Rs 66 crore. The company showed a growth of 21%, and hopes to grow by 25-30% in the next fiscal. Sigma Byte had closed a revenue of Rs 45 crore in FY 2008-09, while FY 2009-10 saw it drop to Rs 35 crore, with a dip of 22%. Sterlite, which holds 11% of the Indian structured cabling market, grew its revenue to Rs 150 crore from Rs 100 crore. The company is looking at a 20-25% increase on the current levels for FY 2010-11.
Main Concern
According to top industry players, some of the main concerns in the last year were lack of customer awareness for product performance, leading to spurious/substandard products getting pitched in, increasing raw material prices (which, though not erratic this year, are still at artificially high levels), the aggressive price war waged between companies to win large projects which have somewhat diluted the focus of delivering quality to customers, stiff competition from a market of 15-20 players that is just growing, more supply than demand in the local market, due to India increasingly becoming a hot-spot for foreign markets like Japan, which is saturated and need a quick solution to their excessive-and superior-production, which is putting a huge pressure on the price of cables. Also, compliance to standards like TIA/EIA, BICSI is another concern, which can help installers maintain a superior network that gives enough “headroom” for expansion.
According to top market player, Tyco, apart from the decline in the market size in 2009, another area of concern for the industry was fluctuating price of copper on London Metal Exchange (LME) which increased to quite a high level towards the beginning of the year, and then declined sharply towards the second calendar quarter and stayed down for a while, forcing vendors to reduce the price of their copper products in order to pass on the price benefit to the customers. This downward revision further resulted in reduction of purchase order values. Increasing bandwidth requirement with the emergence of new technology, is yet another growing concern, which needs an urgent solution to keep up with future requirement.
Communication between players and the government is another aspect that is very important to discuss matters related to infrastructure deficiencies and other problems of SC players on a common forum, as is the case abroad. This will also help prevent duplication, especially from countries like China and Taiwan, who sell low-quality products that do not match standards, but are popular because of the lower price point they offer. This in turn leads to problems in the customer segment – another area where communication – in terms of education to the customer, by the installer or manufacturer is key.
Besides, with a structured network, cable provides huge amounts of redundancy during any unforeseen events like cable cuts, etc, without effecting communications, in terms of combating challenges related to network uptime for access link (last mile for individual customers), as fibre gets cut when there is civil maintenance work in progress that involves digging. Besides, fibre is stable, and most greenfield operators today are starting to deloy its usage, instead of the traditional copper lines. It is also a good solution to spectrum shortage, as for other firms that need network, they However, many players feel that all copper wires should be replaced, and not just a few, which could lead to a choking of the network with both cables running alongside each other.
The third dimension added to the scenario was due to the fluctuating exchange rates. Nexans was able to handle this by extending the price reduction when the copper prices dropped, and when price went up, vice-versa. Leading market player, Sterlite also believes that multiple use of cables (triple play) should be deployed, due to the hike in data traffic.
Key Growth Verticals
DIGILINK, whose biggest USP is its indigenous product development, in-house manufacturing, and unique exclusive regional distribution system, saw some of its main business in 2009 come from customers like ESIC Hospitals, NIC- eCourt, HSBC Bank, Sher khan (Stock Broking Firm), DIAL, Lodha Builders, Surya University/ Pharmaceuticals, and DLF Pramercia Life Insurance for Country wide Networking. R&M, known worldwide for their copper and oftic fibre cables, experienced key growth in verticals that included manufacturing, IT/ITeS, BFSI, and Telco, some customers that included Tech Mahindra, Toyota, Renault–Nissan, BOSCH, HSBC and Bharti Airtel.
For Sigma Byte, too-which is an elite partner of Systimax and the only ISO 9001-2008 in the Indian SC market, two of the main growth verticals were IT/ITeS and BSSI-targeting education and hospitality.
Sterlite registered a major growth in revenues from verticals like data centers, financial sectors, and telecom companies, while Nexans' customers like HDFC, American Embassy, Miele Appliances, Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru, Mudra Communications, Railtel, Carrefour, Arvin Meritor, Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Rexam Pharma, KEM Hospital, Kumaran Systems and Gujarat Printing Press helped boost its growth in 2009. For ADC Krone, key deployments were in IT/ITeS, Government (Karnataka and Tamil Nadu Secretariats), Common Wealth Games, BFSI (Standard Chartered Bank, Barclays), Media/Entertainment (Crisil, Sun TV and Udaya TV), and Automobile (VW).
