“In previous years,” says Steven Foster, EMEA marketing manager with Siemon, “structured cabling has often been seen as just another part of the building, like the electrical wires and water pipes. However, over recent years it has been regularly reported in the press that a high proportion of network downtime is due to faults and mistakes at the physical (cabling) infrastructure layer. Management in all business disciplines now understand the crippling effect that IT downtime can have – with cost implications from £1,000s to £multi-millions per hour of network downtime.
“The results of this in-depth research clearly show that end users have realised the critical role cabling infrastructure plays in running the IT applications now demanded by the business world. Rather than just part of the building, the LAN is finally being recognised as a mission critical part of the IT provision,” said Foster. “With 10Gigabit/s equipment now imminent, the sensitivity and performance of the infrastructure is brought into sharp focus and this research proves that quality is now uppermost in the minds of IT decision makers when choosing their structured cabling,” he said.
“The findings confirm our core business strategy of offering only the highest performing products in the marketplace, built to an incredibly high quality standard,” he added.
Another interesting result from the survey, which mainly focused on large multinationals, is that price came in sixth position, ranked in lower priority than warranty and the availability of localised support services, proving that the structured cabling market understands the major technological advances the industry has made in recent years.
“What we are now witnessing is a mature market with a well-informed customer base able to make educated decisions on their structured cabling purchases. Gone are the days when decisions were based solely on price as a result of cabling being seen as a commodity. Many now realise the physical layer is critical to the overall performance of the IT network and is the infrastructure over which all equipment and applications run,” he said.
Foster went on to say that Siemon has been in the cabling business for more than 100 years and were Category 5e pioneers back in 1994, breaking new ground by being first to market with Category 6/class e products in 1998, and Category 7/class F TERA offerings a year later. “We are ISO 9001:2000 and 14001 approved and offer some of the highest quality and most technologically advanced products in the industry,” he said.
“It is only by IT and business decision makers grasping the absolute mission criticality of the LAN cabling – on which every single aspect of IT and the business operation relies – that they will see the end of unacceptable network downtime and the massive loss of working hours and profits that can be caused. This realisation is ideal for companies such as Siemon which specialise at the high performance, mission critical end of the market.”