Higher Investments Drive India Networking Market in Q1

Increased networking investments across the enterprise and service provider segments led to a strong 10.8% year-on-year increase in India’s networking market during the first quarter, according to IDC India.

Dileep Nadimpalli, Research Manager, IDC India says, “With the advent of software defined networking (SDN) and SD-WAN technologies the landscape of networking architecture is quickly changing. OEMs should address the developing business and deployment models, since the market will adopt subscription-led networking procurement over traditional networking hardware spend.”

The IDC Asia/Pacific Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker estimates Q1 2018 Ethernet switch market in India stood at $139 million with a YoY growth of 9.8%. The key growth driver is Layer 3 category while Layer 2 and Application Delivery Controller (ADC) category saw a marginal YoY decline in Q1 2018.

Telecom leads the top five verticals in Q1 2018. Others include banking, professional services, government and education. As expected digital transformation initiatives across organizations would generate incremental revenues in the near future.

Separately IDC’s latest Asia/Pacific Quarterly Router Tracker found that the Indian router market reached $9.9 million in Q1 2018, representing a YoY growth of 8.0%. The service provider deployments observed a healthy growth in Q1 2018 although there was a marginal decline in enterprise deployments.

The service provider segments continued investments in 4G deployments and VoLTE and the regular refreshes to upgrade the network infrastructure. Government initiatives around digital India are expected to drive incremental revenues in the coming quarters.

Finally IDC’s latest Asia/Pacific Quarterly WLAN Tracker saw India’s WLAN market at $51.5 million in Q1 2018 with a significant Y-o-Y growth of 19.8% .This growth was majorly driven by enterprise and service provides deployments while consumer deployments saw a decline. Increased spending in government was the key growth contributor for the WLAN market in Q1 2018.

“Reconceptualizing network architecture is mandatory for organizations,” IDC India director for enterprise Ranganath Sadasiva said. “Initiatives around citizen digital empowerment, innovation accelerator technologies such as IoT, AR/VR, Robotics, and connectivity enhancements initiatives like 5G/VoLTE rollouts, Wi-Fi campus [and] hotspots are expected to increase the spending on networking in the coming quarters.”