For Leviton, which was the first in the industry to adhere to standards requirement for 10G solutions, the ITeS segment was a major revenue earner last year, while this year it has projects lined up with finance segments, hospitality and healthcare, based on Leviton's end to end CAT6 solution. The company is also currently working on a few government projects.
For Siemon, too, some of the biggest adopters of its structured cabling systems in the country include verticals like IT industry, ITeS, BPO, banking and financial services, and telecom. For Molex, some of its major customers in FY 2008-2009, were HDFC, QualComm Facility, Sutherland Facility, US Technologies Campus, ICICI, Reliance Industries, SEZ Campus, Bhillai Steel Plant Manufacturing, Euronet ITeS, Tata Capital, Adani Power Utility, Aditya Birla Group-MIMACS, Novartis, BNP Paribas, ICC Reality, and Indian Hotels, among others.
Trends to Watch
While Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs have successfully worked on a more efficient DSL design, with high capacity transmission, as well as 100G and PoE solutions, and Commscope is still proving efficiency of its 360 degree solution, in India, latest trends still surround 10G over UTP Copper medium for backbone solutions.
Others include use of OM2/OM3 Fiber in Distribution, and use of structured cabling practices in residential applications, the latter of which is unique to India-not having been tried out in developed countries. Deployment of CAT 6A solution, to replace CAT 5 for LAN and data centers, and intelligence on physical layer, which enables immediate troubleshooting of problems, if any, besides optimum utilization and efficiency, being controlled at a central location, are some other important trends.
According to ADC India communications, IEEE is in the process of ratifying the 40G and the 100G standards which will be available on both single and multimode fibres as well as on copper. One of the recent technological developments at ADC India Communications was the AirES cable which uses air as an insulator to reduce cable diameter which in turn leads to better cable management and energy efficiency.
For the enterprise market, Systimax has unveiled is still going strong with its SYSTIMAX 360 next generation structured cabling solution among its innovative line of fiber, copper, in-building wireless and intelligent infrastructure solutions for data centers, campuses and building environments, while for the broadband market, it has a BrightPath fiber-to-the-home, Signal Vision subscriber drop, and other outside plant solutions, which support state-of-the-art voice, video and data applications.
In the past year, as part of its market-focussed innovation, SIEMON launched innovative new products across nearly all of our product families – In Copper , it launched the Z-MAX copper cabling solution which caters to the basic CAT6 and CAT6A product ranges. To help reduce field fiber termination and to provide accuracy and effectiveness, XLR8 Pre-Polished Fiber Connectors, the enhanced MTP-based fiber Plug and Play solutions provides one with an opportunity to use and reuse the Fiber Solution. To manager the Layer 1, Siemon's MapIT G2 next-generation intelligent infrastructure management helps with management of IT Infrastructure, which not only provides the highest number of port management, but also does the same while saving rack space and power consumption, and lastly, VersaPOD - an efficient data center cabinet solution allows one to manage passive panel not only horizontally, but also vertically there by giving more number of connects per standard rack.
Nexans has developed GG45, a Cat-7/Cat-7A, which is the only RJ-45 format connector that offers 40 GB on copper. This connector offers good ROI as it is backward compatible with the existing Cat-5e/Cat-6/Cat-6A solutions. Hence it offers an economic solution that can be scaled to 40G in a phased manner, ensuring capital investment is made as per the demands of the technology. As part of its MPO solutions offerings for both copper and fibre, Nexans has launched Copper MPO solution for data centres, which ensures easy and neat installation and mobility. The company also offers EMAC (Environment Monitoring and Control) solutions that can be integrated into the IIM. This ensures that the enterprises has substantial savings and is also compliant with the 'green movement' in the purview of the IT scenario.
Tyco Electronics which spends about 5% to 8% of its revenues in R&D, has released new products for data centres that include high-density cabling platforms, AMP Sigma link cable assemblies -(copper 10G compliant cable assemblies that increase high density in datacenter/ telecom closet and help reduce real-estate and carbon foot-print of the network environment, the new MRJ21 Ultra slim cabling system which improves airflow around mission critical electronics, simplifies cable management and reduces clutter in horizontal and vertical pathways.
