Five networking techs that clicked in 2011

BANGALORE, INDIA: Here are a few networking technologies that gained traction in 2011 and touted to make it big in 2012.

IP/Ethernet

 

India is fast realising the importance of IP and Ethernet services, especially when its 3G market is yet to take off. The 2G user base has not yet migrated to 3G, triple play services have not taken off as expected, and moreover, the government is making a major push for rural broadband. For all these services to take off IP/Ethernet is required as the mobile backhaul so as to manage the mobile data traffic.

Also Read: Ethernet Alliance completes DCB interoperability plugfest

Frost and Sullivan estimated that the Indian data services market, which was currently worth Rs. 6,660 crore would grow at a CAGR of 12 per cent for the next five years. India could account for 30% of the revenues accrued from Ethernet services globally, as per Dell'Oro.

Tata Communications rolled out Next generation Ethernet (NGE) architecture across 11 Indian cities in August 2011. Following Tata suit Reliance Communications, Bharti Airtel and a few others too followed suit and launched their Ethernet services.

The adoption is slow, however, there is definitely a larger scope for IP/Ethernet services in India in the coming years.

Unified Communications/Telepresence

India was a late starter in adopting unified collaboration technologies. However, it is fast picking up as more and more enterprises are realising the benefits it can offer.

While the UC adoption is on the upswing, the Indian enterprises are lagging a little bit in terms of awareness of its benefits.

Also Read: Diversity of Internet makes IPv6 transition difficult

 

India's video conference telepresence market is expected to grow by over 40-50 per cent in 2011.

Wireless communication

Not long ago there was this advertisement from a state-owned telecommunication player where a proposal is denied by the girl's family for the sole reason that the boy's family did not have a landline and the former believed that a landline is a symbol of status.

The Indian telecommunication users have come far from such notions and today landlines are gradually vanishing from households, thanks to wireless services.

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Who will bother for the lifeless, rectangular box at home, when every member in a family has a smart mobile device, which can do much more than just voice services?

The number of landlines has considerably dropped since the past couple of years, however, it will be some more years before they become obsolete.

This has happened in matured telecom markets in the West and will happen in India as well, maybe gradually down the line.

Moreover, there are several operators who provide Internet and broadband on the move relegating landlines more to the back.

With galore of wireless services such as WiFi, WiMAX, 3G, GSM, EDGE, LTE there will be no turn back for wireless services and landlines will soon be a thing of the past. 

Flattening of data centre network architecture

Before the virtualisation era, data used to talk between the client server and data centre server. However, today when heavy loaded virtual machines have started talking among themselves inside a data centre, there is no go than to reduce the layer inside the data centre and shorten and simplify the architecture.

That is where flattening of data centre network architecture comes into picture.

With consolidation of data centre, the days of the three- and four-tiered data center networks with Layer 2 and Layer 3 are already counting their days and in 2011 we saw many vendors bringing out products to bring down the layers from three-to-two and then to one.

Big data and cloud were the most abused terms in 2011. No matter which industry you belonged to they haunted everyone. Big data and cloud also brought in a deluge of data, which needed to managed efficiently over the network.

Juniper and Brocade launched their QFbric and VDX respectively and others too have similar plans next year.

In the coming year we will see more and more such vendors and will also see deployments of such architectures gaining traction.

The end of one-vendor tech

Long gone is the one-vendor era, wherein Cisco ruled the world. Today, the corporate world has grown out of such notions as they understood the benefit of using the best from everybody instead of one sole end-to-end vendor, which would have resulted in vendor lock-in.

There are many industry players who will today vouch for best of breed trend being cost effective.