VARs urged to be Ethernet-ready
Data solutions are not the "black art" they once were as companies get switched on
Wrestling for business: In a competitive market, providers will have to struggle to land new customers
With Ethernet technologies becoming the comms market’s largest growth area, the channel has been urged to train up or lose out as greenfield business disappears.
The Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Networks Tracker from IDC reports that the Ethernet routing market grew 11 per cent in the second quarter compared to the previous year, while Ethernet switches enjoyed a 32.7 per cent sales spike.
IDC’s director of enterprise communications infrastructure, Rohit Mehra, said: “The second-quarter performance was very good, following exceptional Q1 results for the Ethernet switch market.”
Carrier Opal has predicted there will be 90,000 100Mbit Ethernet customers in the
UK by 2014, up from 30,000 last year. Opal expects the number of 1Gbit users to increase eightfold to 62,000 by 2014, while 10Gbit customers are anticipated to grow from 300 to 8,000.
Opal’s transformation director, Andy Lockwood, said: “There is very little genuinely new business in the [comms] market. Whenever we win a new customer, we are taking it from another carrier. There is not a lot of genuine top-line growth because of price erosion, but there is a lot of movement and change, which creates opportunity.
“Customers might have as many as seven suppliers. The opportunity for the channel is to acquire new skills and consolidate the number of suppliers customers have. The battleground is to be the winner in that consolidation.”
Andy McEwan, senior manager of Ethernet point to point at Virgin Media Business, was another to forecast impressive growth.
“The traditional way of connecting networks has become more expensive,” he said. “BT has entered the Ethernet market in the UK in the past 24 months, which has given the market some maturity.”
He added that the make-up of Virgin’s traditionally voice-centric channel is changing.
“It is getting there, and I do not think data solutions are the black art they once were,” he said.