Molex's end to end solutions for connectivity include systems like FSO (Free Space Optics), Blown Fiber, MIIM – Intelligent cabling & Insight which is a software tool for the customer to deploy and manage projects. This vast spectrum of products allows the customer to choose an optimum solution for their needs. The company's pre-terminated copper solutions (Modlink) use the i-Pass connector which allows the customer to deploy high speeds (1G) in pre-terminated copper cassettes.
Once the 100G standard is ratified, the industry can expect 24 fibre MPO connectors to be introduced in the physical infrastructure space. The recent ratification of the OM4 fiber standard is an important step forward as it will provide greater reach then the earlier OM3 standard and also support the new 40/100G standards.
Some of the other major trends that were seen in the last year include the opening up of tier II and tier III cities in India as a significant customer base for structured cabling. There is also the move towards more usage of fibre-optics, as prices are progressively becoming comparable and physical reliability is getting better.
Another development will also be the higher port counts on panels to support increasing network density. At the same time, green initiatives will remain popular in data centres, even as cloud infra or cloud computing with high-speed data transport requirement is fast catching up.
Growth Drivers
According to Belden, target verticals will be airports, hospitality, oil and gas, metros, IT/ITeS, BFSI, process automation, higher education, health care, power generation and distribution, high end media, sea ports, metals and minerals. According to DIGILINK, while in the copper range there is a clear shift from Cat5e to Cat6, there is certain growth in 10G over copper installations. In fiber, there will be distinct growth in SM applications, even for FTTH areas.
According to Sigma Byte, demand for bandwidth, data centre solutions, high-end applications with higher bandwidth requirement, voice and data convergence (VoIP or POE) solutions are driving the need to connect from traditional to structured cabling, as also are new verticals like airports, new education centres, which are also drivers for structured cabling, as they need higher bandwidth and infrastructure.
The last two years have seen a rise in 10G solutions-picking up and intelligent infrastructure solution on physical layer. There is also hope of FTTH or FTTB coming to India in the next 12-18 months. VAS will be yet another important growth driver, and keeping this in mind, Sigma Byte recently started an audio/visual solutions company(Sigma Byte AV solutions pvt ltd), another division within Sigma Byte, to focus on physical sector solutions, and they are looking at expanding reach to different parts of the world (Far East, Africa, etc).
In addition to key verticals like IT/BPO, BFSI, Telecom, Education, Financial Institutions and Health care, Siemon believes that opening up of FDI new areas have widened for cabling vendors in retail and real estate. Most other players also believe that government, infrastructure, hospitality and manufacturing will also be key growth drivers.
Emerging from the Ashes
Structured cabling players believe that this is an appropriate time for them to cash in on investments and make a killing with new innovative offerings. Due to cautious economic controls in place in India, the Indian market experienced far less decline than other mature markets. This is also due to the fact that the cabling market in India did not suffer the brunt of the economic downturn-for them it was mostly a slowdown-due to the global wave effect.
Also, certain segments like manufacturing, infrastructure, healthcare and ITeS did reasonably well. However, as the economy moves into recovery mode, industry players foresee larger volumes of business transactions and with it higher data, and voice transmission requirements emerging this year. The last 7-8 months have also seen a growth in data centers and NOCs for telecom operators picking up-which are two major growth drivers, and it is hoped that the BPO–IT–BSSI segment which is strongly affected by global markets comes around soon, too. Players also believe that the requirement for bandwidth will drive the growth for structured cabling.
While ADC India Communications registered revenue of Rs 53 crore in FY 2009, Belden saw a revenue of Rs 41 crore -down from Rs 47 crore in FY 2008-09. Belden's revenue for the quarter ending March 2010 was Rs 11 crore, with a y-o-y slump of 12.8%. However, the company is hopeful of a revenue of Rs 55 crore in FY 2010-11. Schneider Electric's revenues for FY 2009-10 was Rs 35 crore, which remained unchanged in FY 2010, with a market share of 2.7%. However, the company is targeting a revenue of Rs 50 crore for FY 2010-11.
