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.

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