Thread: Wireless Access Solutions

The growth of this market is closely associated with the growth of laptops, because it's the combination of both that gives a truly mobile solution. Two key players dominate the market, according to our survey, as far as top of mind recall, future likelihood of purchase, or current ownership are concerned. These are (no prizes for guessing) Cisco and D-Link. Out of these, again, Cisco is the winner of the Users' Choice award, being the most future ready brand. Before we get into the individual brands and how they fared, let's look at the market condition based on our survey. The demand for wireless access solutions is growing by leaps and bounds, as suggested by our survey. Last year, only 35% of 100% the users said that they were likely to purchase a wireless solution.

The remaining 65% were either not sure of which solution to purchase, or had no plans for the same. This year however, that figure has almost doubled to 64%. This is possibly due to the rapid growth witnessed by the laptops market. With more WiFi enabled laptops in the market, there's a greater demand on CIOs to offer them connectivity on the move. Coming back to the key brands in this segment, D-Link has improved its position as compared to last year. While it had a score of 48% on the future readiness index last year, this year it's gone up to a whopping 77%.



It has also become a more persuasive brand as compared to last year, though Cisco is still the most persuasive. D-Link's brand pull situation however, is a concern area. It had higher brand pull than Cisco last year. This year, the situation is exactly the reverse. Brand pull is the ratio of users likely to switch-in over users likely to switch out. So obviously higher switch-ins than switch outs is what's desired. Here, although both are gaining brand pull (more switch-ins than outs), D-Link's success ratio in the same is well below that of Cisco's. The brand loyalty situation is also very interesting. Although both Cisco an D-Link have improved their brand loyalty as compared to last year, the number of CIOs who said that they're likely to switch to another brand has increased. Last year, this shift out percentage was only 4% for both brands.

This year, likely switch out of Cisco has reached 11% and for D-Link, it's 19%. The next obvious question is where are the likely shifts happening to? A majority of them are happening to the other, (i.e. existing Cisco users likely to switch to DLink and vice versa), while some of them are shifting to other lesser known brands. A few other brands that could not make it to the Users' Choice club were 3Com, Nortel, Enterasys, and HP ProCurve.