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AMI-Partners: VoIP, VPN, Storage and IP Telephony Are Key Ingredients for Networking Growth in the Developed APAC CountriesSINGAPORE --(Business Wire)-- In export markets for Australia, Japan and Korea, falling demand is not changing the fundamentals of SMB (small and medium businesses, or companies with up to 999 employees) spending on networking. The developed APAC SMB networking market is expected to reach US$1.6 billion in 2009, representing a growth of 1.7% over 2008, according to new research by AMI-Partners. This will be driven by continued spending on network upgrades and migration to all-IP platforms, coupled with the desire for low latency, no hardware redundancy, operating systems that maximize uptime, and high speed to recovery. AMI believes that networking as a whole will come out of these difficult times with an increased share of overall IT & telecom spending. Adoption of IP voice and video, higher demand for network intelligence, and a growing number of users and devices connected to the network will also drive this spending. "Mobility has taken off over the last couple of years," notes Ms. Gina Luk, Asia-Pacific Telecommunications and Networking Research Manager at AMI-Partners. "This is occurring as SMB employees in the developed APAC region are traveling more and farther. Korea and Australia SMBs have a greater propensity for telecommuting, while Japan and Australia SMBs tend to be more mobile because of travel. This is evident even among firms across all employee segments." The research also shows that software-based VoIP and conferencing solutions are gaining strong traction, too, as travel budgets are being reduced, and as SMBs download Skype (News - Alert) and rent audio and videoconferencing facilities for executive meetings and conferencing. This significantly increases bandwidth consumption, which implies an investment in networking solutions to maintain accessibility. "Internet service providers in Australia, Japan and Korea have launched low-cost VoDSL or VoCable offerings," added Ms. Luk, "and we are seeing that the low costs involved would increasingly become appealing for SMBs taking up small VoIP and wireless-enabled VoIP routers. Networking equipment vendors will then need to accelerate emphasis on value-added features to increase their networking business and multiplatform usage growth." Increasingly, SMBs with multiple branches need to transmit data through a secure network; VPN implementation is becoming more common, especially among SMBs in Korea. SMBs are also beefing up security and intrusion detection to fend off ever-increasing electronic threats from growth in email volume and usage of new digital media. To secure data and protect their companies from intrusion, SMBs will be looking to both on-site and managed solutions. Vendors must segment the market in a way that will help SMBs target and capitalize on leads during this downturn. Those that can develop insights on their domestic networking markets along with an understanding of emerging technologies, future scenarios and SMB adoption trends, drivers, attitudes, market penetration, opportunities, channel strategies and marketing optimization are sure to have the highest return-on-marketing-investments (ROMI). Related Studies AMI-Partners' 2009 Developed APAC Networking Opportunity: Addressing a Growing Demand in a Downturn Economy study highlights major trends in the context of current/planned IT, Internet and communications usage and spending. Products and services covered include established and emerging hardware, software, applications and business process solutions. Based on AMI-Partners' annual surveys of SMBs in Japan, Australia and Korea, the study tracks a broad spectrum of issues pertaining to budgets, purchase behaviors, decision influencers, channel preferences, outsourcing, service and support. Also covered are detailed firmographics and critically important technology attitudes and strategic planning priorities. This data points to key opportunities and messaging hot buttons for vendors and service providers seeking to match their offerings to SMB market requirements. In light of global recessionary fears and the impact of economic downshifts on business, AMI-Partners has expanded its tracking studies to include several questions pertaining to SMBs' perceptions of their dependence on local, national and global economies as well as their expectations about economic growth. These questions gained added significance in light of the timing of this year's studies, which overlapped with the global financial crisis starting in mid-September. AMI-Partners' studies, thus, present an early picture of an SMB market undergoing a major transition. Given that many SMBs are at the leading edge of this transition, AMI-Partners has included an additional analysis in this year's reports to assess demographics, attitudes, current IT adoption as well as planned IT purchases among "concerned SMBs" compared to the rest of the market. (AMI-Partners defines concerned SBs as those that expect the local/regional economy will get worse in the next one year and concerned MBs as those that expect the local/regional, national or global economy to get worse in the next one year.) For more information about this study, AMI-Partners, or our global SMB research, call 212-944-5100, e-mail [email protected] or visit www.ami-partners.com. About Access Markets International (AMI) Partners, Inc. AMI-Partners specializes in IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services strategy, venture capital, and actionable market intelligence with a strong focus on global small and medium businesses (SMBs), and extending into large enterprises and home-based businesses. The AMI-Partners mission is to empower clients for success with the highest quality data, business strategy perspectives and "go-to-market" solutions. Led by Andy Bose, the firm has built a world-class management team with deep experience cutting across IT, telecommunications and business services sectors in established and emerging markets. AMI-Partners has helped shape the go-to-market SMB strategies of more than 150 leading IT, Internet, telecommunications and business services companies. The firm is well known for its IT and Internet adoption-based segmentation of the SMB markets; its annual retainership services based on global SMB tracking surveys in more than 25 countries; and its proprietary database of SMBs and SMB channel partners in the Americas, Europe and Asia-Pacific. The firm invests significantly in collecting survey-based information from several thousand SMBs annually, and is considered the premier source for global SMB trends and analysis. |