DIGILINK registered a revenue of Rs 215 crore in FY 2009-10. R&M grew by a modest 21% during the fiscal to touch Rs 80 crore from Rs 66 crore. The company showed a growth of 21%, and hopes to grow by 25-30% in the next fiscal. Sigma Byte had closed a revenue of Rs 45 crore in FY 2008-09, while FY 2009-10 saw it drop to Rs 35 crore, with a dip of 22%. Sterlite, which holds 11% of the Indian structured cabling market, grew its revenue to Rs 150 crore from Rs 100 crore. The company is looking at a 20-25% increase on the current levels for FY 2010-11.
Main Concern
According to top industry players, some of the main concerns in the last year were lack of customer awareness for product performance, leading to spurious/substandard products getting pitched in, increasing raw material prices (which, though not erratic this year, are still at artificially high levels), the aggressive price war waged between companies to win large projects which have somewhat diluted the focus of delivering quality to customers, stiff competition from a market of 15-20 players that is just growing, more supply than demand in the local market, due to India increasingly becoming a hot-spot for foreign markets like Japan, which is saturated and need a quick solution to their excessive-and superior-production, which is putting a huge pressure on the price of cables. Also, compliance to standards like TIA/EIA, BICSI is another concern, which can help installers maintain a superior network that gives enough “headroom” for expansion.
According to top market player, Tyco, apart from the decline in the market size in 2009, another area of concern for the industry was fluctuating price of copper on London Metal Exchange (LME) which increased to quite a high level towards the beginning of the year, and then declined sharply towards the second calendar quarter and stayed down for a while, forcing vendors to reduce the price of their copper products in order to pass on the price benefit to the customers. This downward revision further resulted in reduction of purchase order values. Increasing bandwidth requirement with the emergence of new technology, is yet another growing concern, which needs an urgent solution to keep up with future requirement.
Communication between players and the government is another aspect that is very important to discuss matters related to infrastructure deficiencies and other problems of SC players on a common forum, as is the case abroad. This will also help prevent duplication, especially from countries like China and Taiwan, who sell low-quality products that do not match standards, but are popular because of the lower price point they offer. This in turn leads to problems in the customer segment – another area where communication – in terms of education to the customer, by the installer or manufacturer is key.
Besides, with a structured network, cable provides huge amounts of redundancy during any unforeseen events like cable cuts, etc, without effecting communications, in terms of combating challenges related to network uptime for access link (last mile for individual customers), as fibre gets cut when there is civil maintenance work in progress that involves digging. Besides, fibre is stable, and most greenfield operators today are starting to deloy its usage, instead of the traditional copper lines. It is also a good solution to spectrum shortage, as for other firms that need network, they However, many players feel that all copper wires should be replaced, and not just a few, which could lead to a choking of the network with both cables running alongside each other.
The third dimension added to the scenario was due to the fluctuating exchange rates. Nexans was able to handle this by extending the price reduction when the copper prices dropped, and when price went up, vice-versa. Leading market player, Sterlite also believes that multiple use of cables (triple play) should be deployed, due to the hike in data traffic.
Key Growth Verticals
DIGILINK, whose biggest USP is its indigenous product development, in-house manufacturing, and unique exclusive regional distribution system, saw some of its main business in 2009 come from customers like ESIC Hospitals, NIC- eCourt, HSBC Bank, Sher khan (Stock Broking Firm), DIAL, Lodha Builders, Surya University/ Pharmaceuticals, and DLF Pramercia Life Insurance for Country wide Networking. R&M, known worldwide for their copper and oftic fibre cables, experienced key growth in verticals that included manufacturing, IT/ITeS, BFSI, and Telco, some customers that included Tech Mahindra, Toyota, Renault–Nissan, BOSCH, HSBC and Bharti Airtel.
For Sigma Byte, too-which is an elite partner of Systimax and the only ISO 9001-2008 in the Indian SC market, two of the main growth verticals were IT/ITeS and BSSI-targeting education and hospitality.
