3Com well positioned for lean times

Smart South African enterprises are using lean economic times to re-evaluate their investments in network infrastructure and seek out components that give them top-value, says Derek Wiggill, 3Com Africa's regional sales director.

“South African enterprises have been proactive in response to the global economic crunch and are being cautious about expenditure to fund expansion strategies. But they're using this time of appraisal to focus closely on the essentials needed to maximise opportunities when the tide turns.

“We are seeing large organisations putting in place the infrastructure that will better be able to support their dynamic demands when the time is right.”

Businesses are being smarter in doing more with less. Reduced IT budgets are forcing vendors to be more competitive in delivering value.

“Cost comparisons are easily determined now, making a value judgment more straightforward,” says Wiggill.

“Open standards have prised loose the grip proprietary solutions had on the market. The degree of standardisation in the networking industry has commoditised most of its components so companies are more confident about pursuing solutions in which price plays a significant role.

When building a network, companies can budget for best-value components for the basic infrastructure, giving them financial room to seek out suppliers with forward-looking technologies such as those that deliver ongoing energy savings, for example.”

Wiggill says South Africa faces the same business challenges as the rest of the world and the 'flight to value' that 3Com has witnessed elsewhere is being mirrored here.

“Customers have the confidence and the clout to now look beyond their preconceptions of value in proprietary solutions and look to the value that's delivered in a variety of best-of-breed open standards offerings.”

Other major issues increasingly coming under the spotlight this year are:

Going green - More firms will make serious moves to cut energy consumption in their data centres and networks. The IEEE P802.3az energy-efficient Ethernet project, a key component of green technology, is working on an approach called 'low-power idle', which enables the network to consume the minimum amount of power during the idle time between packets. This enables the devices connected to the link to also enter a low power - or sleep - state when the link is in low-power idle state, using the wake signal to activate in time to process the packets. Savings are achieved simply by making the Ethernet physical layer more energy-efficient.

Managing network virtualisation - The next step after virtualising servers and storage environments is virtualising the network. 3Com's switches with eXpandable Resilient Networking (XRN) can virtualise multiple edge switches into a logical virtual switch, while virtual core technology can combine multiple core switches into a virtual mega-switch. This improves ease of management, availability and scalability. Beyond this, a key issue is the ability to manage virtual servers, networks and clients in an integrated fashion, and tools are emerging now that will mature during this year.

Networking services hardware vs software - As more companies feel the economic pinch, they will use a services platform to roll out network services when needed rather than plugging another physical server or appliance into the network. Besides saving substantial costs, this approach gives businesses better control of their operations and enables them to deploy new services faster.

The business outlook for 3Com in 2009 looks promising. In Africa, expansion into countries north of South Africa and in the Indian Ocean are proceeding on schedule. Staff headcount has increased by 33% and is growing, and Wiggill expects growth in the region to be between 50% and 70% this year.