Analysts' Views

VOIP, storage and VPN important for networking growth in the developed APAC countries, says AMI

The developed APAC SMB networking market is expected to reach US$1.6 billion in 2009, representing a growth of 1.7% over 2008, according to new research by AMI-Partners. This will be driven by continued spending on network upgrades and migration to all-IP platforms, coupled with the desire for low latency, no hardware redundancy, operating systems that maximize uptime, and high speed to recovery. AMI believes that networking as a whole will come out of these difficult times with an increased share of overall IT & telecom spending. Adoption of IP voice and video, higher demand for network intelligence, and a growing number of users and devices connected to the network will also drive this spending.

"Mobility has taken off over the last couple of years," notes Ms. Gina Luk, Asia-Pacific Telecommunications and Networking Research Manager at AMI-Partners. "This is occurring as SMB employees in the developed APAC region are traveling more and farther. Korea and Australia SMBs have a greater propensity for telecommuting, while Japan and Australia SMBs tend to be more mobile because of travel. This is evident even among firms across all employee segments."

The research also shows that software-based VoIP and conferencing solutions are gaining strong traction, too, as travel budgets are being reduced, and as SMBs download Skype and rent audio and videoconferencing facilities for executive meetings and conferencing. This significantly increases bandwidth consumption, which implies an investment in networking solutions to maintain accessibility.

"Internet service providers in Australia, Japan and Korea have launched low-cost VoDSL or VoCable offerings," added Ms. Luk, "and we are seeing that the low costs involved would increasingly become appealing for SMBs taking up small VoIP and wireless-enabled VoIP routers. Networking equipment vendors will then need to accelerate emphasis on value-added features to increase their networking business and multiplatform usage growth."