BANGALORE, INDIA: 3Com is out with its predictions for 2009 in the networking space.

Trend 1: The impending economic slowdown will provide an unprecedented impetus to the demand for Unified Communications and Collaboration (UCC) solutions in 2009

With the economic slowdown and the industry’s efforts to educate businesses on the benefits of UCC gaining traction, 2009 could mark the start of a broad-based adoption of UCC solutions as business start to look hard at cutting costs. UCC, by consolidating voice and other services onto standard data networks, provides IT with an intuitive and meaningful way to reduce operating expenses.

The demand for UCC will likely stay after the recession lifts, not only because businesses will be convinced of its benefits after trying it out, but because the need for UCC is backed by sustainable industry developments. For instance, with the emergence of virtualization, embedded software on open platforms and the software-as-a-service model, there is increasing focus on services and applications delivered over a robust network infrastructure.

The rules are also changing in that people are no longer interested in operating systems and hardware platforms for computing and networking, but rather in how they can get simple, reliable and secure access to services that drive the business.

Ultimately, UCC, by removing the friction of communication and collaboration between teams and individuals, will increase business agility and response times, and facilitate business innovation. These are traits we need in both bad and good times.

Trend 2: Demand for high-bandwidth multimedia services will surge as Asia Pacific continues to develop

Asia Pacific is home to the world’s most important emerging economies, which are continuing their rapid urbanization despite the dimming economic outlook. Building developments, both commercial and residential, are mushrooming. With many of these projects targeted at well-heeled and IT savvy professionals, developers are making multi-media access facilities a feature without second thought.

The hive of building activity means that the demand for fiber optic technologies that can reach into homes and offices to deliver scalable, high bandwidth interactive multimedia services for buildings, campuses, and cities can only go up. This growth will be further backed by Asia Pacific governments jumping into the fray by taking nation-wide initiatives to build out FTTx fiber infrastructure as a catalyst for economic growth.

In addition, new battle lines will be drawn for the service provider industry as commercial and residential development managers start to lease wholesale bandwidth and content to create new real estate revenue streams by offering interactive multimedia services themselves.

All of these will drive demand for simple, reliable, and cost effective ways of enabling large scale interactive multimedia content delivery using point-to-multipoint passive optical networks based on Ethernet.
 
Trend 3: 2009 will see the start of broad-based adoption of the 802.11n protocol to deploy novel wireless applications

With mobile devices becoming more pervasive and finding application across verticals, mobile technologies that enable high user volumes, high bandwidth voice services, seamless roaming and adaptive mesh creation, as well as industry-specific services like RFID asset tracking, will become important for businesses and consumers.

The 802.11n protocol is the foundation to enabling all these capabilities, and we expect technologies based on the protocol to be explored and deployed liberally throughout Asia Pacific in the coming year. Giving the protocol momentum would be its ability to help organizations better manage and secure access points, as well as its expected ratification at the end of 2008.

We expect uptake to be especially fast in verticals like logistics, manufacturing and retail, which can immediately leverage advanced 802.11n wireless connectivity to provide high performance and reliable wireless control and tracking solutions. 3Com itself is devoting much effort to the development of networking solutions based on the protocol – we are working with third party solution partners to integrate services like utility billing, RFID-based location and asset tracking of life-critical medical devices and drugs, high-value or security-sensitive equipment, logistics pallets and shipments, and even people.