By?Edd K. Usman
A US-based network solutions company remains bullish about the Philippines, betting on the growth of the business process outsourcing (BPO) sector to fuel demand for its products.
With call centers increasingly being ?transformed into data centers,? the BPO sector?s reliance on critical infrastructure will grow, Harry Woo, managing director and SVP of Panduit for Asia Pacific, explained.
Citing a study of the Economist Intelligence Unit, the Philippines? BPO industry ? which already has a 12.6 percent share of the global market ? is expected to grow at 6.5 to 7.5 percent by end of 2017, Woo said.?In turn, this growth is expected to increase demand for its products and solutions, he added.
?A resilient and agile critical infrastructure is vital for the success of any technology-backed service,? said the executive of Panduit, the market leader in the network infrastructure business in the Philippines.
Established in 1955, the company in 1997 opened its first office in the country, where it currently enjoys a 37 percent market share.?Panduit started with electrical infrastructure business and then expanded to cover cabling structures, supporting data needs for local organizations. It now has a strong distribution network propped up by 81 installation partners in 23 cities.
Among its many Philippine customers include those in industries like hospitality and entertainment (Resorts World); health (St. Luke’s Medical Center); BPO (Convergys and Teletech); and transportation (Ninoy Aquino International Airport (NAIA) Terminal 3 Project.
On Nov. 20, Panduit introduced its OM5 Signature Core Solutions to the Philippine market.
The OM5 Signature Core Solutions has channels of signals and its reach is 15 percent longer that standard OM5 with Signature Core Solutions, company executives said.?If a new data center?s fiber cables are not future-proof, its operations will slow down as it accepts more data.
But by using OM5 Signature Core Solutions, the data center can accept the increase of data, preventing the slowdown of operations, Thomas Poh, Panduit director, said.
?If you don’t lay big (or long) enough, you are limiting your future growth of the traffic,? Poh explained. ?The trend that we see, the uses of data, the consumption of data, is increasing exponentially. OM5 is already huge in terms of fiber; moving forward, OM5 supports four channels, four times in simple terms over OM4.?
He said OM5 was designed to support next-generation Ethernet data rate of 400 GB/s transmission.
