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IFSEC Global India Correspondent, IFSEC Global

January 1, 2014

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Allied Telesis as a leader in the IP Ethernet arena offers a host of products and solutions in switching, routing, and wireless as well as media conversion portfolios. In the interview Subhashish talks about the company’s expansion plans for the next few months and shares his insight on some of the latest trends and developments in IP surveillance market.

What is the total size of the IP and Ethernet network solutions market in India? What is your company’s market share in it? 

Based on reports on the IP camera markets from third party sources like IMS and others, a rough estimate for the IP surveillance network size would be around USD 100-105 million for the year, growing at a sizeable CAGR of close to 26-28 percent. We believe we are amongst the top three players in the IP surveillance network market. 

Tell us about the segments/vertical that you have your presence in India? Which of these segment do you see have the potential to drive the maximum demand and why? 

IP based surveillance is prevalent in every vertical market -starting from mid to large enterprises. Allied Telesis’s focus predominantly has been in the enterprise segment, government, PSU’s, city surveillances and infrastructure projects. Allied Telesis is one vendor in the networking arena that has changed the entire approach to the IP based surveillance market in the past four to five years in India. We take a very strong consultative approach and most of the eco-system, be it an IP camera vendor, the VMS vendors, or the analytics vendors, appreciate the same! It’s imperative to have, a well designed, resilient and scalable network backbone for an IP surveillance network to perform to the expectations of the enterprises.

With thrust of the central government on Smart Cities, and infrastructure projects, including airports, I believe these are some of the potential verticals that would drive the maximum demand.We are well poised with huge deployments in the IP surveillance market in India and focus to address and win a good pie out of this growing market. 

What are the existing trends in the IP and Ethernet network solutions market? 

We are seeing a number of changes in the market.  The market is increasingly being separated into two – the commodity space where price is the primary discriminator and the value space where features and functionality are the primary discriminator.  In the value space, organisations are concerned about the value and the benefits a network can deliver to the organisation over time instead of the initial purchase price.  In most instances – with the right technology – a network that is initially more expensive will deliver far greater benefits and reduced cost over time, than a commodity network. An example of this is Allied Telesis Management Framework or AMF that enables initial deployment and routine tasks to be simplified and automated delivering savings to the organisation.  In addition, the performance and advanced features of the AlliedWare Plus operating system deliver many benefits that can’t be realised with commodity products. 

While in its infancy, Software Defined Technology or SDN is an emerging technology that will be disruptive to the networking industry over the next 18 months to two years and will increasingly widen the gap between the offerings of commodity and value-based vendors. The SDN enables the decision making process about how traffic should be forwarded to be virtualized and moved to an external controller that delivers network that are flexible and dynamic and can change rapidly based on application needs or changes to the environment. 

What opportunities and challenges do you see for networking business in India? 

Opportunities are in abundance with India having a lot to do with its infrastructure, energy, and other sectors. Some of the opportunities that would be big are in the Government, PSU and infrastructure verticals. One of the biggest challenges that I see is sometimes, customer compromise on the network backbone, while investing in the best of IP camera/VMS solutions. I believe , the same will get addressed with markets getting matured and vendors like Allied Telesis and some of our complementing eco-system vendors  taking strong initiatives to get into educating customers/focused security partners through various forums , on the best practices that have been deployed in mid to large surveillance networks that are running successfully for years now. 

Now that customers are moving to IP platform, how important would be the role of Networking in some of the developing industries like Physical Security and Surveillance? 

The concept of a unified or converged network is not new but many applications – such as physical security – are only just catching on.  At Allied Telesis, we believe organisations should be deploying single, converged network architecture to support all applications.  These applications can be desktop and mobile connectivity, VoIP, CCTV, access control, building management systems and so on.  With all applications, operating across a single network, many benefits can be realised that can’t be attained when each application operates on its own network, however the performance and reliability of the network becomes critical. Allied Telesis has a range of products and technologies that can be used to deliver this converged network architecture and is renowned for the performance and reliability of the solutions that are delivered. 

Would you please share some of the latest developments in terms of your company’s products and solutions for the Indian market? 

Speed is ever-increasing and our recently introduced SwitchBlade x8100, x510 and x210 series products have proven immensely popular in the Indian market.  With support for 1G and 10G over copper and fibre these products are extremely flexible and can be used with a variety of applications across a range of different verticals.  Ours Allied Telesis Management Framework or AMF has also proven popular as it simplifies deployment and reduces the cost of managing the network.  Over the next six months Allied Telesis will be releasing a new range of security related products that are an evolution of our router and security appliance products already in the market for many years.  This new range of products takes Allied Telesis into a different market segment and is expected to be extremely popular with both our end user and channel customers.  More news on this new range of products will be available later this year. 

As a leading player in IP and Ethernet network solutions, where would Allied Telesis want to reach in the next five years? 

Over the next five years there will be many changes within the networking industry.  The gap between commodity and value-based vendors will widen in such a way that we expect to see almost two different markets for networking technologies.  We expect to see further consolidation in the market that will see the number of existing vendors in the market, reduced, but at the same time we expect to see new, niche vendors emerge that will challenge the established networking vendors that have a broad offering in the market today.

Allied Telesis will continue to do what it does best.  Deliver quality product that performs well and supports the applications and features that our customers are looking for, purely on open standards.  We will continue to innovate and delivering best of breed technologies such as SDN and AMF to the market to help our customers do more with less.

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