According to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Wireless LAN (WLAN) Tracker, the Indian WLAN market had a YoY growth of 8.8 percent during Q4 2020. The market stood at $61.7 million (by vendor revenue) majorly contributed by consumer gateway routers. While enterprise class WLAN took a significant decline of 26.3 percent YoY, the consumer gateway router demand picked rapidly by 57.8 percent YoY to support the growing demand of employees and students working out of their homes.
With a market share of 33.2 percent, TP-Link was the market leader in the WLAN segment during Q4 2020, followed by D-Link due to the rapid increase in demand for consumer gateway routers. Cisco Systems and HP Enterprise were the key vendors driving the market for enterprise class WLAN during Q4 2020.
Sudharsan Raghunathan, Senior Market Analyst, Enterprise Networking, IDC India, says, “With more and more applications moving into cloud, the demand for software defined technologies like SD-WAN is gaining significant adoption in India. The networking ecosystem is undergoing a paradigm shift in terms of vendors partnering with multiple cloud providers that enable seamless access to IaaS and SaaS applications in a secured manner. The usage of on-ramps for cloud has played a very important role in connecting branch sites to cloud applications effectively. The prolonging remote working scenario will also promote more cloud delivered models of SD-WAN wherein employees working from home would be able to access cloud applications without hardware dependency”.
Enterprise class WLAN remains to be most affected segment since the COVID-19 driven lockdown owing to the drop in campus investments. However, the market is opening with multiple enterprises looking out to adopt cloud-driven WLAN that will enable management efficiency. Manufacturing and professional services are the top verticals contributing to the enterprise WLAN business with investments coming from automobiles, and pharmaceutical enterprises. Business from other key verticals like government and education remained slow.