The pillar of success

Try speaking to any networking player about networks and you will struggle to keep them focused on the pipes and raw infrastructure which previously formed the backbone of the networking landscape. Talk is of opportunities in security, VoIP, managed services, thin clients, storage, Unified Communications, and WAN optimisation, to name a few. However if resellers want an ongoing relationship with customers there is one underlying deployment needed to exploit the aforementioned opportunities: the network.

There is no point owning a car if no-one has built the roads for you to drive on, and the network is the essential IT infrastructure which is hosting a growing range of IP-based offerings.

“The infrastructure business is still there,” said Graeme Reardon, regional director for A/NZ at Cisco’s SMB division Linksys. “However there are new technologies emerging such as Unified Communications, VoIP and Software-as-a-Service which resellers need to get trained up on to have the basic skills.”
Reardon’s comments are indicative of the message Linksys and Cisco have been pushing out to the market in recent years. There is little doubt Cisco is the networking market’s most significant player, with a hugely dominant marketshare.

Discussing Cisco’s fiscal results for the first quarter of 2008, the vendor’s CEO John Chambers said: “Unified Communications continued to lead the way with revenue growth above 70 percent year-over-year. Storage was up more than 20 percent…and security growth was in the mid teens,” said Chambers. “Our second wave of advanced technologies that includes video systems, application networking systems, etc., is now approaching the US$2.5 billion run rate and grew in the mid 30s year-over-year from a revenue perspective.”

Cisco is alive to the opportunity of leveraging its networking legacy to grab business in the next wave of technology. It is a direction which networking resellers would be well advised to note, alongside the developments of the networking market and the many other vendors either branching out or into the space.

The networking landscape is rapidly changing with legacy players such as Cisco not only changing focus, but non-networking players moving into the space. In September database giant Oracle acquired network optimisation technology maker Netsure Telecom. At the time of the deal analyst Peter Goldmacher said: “We believe that this purchase could signal Oracle’s willingness to branch out from data management into the network and systems management space.”

In October software giant Microsoft released Office Communicator 2007 (its voice-data-video communications client), Office Communications Server 2007, and a 360-degree videoconferencing system called Roundtable.

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