Frontier Business Systems: Solution Champ for Networking

face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">Look
Ma, No Wires!

face="Times New Roman, serif"> style="font-weight: normal;">One
segment which has not seen too many changes in the past
several years, is the networking market in India. There are various
segments in networking that remain positive and will experience
considerable growth and will show robust growth in 2010. Especially
in notebooks and semi conductors, which is more driven by effective
marketing and branding approach. The networking market has always
relied upon the technological advancement unlike the other IT
products in the
hardware space. India is the fastest growing IT networking products
market in the Asia Pacific region.

“ face="Times New Roman, serif">We
have found that the current trend in wired networking is slowly
moving towards the standardized Giga (1000Mbps) connectivity to the
workstations. In addition, the server and backbone connectivity
network engineers are also getting interested in 40G and 100G, but
10G still remains the preferred choice. On the Wi-Fi front the
802.11n is gaining acceptance and the older 802.11g has now become
obsolete. Most of the Wi-Fi supporting products like laptop, Wi-Fi
routers and access points are now 802.11n compliant, which give
better performance and wide range support. For WAN connectivity, the
3G option has been launched by many operators now,” said Shridhar
Kadam, VP-Project Management and CTO, DIGISOL.

face="Times New Roman, serif">No
doubt the demand for networking products in India is growing at a
decent pace. The entire world is looking at the growth of the Indian
economy and the Indian government is also keen on computerization and
is focusing on connecting the different departments and district Hos
to rural panchayat offices. Shekar Nair, CEO, Elina Networks added,
“The Indian market is getting more mature, especially in
distributed enterprises, which are realizing the need to effectively
secure all their branches
and not just their datacenters or headquarters. We are focusing on
bringing the security with manageability to all these distributed
enterprises because without manageability there is no lasting security.
The three main product modules-network security, network visibility
and network continuity together
help in securing the network.”

face="Times New Roman, serif">A
key player in the modern global economy and serving as a significant
global hub for knowledgebased economic
activities, India, has become off shoring destination through the
growth of indigenous firms.
“The networking market in India is poised for a good growth rate in
the coming year. Key trends that
are likely to impact spending include cloud computing, datacenter
technologies, security and mobile
applications are among the Top 10 strategic technologies identified
by Gartner for 2010. Increased adoption of these technologies among
enterprises is likely to impact spending on networking equipments. 10
gigabit has the ten times performance over gigabit Ethernet today,”
added Chetan Timbadia from DC Infotech.

face="Times New Roman, serif">For
ages now, Cisco has been enjoying a virtually unchallenged dominance
over the networking market, but the first signs of change were
visible in FY '10. It was not just the HP challenge; increasing
commoditization
of traditional products like switches and routers and a shrinking
market impacted by the slowdown forced Cisco to increase the focus on
nontraditional areas like unified communications, enterprise
telephony and SAN switches. With enterprises standardizing on fast
Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet
network speeds, it allows seamless integration for an end-to-end
wireless network. Thanks to its wide channel network, Cisco's growth
in FY '10 in the switches segment was owing to the emphasis on local
innovation and penetration into tier-2 and tier-3 markets. “We have
entered into the second phase of the Internet Web 2.0, which is
characterized by its ability for people and companies to organize and
categorize content, improve collaboration, open communication
channels, and transform websites
into computing platforms running full-fledged applications. As a
result, the network is becoming more intelligent and evolving to
become a platform, not just for data traffic but also for all forms
of media. In the future, we will see more investments in building
intelligent networks,” said Avinash Purwar, Senior VP-Borderless
Network, Cisco.

face="Times New Roman, serif">Talking
about the current trends in the networking space Purwar said that
datacenter consolidation ensures optimal utilization of existing
resources and assets. He also added that virtualization will play a big
role in the near future as IT organizations morph into more and more
of a services management framework. "Based on our understanding
of the evolution of the datacenter, we launched the Unified Computing
System (UCS), a next-generation datacenter platform that unites
compute, network, storage access, and virtualization into a cohesive
system that reduces TCO, increases business agility and improves
energy efficiency," Purwar added.

