BANGALORE, INDIA: This is a Cisco perspective, presented by Tata Rao Sr. Vice President, System Engineering, Cisco India & SAARC.

* The booming network and communications market is propelling the growth of the router and switching market in India. There is phenomenal growth happening across all industry verticals. ITeS and IT have been the biggest propellers for growth in networking. Banking, financial services and insurance (BFSI) and telecom service providers, will remain key adopters in the market. Government is also emerging as a big spender due to various e-governance and SWAN initiatives.

* SMB market having crossed the first wave of networking will witness considerable adoption of storage solutions. Additionally, spending from the SMB segment on integrated security appliances will also grow steadily.
 
* As the value of information technology moves from the edge of the network into the core, industry is seeing corresponding transition from transactional communications like phone calls and email to continuous collaborative experiences, similar to today's social networking. Not only do corporate now expect to be able to connect to everyone from everywhere through every device, corporate expect it to be seamless, secure and simple.

* Collaboration within and between firms worldwide is accelerating. It is enabled by technology and a change in behavior. Global, cross-functional teams create a virtual boundary-free workspace, collaborating across time zones to capture new opportunities created with customers and suppliers around the world.

* Investments in unified communications help people work together more efficiently. In particular, collaborative, information search and communications technologies fuel productivity by giving employees ready access to relevant information. Companies are flatter and more decentralized. The intelligent network, which include LAN, WAN and Wireless is what is making this possible.

* We have now entered the second phase of the Internet. Although collaborative technologies and 'Web 2.0' have been around for many years, employing them through entire organizations will be made possible only by the intelligent network.

* Today's evolutionary enterprises require a new IT strategy, one that will improve their ability to respond to competitive pressures and market demands while accelerating business growth. The network connects every part of the IT infrastructure, from servers to applications, middleware, and end points, the network has the potential to improve the performance and functionality of every element of the IT environment and bring benefits to all organizations and people within the enterprise.
 
* More and more intelligence has been added to the network, and a network is becoming a platform of Service Oriented Network Architecture.