Enterprise Wireless : Unwiring The Future

India's wireless market is up for a big change with the launch of WiMax and
3G services, along with consolidation of the industry in 2009. It is also
expected that the number of Indian wireless subscribers is expected to grow at a
CAGR of 21 percent in the next four years, exceeding 735 million by 2012.
Wireless revenues are expected to reach $37 billion, according to a new market
analysis.

Recently, Gartner has predicted that wireless market penetration will rise
from nearly 20 percent now to over 60 percent by 2012.

Speaking about the prevalent situation in India, Andrew Hindmarch, Regional
Product Marketing Manager-APAC, 3Com said, “Today, India has emerged as a fast
growing wireless market with a subscriber base of about 350 million, and
potentially adding nine to 10 million subscribers a month. The business benefit
of wireless is fuelling such a demand. The agility, flexibility, affordability
and mobility of wireless solutions have resulted in WLAN overpowering LAN as an
enterprise tool.”

However, it is unlikely for companies to completely replace wired with
wireless. With the demand for mobility increasingly becoming the norm, we would
see co-existence of wireless and wired solutions. Among the wireless solutions,
Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi security seem the most promising segments.

Wireless in India

With the evolution of time and technology, WLAN has gradually become
business-critical. Mobility is now one of the key elements for the buying
discretion of the end-users. Thus, recently, the nation witnessed the laptop
boom with a steep rise in sales in multimedia and business suite mobile
handsets.

Referring to the mindset of the Indian consumer, B Raghavendran, VP-Channel
Operations and Commercial Strategy, Cisco India and SAARC said, “Nowadays, the
customers are embracing the freedom and flexibility of wireless connectivity.
Business executives are recognizing the competitive advantage of
business-critical mobile applications. Organizations are deploying WLANs to
increase employee productivity, enhance collaboration, and improve
responsiveness to customers.”

“Most CIOs are looking to deploy centralized unified access solution and
network. 24X7 intrusion detection and prevention, real-time wireless RF
environment monitoring and automated alerts are key for them. 802.11n is
becoming the standard in an enterprise with increased demands for fast wireless
access to company resources and bandwidth intensive multimedia applications.
Further, we have noticed an increased adoption of secured wireless solutions,”
Hindmarch added.

Solution providers (SPs) will have to continuously reinvent themselves to
develop applications along with vendors and ensure they do not lose out on the
market opportunity. They will have to take next step in their evolution to full
blown 4G over time once the eco-system is ready and makes business sense in
Indian context. They would require deep expertise in the systems, processes, and
technology necessary to increase operational efficiency. The industry
stakeholders will have to work closely together to chalk out new revenue models
to benefit all.

“Motorola has a joint venture with Tech Mahindra. As part of this JV, the
company, CanvasM is focused on developing exciting new age value-added services
(VAS) like mWallet, location-based services, live video feed from sports events
like was recently done by the company for FIFA soccer games and many such
applications tailored to the specific needs of the Service provider,” commented
Tarvinder Singh, Director-Marketing and Product Management, Home and Networks
Mobility, Motorola India.

Why go wireless

Wireless medium is becoming the de facto network access method for not only
the mobile workers with laptops and handhelds, but even for the fixed desktops
and phones. The biggest driver is the cost advantage of providing equally
reliable, secure network access. There are many analysts focusing on comparing
the wireless and wired network access methods and most agree that the wireless
access technology has matured for mainstream adoption and provides 1/5th RoI
advantage over wired access.

Another key driver is the need for security on wireless networks. As adoption
of wireless access increases, the need for securing and monitoring the airwaves
becomes crucial. Special category of access points which can be converted to a
dedicated sensor, whose only job is to do an intelligent 24x7 scan of all the
channels in the Wi-Fi spectrum and report back to the Master. The Master
performs pattern analysis on hundreds of events per second and constantly
monitors to detect rogue devices.

“The SME space is potentially a good market for wireless SPs, where these
businesses will benefit from reliable and fast wireless solutions as they don't
usually need a structured physical wired infrastructure,” Hindmarch concluded.

According to a recent IDC report, one of the largest segments for wireless
networking in India is education. With over 50 percent of Indians falling in the
18-25 age group, education is one segment which won't be affected terribly by
the slowdown.

“Hospitality and educational institutions were amongst the first to deploy
WLAN in India. However, the business benefits have compelled adoption among
hospitality, manufacturing, banking and financial institutions, large corporates
and the government sector as well. Deployments are sprouting up at coffee shops,
hotels and airports too in the form of hotspots and hot zones. Cisco targets all
the segments from SMB, to enterprise including education, IT/ITeS,
manufacturing, retail, BFSI, government,” Raghavendran said.

Channels speak

Commenting on Motorola's plans for its channel space, Jayant Rastogi,
Country Head- Sales and Area Director-Indian Subcontinent, Motorola Enterprise
Mobility said, “It is our plan to continue sharing our deep industry expertise
through our channel training and development programs. In April, we launched the
Premier Partner Program (PPP) in India. This is the industry's first regional
accreditation for radio communications channel business. The objective of the
new program is to drive a long-term channel foundation and most importantly, it
will help to enhance our channel partners' competitive position to drive growth
and maintain profitable business relationships to gain incremental marketshare.”

“We constantly train our channel partners and help them understand the
developments in the technology. As a result, they are able to educate our
customers on the benefits of upgrading their existing networking IT
infrastructure. We want our partners to adopt consultative approach with our
customers,” Raghavendran concluded.

Commenting on the trends, VK Bhandari of Kolkata-based Supertron India said,
“We are in the initial stage of the business as we started offering wireless
products recently. Hence at present the percentage share is minimal for wireless
products. However, we expect that this year end the share should be around two
percent of our total revenue. The new verticals are emerging but at present the
growing segment are SOHO and SME, which itself is catering to more than 50
percent of the market. Then these days government initiatives are also on the
rise, the government is embarcing wireless in terms of city wireless and WiMax
implementation.”

Avishek Rakshit

avishekr@cybermedia.co.in