Transformational Buildouts

The focus was on laying the infrastructure that could help deliver next generation services in a fast approaching digital era

 

Though the “digital” agenda has been around for a few years now, the last fiscal saw actual deployments taking place on a scale that looked meaningfully substantial. While the trend was more visible in the carrier segment, thanks to the publicly announced large deals, the enterprises were not leftbehind either.

Both carriers and enterprises grew increasingly conscious of the need to deploy and upgrade to next generation gears that would, in turn, enable digitization at a service level. However, in the carrier segment, where the stakes are much larger, there was something bigger at work. It wasn’t about one technology or the other, but about how and why the technologies were being deployed; it was about optimizing the existing assets. Given that spectrum turns out to be the priciest asset, all strategic technology decisions were increasingly taken with the objective of achieving greater spectral efficiencies.

For enterprises, with more and more IT moving into the cloud, it became increasingly evident that the enterprise networks had to be future proofed for a cloud driven era. This meant that the data centers, whether third-party or captive, were to be cloud enabled in some way or the other. However, the tight IT budgets and high costs of having a captive private cloud make it uneconomical to a large number of enterprises. This led to the development of private cloud, virtual private cloud and hybrid cloud offerings by the third party data center providers such as Netmagic, Sify, NxtGen and Tata Communications with facilities located in India. Compliance issues are prompting global data center service providers like Microsoft, Amazon Web Services (AWS) and IBM to set up locally hosted cloud facilities. All of this is contributing to the development of the networking infrastructure market as well locally.