The Hindu Business Line : ADC Krone will focus on channel development

From cabling to data centre service provider, ADC Krone is evolving to take advantage of new markets. The firm will focus on channel development during this year. It has 200 service integrators as partners and will grow by 20 per cent by end of year.

Explaining what a cabling company can offer in terms of experience to the IT manager, Mr Dileep Kumar. R, Technical and Product Manager, Enterprise Networks, KRONE Communications, ADC Krone lets loose a statistic, “70 per cent of a network’s downtime in India is due to cabling related problems.”

Wrongly specified, or set up in a hurry, the cables can cause the most harm to your data centre. Yet only 7 per cent of the overall IT budget is spent on wiring, he noted. While 35 per cent of the budget is spent on active equipment such as routers and switches, 35 per cent on software and another 20 per cent on peripheral devices, the investment in cabling is negligible. With the notion that the network is the most important utility for an enterprise, he hopes this will change.

Wireless service

Data centres require very high availability and building redundancy into them is necessary. IT managers could look to the industry for innovations and advice, Mr Kumar said.

Wireless is not a threat to cabling firms. “Wireless connectivity will be complimentary to cables — both fibre and copper. Wireless offers the advantage of flexibility and mobility, but may not offer high bandwidth. Cabling will be installed as a fallback option and will offer data speeds of up to 10 giga bits per second (GBps),” he said.

India is the fastest growing market in the cabling industry. Developed nations have plateaued, said Mr Kumar. Currently, 100 MBps cables are reining the marketplace with SMB customers, while 1 Gigabit (1000 Mbps) cables are used by big corporates. The latest 10 Gigabit cables are also growing in popularity, with three-four vendors offering the latest in cabling technology.

The firm’s manufacturing facility in the outskirts of Bangalore employs 120 and produces cabling and connectivity products.

The cabling, data centre service provider has 200 service integrators as partners