• Investment World
• eWorld
• Catalyst
• Mentor
• Life
• Canvas
• Praxis
• Urban Pulse
• Brand Quest

L.N. Revathy

`There is a need to define the priority within a network. Having quality of service allows service providers to offer better granulated service and in turn better revenue.'

Coimbatore , Dec. 25

HAVING made five acquisitions in the optical networking space, Cisco Systems is bullish on investments in new products and technology in the optical and storage networking areas.

``We will continue investing. From a R & D perspective, investments in optical networking represent the biggest portion of our company's emerging market investment,'' said Mr Idris T. Vasi, Asia-Pacific Director of Optical and Storage Networking in Cisco Systems.

Stating that the optical market was stabilising at present, Mr Vasi cited an industry analyst report, wherein the experts perceived the market to grow at 5-10 per cent from 2004 onward, compared to the 50 per cent growth in the initial phase.

``The Asia Pacific market is still very large. China tops with the capital spend on optical gear touching a high of $1,190 million in 2002, followed by Japan at $898 million. The total market size is estimated at $3,606 m in 2006 compared to $2,600 m at present,'' Mr Vasi said.

He, however, pointed out that a majority of the traffic providers had not made a study on what the traffic would be like, in say 2 years from now.

While service providers are keen to reduce expenses, introduce new service, reduce system complexity and build flexible architecture, quality of service is equally important.

``There is a need to define the priority within a network. Having quality of service (QoS) allows service providers to offer better granulated service and in turn better revenue and higher QoS,'' he argued.

Cisco, he said, had established a niche in optical technologies, with a customer base of 1,100.

Nearly 80 per cent of its customers are service providers while the rest are operators. The company's focus area is in consolidating the multi-service switching platform position, in continuing to penetrate the wave division multiplexing (WDM) and international markets.

Reverting to storage area networks (SAN), Mr Vasi said that the storage requirement was doubling every year, but the cost of ownership was not falling.

Though a late entrant in this advanced technology area, Cisco, he clarified, was only into storage networking space. Stating that the market opportunity was really huge, he said that the storage attach market was growing at a phenomenal rate.

``Look for instance at the number of emails one received at present compared to the number say 5 years ago; the database of banks and insurance companies.

"No doubt, the cost of storage is increasing year after year. We want to migrate our customers from direct attach to storage attach networking,'' he said.

The SAN switching market, according to reports was expected to grow at a compounded annual growth rate of 26 per cent in the next four years from $1,056 million to $2,690 m in 2007.

Mr Vasi claimed that Cisco was the only company to have storage area networking solution over optical networking, fibre channels and storage over IP (internet protocol).

Article E-Mail :: Comment :: Syndication

Stories in this Section
2 Hyderabad cos eye GDR funds

Copyright © 2003, The Hindu Business Line. Republication or redissemination of the contents of this screen are expressly prohibited without the written consent of The Hindu Business Line