With changes and uncertainty in the global landscape – Brexit, President-elect Donald Trump, country leaders resigning – 2017 could be the year of massive change as businesses loosen their purse strings and invest, or organizations reduce spending while waiting to gauge the impact of changes. Even with these two different scenarios, we see a few trends for the coming year in business enterprise network infrastructure.
Cloud Migration
Service providers, enterprises and data center owners began a migration of applications to the cloud and we see this increasing over the next year.
A recent IDC survey indicates that currently 41 percent of a company’s IT budget is allocated to cloud versus outsourcing or in-house. The survey indicates that in 24 months, that will increase to 47 percent. In Asia Pacific region excluding Japan, spending on public cloud services in particular will grow at a 22.9% compound annual growth rate (CAGR), which is almost six times the rate of overall IT spending growth - from nearly US$7 billion in 2015 more than doubling to US$15 billion in 2019.
Nonetheless, we believe there also will be a build out of private clouds for those industries that have regulatory requirements or their legacy networks do not allow them to go to a full public cloud at this time.
Capital Decisions
The lease versus buy and capital expenditure versus operating expenditure debate is ongoing with businesses. Throughout the next year, we see service providers and enterprises looking at options to building their own networks as they explore colocation (or multi-tenant) options for data centers and leasing office buildings.
By 2018, IDC predicts that 45 percent of the ICT spending in enterprises will be on a mix of colocation, hosted and public cloud datacenters in order to react to changing data use patterns in Asia Pacific; this has been a consistent and ongoing trend for the past couple of years but we see the gap closing in 2017 as enterprises shift from ‘build you own’ to multi-tenant data centers.
Security
Security is part of every business and IT discussion these days and it will only become more intense in 2017. We see an increase in the demand for video for surveillance, both for government and private businesses. This issue includes physical security—securing the building, people and assets—as well as network and data security.
Network Convergence
The trends of capital investments and security are also impacting another area that we see as big trend in 2017—network convergence. Take buildings, for example. What was traditionally just hardwired for data and voice is now being retrofitted or designed new with wireless in mind. Building owners and operators are looking at the co-existence of wireless and wireline for the coming year but will consider the new radio spectrum, both licensed and unlicensed, that is coming available as well as new technologies that enable the universal ceiling.
As this convergence happens, we see a greater focus in 2017 on consolidation and partnerships (creating an ecosystem) to address these needs.
Gavin Milton-White is Vice President Asia Pacific Enterprise at CommScope