Structured Cabling for Indian SMBs

Belkin Inc, a brand more popularly known in India for its consumer products, has recently forayed into the structured cabling space for Indian SMBs. We interacted with their MD, Mohit Anand to know more about the move and its advantages for them as well as for Indian SMBs Why would a small company with 25 computers require something as complex as structured cabling? Isn't structured cabling something meant only for large enterprises? This was the thought in our mind when we went to speak to the India MD for Belkin Inc, whose recently launched their structured cabling solutions for Indian SMBs. The company has been in the structured cabling business internationally, and has mostly focused on consumer products for the Indian market till now. So why such a bold step to enter into a fragmented and widespread market with both copper and fiber based structured cabling solutions? Mohit explained his company's strategy of why they're targeting Indian SMBs with 25-100 with their structured cabling solutions. He said, that “India is a country with about 13 million organizations. Only the top 10,000 or so organizations would be having structured cabling in place. That is not even the tip of the iceberg. Our strategy is to tap structured cabling business from organizations that have 25-100 computers, because that's where the growth is really happening.”But do they really need structured cabling solutions? To this, he explained that IT expands like a web in an organization. Most organizations are now gradually coming out of the economic slowdown, and started to grow. So today, if an organization has 5 computers, 2 to 3 years down the line this number could grow to 10 or even 50. Many a times, the companies themselves can't predict that they would grow so much, and when they do, they need the right IT solutions to help them manage everything. For instance, they would need structured cabling and active networking equipment to connect all the computers to share data. Mohit then gave examples of everyone, right from a dentist to real estate companies. Even a dentist today, could have five computers to tackle his day to day operations. All of a sudden, the dentist would realize that besides using computers to maintain their billing, they also need computers to store and maintain the digital records of their patients, for which they require more computers. With more computers, transferring data between them becomes a challenge, for which need structured cabling. Likewise, most real estate builders are adding structured cabling into their construction projects, because the consumers who eventually occupy those buildings would require networking.The company has the top ten cities in its radar for the immediate future, and later will target the remaining 20 Indian cities that are growing. For this, they've partnered with Neoteric and Iris as their channel partners. The former will handle the consumer side of the business, while the latter would handle projects. Belkin will use its existing web of 55 support centers (that are currently used for their consumer products business) to also handle the support for structured cabling as well.With this rollout, Belkin will become the only company in India to offer both active and passive structured cabling products. They already manufacture wireless and wired networking products like unmanaged switches and routers. The only other company that was offering both passive and active products till now was D-Link, and even they've had a demerger, with one company handling the active networking products, while the other is handling passive products.Considering that the Indian SMB market is very price sensitive, and companies are mostly unaware of new technology, how does Belkin plan to grab a market share? To this, the simple response from Mohit was “We are confident of our strategy, and we expect tough times ahead. But we're like a child who’s learning to walk. We might fall, but we’ll get up, wipe off the dust, and start walking again.”On the pricing front, Belkin apparently has their own manufacturing unit for copper cables in China, so they can leverage that to be more competitive in the Indian market. Rahul Sah