IDC predicts big things for Aussie networking market

The report, ‘Australian Networking Equipment 2008-2012 Forecast and Analysis: Convergence, Consolidation, Centralisation, and Consumerisation', claims this revolution is driven by the emergence of newer and smarter technologies, greater network capacities, and refreshed network architectures.

According to Jamie Jin, market analyst, Network Technologies at IDC Australia, the research also showed that the Australian networking equipment market saw a healthy growth of 19 percent in 2007.

Jin claims the overall market can be described in many words, but convergence, consolidation, centralisation, and consumerisation (C4) are the most appropriate.

“C4 is a movement within the industry, which has several overlapping layers and is driven by multiple technologies; but most importantly, it seeks to provide a better return on investment (ROI), lower total cost of ownership (TCO) and simpler ease of use across the entire ICT infrastructure," he said.

The report found that new datacentre installations (datacentre 2.0), enterprise converged networking, consumer adoption of broadband modems/routers, and increased deployment of wireless LANs (WLAN)brought solid growth to the networking equipment market in 2007.

“Compared to the same quarter in 2006, IDC's Australia Quarter 4 2007 LAN tracker revealed that the total switch and router market grew 18 percent to reach US$912.8 million in 2007,” said Jin.

Switch revenue was US$573.3 million and router revenue was US$339.5 million. The growth of the router and switch market from 2006 to 2007 was 15.7 percent and 19.8 percent, respectively.

Since the core network upgrades for both Telstra and Optus are now complete, the report predicts the market won't be able to sustain such strong growth in the future.

In 2007, the WLAN market grew to 23 percent from US$110.11 million in 2006 to US$136.73 million, which was slightly higher than the IDC 2006 forecast. Wireless routers/gateways revenues increased 19 percent in 2007, delivering US$70.9 million and contributing to 50 percent of the total WLAN market.