Sterlite registered a major growth in revenues from verticals like data centers, financial sectors, and telecom companies, while Nexans' customers like HDFC, American Embassy, Miele Appliances, Chinnaswamy Stadium, Bengaluru, Mudra Communications, Railtel, Carrefour, Arvin Meritor, Mumbai Municipal Corporation, Rexam Pharma, KEM Hospital, Kumaran Systems and Gujarat Printing Press helped boost its growth in 2009. For ADC Krone, key deployments were in IT/ITeS, Government (Karnataka and Tamil Nadu Secretariats), Common Wealth Games, BFSI (Standard Chartered Bank, Barclays), Media/Entertainment (Crisil, Sun TV and Udaya TV), and Automobile (VW).
For Leviton, which was the first in the industry to adhere to standards requirement for 10G solutions, the ITeS segment was a major revenue earner last year, while this year it has projects lined up with finance segments, hospitality and healthcare, based on Leviton's end to end CAT6 solution. The company is also currently working on a few government projects.
For Siemon, too, some of the biggest adopters of its structured cabling systems in the country include verticals like IT industry, ITeS, BPO, banking and financial services, and telecom. For Molex, some of its major customers in FY 2008-2009, were HDFC, QualComm Facility, Sutherland Facility, US Technologies Campus, ICICI, Reliance Industries, SEZ Campus, Bhillai Steel Plant Manufacturing, Euronet ITeS, Tata Capital, Adani Power Utility, Aditya Birla Group-MIMACS, Novartis, BNP Paribas, ICC Reality, and Indian Hotels, among others.
Trends to Watch
While Alcatel-Lucent and Bell Labs have successfully worked on a more efficient DSL design, with high capacity transmission, as well as 100G and PoE solutions, and Commscope is still proving efficiency of its 360 degree solution, in India, latest trends still surround 10G over UTP Copper medium for backbone solutions.
Others include use of OM2/OM3 Fiber in Distribution, and use of structured cabling practices in residential applications, the latter of which is unique to India-not having been tried out in developed countries. Deployment of CAT 6A solution, to replace CAT 5 for LAN and data centers, and intelligence on physical layer, which enables immediate troubleshooting of problems, if any, besides optimum utilization and efficiency, being controlled at a central location, are some other important trends.
According to ADC India communications, IEEE is in the process of ratifying the 40G and the 100G standards which will be available on both single and multimode fibres as well as on copper. One of the recent technological developments at ADC India Communications was the AirES cable which uses air as an insulator to reduce cable diameter which in turn leads to better cable management and energy efficiency.
For the enterprise market, Systimax has unveiled is still going strong with its SYSTIMAX 360 next generation structured cabling solution among its innovative line of fiber, copper, in-building wireless and intelligent infrastructure solutions for data centers, campuses and building environments, while for the broadband market, it has a BrightPath fiber-to-the-home, Signal Vision subscriber drop, and other outside plant solutions, which support state-of-the-art voice, video and data applications.
In the past year, as part of its market-focussed innovation, SIEMON launched innovative new products across nearly all of our product families – In Copper , it launched the Z-MAX copper cabling solution which caters to the basic CAT6 and CAT6A product ranges. To help reduce field fiber termination and to provide accuracy and effectiveness, XLR8 Pre-Polished Fiber Connectors, the enhanced MTP-based fiber Plug and Play solutions provides one with an opportunity to use and reuse the Fiber Solution. To manager the Layer 1, Siemon's MapIT G2 next-generation intelligent infrastructure management helps with management of IT Infrastructure, which not only provides the highest number of port management, but also does the same while saving rack space and power consumption, and lastly, VersaPOD - an efficient data center cabinet solution allows one to manage passive panel not only horizontally, but also vertically there by giving more number of connects per standard rack.
Nexans has developed GG45, a Cat-7/Cat-7A, which is the only RJ-45 format connector that offers 40 GB on copper. This connector offers good ROI as it is backward compatible with the existing Cat-5e/Cat-6/Cat-6A solutions. Hence it offers an economic solution that can be scaled to 40G in a phased manner, ensuring capital investment is made as per the demands of the technology. As part of its MPO solutions offerings for both copper and fibre, Nexans has launched Copper MPO solution for data centres, which ensures easy and neat installation and mobility. The company also offers EMAC (Environment Monitoring and Control) solutions that can be integrated into the IIM. This ensures that the enterprises has substantial savings and is also compliant with the 'green movement' in the purview of the IT scenario.