“ face="Times New Roman, serif">Cisco's
roadmap for India has been to drive growth by adopting the role of a
trusted, strategic advisor to Indian businesses offering relevant
solutions for business transformation, and in the current
environment, we worked towards this with renewed color="#000000">vigor.
At a global level, Cisco, EMC and Vmware, color="#000000">formed
the Virtual Computing Environment coalition in 2009, an unprecedented
collaboration of three IT industry leaders. The coalition has been
created to accelerate customers' ability to increase business agility
through greater IT infrastructure flexibility, and lower IT, energy
and real estate costs through datacenter virtualization and a
transition to private cloud infrastructures,” added Purwar.

face="Times New Roman, serif">THE
GAME CHANGERS

face="Times New Roman, serif">Elucidating
on the same Sanjeev Gupta of Veltronics India added that networking
depends on the requirements
of the company and cloud computing is the next big thing in the
market. “People nowadays are restructuring their networking
requirement and upgrading the network. All the manufacturers are
talking about selling and not about training the people to reach to
the end customers. There is a dearth of manpower for deploying the
solutions,” Purwar said.

face="Times New Roman, serif">Cloud
computing will indeed show signs of adoption in India with SMBs
investing in it. However, this depends
largely on huge investments in improving network infrastructure to
avoid seamless flow of large data traffic. “Networking is a huge
term consisting of Wi-Fi to structured cabling and we do focus on the
entire solutions. Definitely a lot of promises are made on major
projects and I think Cisco and D-Link rule the current market in
networking. For the SMB sector, we have to deal with Cisco for
solutions. Off lately, I have also noticed that customers are more
interested in revamping the structure of networking,” added Chetan
Shah of Xpress Computers.

face="Times New Roman, serif">Keeping
pace with technology and customer requirements, Frontier Business
Systems has developed deep expertise in multiple infrastructure
domains, and multiple technologies within each domain. Starting from
design and execution of enterprise backup power requirements to
personal computing, networking, network security, Thin Client
computing, virtualization, enterprise computing, storage area
networks, infrastructure management services, IT infrastructure
consulting, and information security consulting, Over a decade of
experience in executing these services, Frontier is successfully
enduring partnerships with networking and security companies such as
Cisco, Systimax, Avaya, CheckPoint, Trend Micro and WebSense.
Frontier has recently bagged a project on the deployment of
networking in Tamil Nadu worth Rs 6.75 crore and they have also
achieved strong success in desktop virtualization. It has also
consulted organizations from industry verticals such as IT/ITeS,
banking, financial institutions, pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and
government. They have consulted in assessing, design and deployment
of robust information security management systems. Helping many
organizations in meeting information compliance standards such as
ISO:27001 among many others has been one of their achievements.

face="Times New Roman, serif">Globalization
is happening fast and communication technologies are helping
eradicate geographical boundaries. Video is gaining importance due to
crosscultural engagement between employees and organizations. As per
a Frost & Sullivan survey, the videoconferencing market in
2005-06 touched Rs 65.6 crore and is likely to grow at a CAGR of 24.9
percent till 2011.

“ face="Times New Roman, serif">Video
conferencing is the latest and hot technology in the market
currently. But there are other technologies
as well in the pipeline and we are focusing currently on security.
Also our security consulting
goes beyond traditional security measures. “We deal with a complete
range of networking services that are essential to design, implement
and maintain a comprehensive network,” Ravi Verdes, Frontier
Business Systems.

face="Times New Roman, serif">RAVI
VERDES

face="Times New Roman, serif">Founder
and Director, Frontier

face="Times New Roman, serif">Business
Systems

face="Times New Roman, serif">VERDICT

face="Times New Roman, serif">In
addition to assisting organizations in establishing best security
practices, we partner organizations through
the entire information security lifecycle assisting them in meeting
ongoing security challenges and
work with them in taking proactive steps to ensure the security and
reliability of business systems. We
keep looking at what different do we need to do and what would
differentiate us as an organization. We
have defined level of skills in each area. So the employees know that
as they acquire a skill, they can keep adding more revenue to the
organization,” said Ravi Verdes, Founder and Director, Frontier
Business
Systems. The company feels that in the time line networking will open
up challenges for a lot of partners and it will be difficult to get
in the right manpower. DC
Infotech from Mumbai, which is one of the largest distribution houses
and solution provider for networking
in India offers a wide range of interests to meet any customers
challenge. They provide wireless
switching solutions through Netgear and Dlink comprising of business
wireless access points, business
power over Ethernet access points, home access points and wireless
desktop etc. Deploying the
powerful Gigabit switch DGS-3324SR, equipped with single IP
management at Riverstone Networks India Private Limited which is the
India R&D Center of the leading supplier of Carrier Ethernet
solutions, located in Bengaluru is one of their major achievements.
The solution is a part of the D-Link xStack series. It provides two
stacking ports each supporting 20Gbps full-duplex bandwidth.

face="Times New Roman, serif">According
to Sanjeev Gupta of Veltronics India, “India is the fastest growing
IT networking products market
in the Asia Pacific region. Government, telecom, financial
institutions, manufacturing sector and
IT segment were the major vertical spenders in 2010.”

face="Times New Roman, serif">THE
CHAMP

face="Times New Roman, serif">Now,
if we analyze the presence and success stories of these solution
providers in the networking space, one name that clearly stands out
is Frontier Business Systems. It is well-positioned to be a strong
player in this emerging business opportunity.