LAS VEGAS. Things are looking up in the networking business.
At IDC’s annual breakfast meeting held at the Interop conference in Las Vegas, the analyst firm detailed their projections for the networking industry moving forward.
Rohit Mehra IDC’s Director of Enterprise Communications Infrastructure, told the Interop audience that his firm is forecasting that the Network equipment market will be growing to $51.4 billion by 2014. For, 2011, IDC pegged the market to be worth $39 billion in 2011.
According to Mehra, the lion’s share of network revenues are coming from switching at $21 billion in 2011. IP telephony comes in second at $7.68 billion and routing is third at $3.69 billion.
Mehra noted that one of the things that is a requirement for networking moving forward is convergence of wired and wireless networking infrastructures. He noted that enterprises need to take their overlay wireless networks and find ways to unify wired and wireless as the move to the cloud progresses. He added that enterprise also need to improve device visibility.
Not surprisingly, IDC is also seeing tremendous growth in 802.11n Access Points (APs). Mehra noted that in 2009, 802.11n represented only 26 percent of APs and by 2015 it will be 95 percent of all APs.
“The new normal is dynamic, it’s not static,” Mehra said. “Think flexibility and intelligence, that’s where networks are going.”
Cindy Borovick, Research Vice President for IDC’s Enterprise Communications and Datacenter Networks services commented that when it comes to the cloud, though it may seem like a buzzword there are real long term benefits for the industry.
From a forecast perspective, IDC is projecting that the Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) market will be worth $56 billion by 2014, up from $24 billion in 2010.
From a Private cloud viewpoint, Borovick sees the opportunity for cloud IT infrastructure as being worth $6.4 billion today including server storage and systems management. IDC is forecasting that market to be worth $13.3 billion by 2014.
Borovick also reported that according to a recent IDC survey of 500 customers, 25 percent had no plans for the cloud and 75 percent said they are doing something with cloud.
In terms of what is helping to drive cloud adoption, IDC’s data points to the pay-as-you-grow model with 48 percent of respondent identifying it as a primary driver. Some 40 percent of IDC survey respondents noted that they wanted to move to cloud because it’s easy and fast to deploy to end-users.
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.