Tyco Electronics which spends about 5% to 8% of its revenues in R&D, has released new products for data centres that include high-density cabling platforms, AMP Sigma link cable assemblies -(copper 10G compliant cable assemblies that increase high density in datacenter/ telecom closet and help reduce real-estate and carbon foot-print of the network environment, the new MRJ21 Ultra slim cabling system which improves airflow around mission critical electronics, simplifies cable management and reduces clutter in horizontal and vertical pathways.
Molex's end to end solutions for connectivity include systems like FSO (Free Space Optics), Blown Fiber, MIIM – Intelligent cabling & Insight which is a software tool for the customer to deploy and manage projects. This vast spectrum of products allows the customer to choose an optimum solution for their needs. The company's pre-terminated copper solutions (Modlink) use the i-Pass connector which allows the customer to deploy high speeds (1G) in pre-terminated copper cassettes.
Once the 100G standard is ratified, the industry can expect 24 fibre MPO connectors to be introduced in the physical infrastructure space. The recent ratification of the OM4 fiber standard is an important step forward as it will provide greater reach then the earlier OM3 standard and also support the new 40/100G standards.
Some of the other major trends that were seen in the last year include the opening up of tier II and tier III cities in India as a significant customer base for structured cabling. There is also the move towards more usage of fibre-optics, as prices are progressively becoming comparable and physical reliability is getting better.
Another development will also be the higher port counts on panels to support increasing network density. At the same time, green initiatives will remain popular in data centres, even as cloud infra or cloud computing with high-speed data transport requirement is fast catching up.
Growth Drivers
According to Belden, target verticals will be airports, hospitality, oil and gas, metros, IT/ITeS, BFSI, process automation, higher education, health care, power generation and distribution, high end media, sea ports, metals and minerals. According to DIGILINK, while in the copper range there is a clear shift from Cat5e to Cat6, there is certain growth in 10G over copper installations. In fiber, there will be distinct growth in SM applications, even for FTTH areas.
According to Sigma Byte, demand for bandwidth, data centre solutions, high-end applications with higher bandwidth requirement, voice and data convergence (VoIP or POE) solutions are driving the need to connect from traditional to structured cabling, as also are new verticals like airports, new education centres, which are also drivers for structured cabling, as they need higher bandwidth and infrastructure.
The last two years have seen a rise in 10G solutions-picking up and intelligent infrastructure solution on physical layer. There is also hope of FTTH or FTTB coming to India in the next 12-18 months. VAS will be yet another important growth driver, and keeping this in mind, Sigma Byte recently started an audio/visual solutions company(Sigma Byte AV solutions pvt ltd), another division within Sigma Byte, to focus on physical sector solutions, and they are looking at expanding reach to different parts of the world (Far East, Africa, etc).
In addition to key verticals like IT/BPO, BFSI, Telecom, Education, Financial Institutions and Health care, Siemon believes that opening up of FDI new areas have widened for cabling vendors in retail and real estate. Most other players also believe that government, infrastructure, hospitality and manufacturing will also be key growth drivers.
Microsoft OCS R2 and Exchange 2010 in Action
Microsoft’s Unified Communications (UC) solutions use the power of software to streamline communications. Office Communications Server 2007 R2,
one of the cornerstones of Microsoft’s UC solution, is the platform for presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and enterprise voice for businesses around the world.
Building on the customer, partner, and industry momentum of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, the new Office Communications Server 2007 R2 update continues to deliver on the Microsoft promise to streamline communications for users, give IT organizations the flexibility and control they need to manage their communications infrastructure efficiently, and provide an extensible platform for communications-enabled business processes.
See Real Action at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzSM9uzrgDs
one of the cornerstones of Microsoft’s UC solution, is the platform for presence, instant messaging, conferencing, and enterprise voice for businesses around the world.
Building on the customer, partner, and industry momentum of Microsoft Office Communications Server 2007, the new Office Communications Server 2007 R2 update continues to deliver on the Microsoft promise to streamline communications for users, give IT organizations the flexibility and control they need to manage their communications infrastructure efficiently, and provide an extensible platform for communications-enabled business processes.
See Real Action at
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WzSM9uzrgDs
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