by Abhijit S. Pandya; Ercan Sen CRC Press, CRC Press LLC
ISBN: 0849331390 Pub Date: 110198
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B. Scale of Market Size and Reward
The larger the size of the current and potential market the more players want to get in and differentiate themselves from the competitors in terms of price and performance via current technology or new
technology, filling a particular gap between interrelated product segments such as the gap between the private LAN networking world and the public telecom world. Additionally, the size of the market also
determines the scale of the reward. Hence, the bigger the reward, the more players are willing to compete for the reward and intrinsically increase the competitiveness of the market.
C. Regulatory Conditions
As the market becomes less regulated by the government, it tends to become more competitive. Deregulation provides new opportunities for more vendors, thus leading to a variety of products.
D. Customer Driven Factors
The customer’s perception of a company and its product determines the success of a product in the marketplace. Understanding the customer’s perception and the selection process used by customers in
the product purchase decision is a key factor to succeed in the marketplace.
A potential customer goes through a process of product selection typically based on multi-level selection criteria. It is very important to understand this selection process and make sure that a product we are
designing matches this selection criteria. The degree of match to this selection process ultimately determines the success of the product. The multi-level selection criteria can be described as:
Level-1 Selection Criteria
Bandwidth demand: This is the main factor that causes a customer to look for new transport equipment to meet the expanding bandwidth demand. Particularly, the business customers mid to large
size corporations and universities tend to exhaust their available bandwidth within a 2 to 3 year period due to expansion of computer networking and software applications requiring higher bandwidth per
user. Rapid expansion of InternetIntranet based communication is moving the traffic from local LAN
Bandwidth Cost: After identifying a set of equipment which fit the demand in terms of bandwidth capacity, the next step is to further narrow the list based on bandwidth cost. Investment in networking
equipment directly affects the financial bottom line of a corporation, i.e., the cost of bandwidth contributes to the operating expenses of a corporation.
Level-2 Selection Criteria
Once the bandwidth capacity and bandwidth cost factors are used to narrow the list of possible equipment, a secondary selection criteria is used to narrow the list further. The secondary selection
criteria include factors such as ease of use, i.e., network management, flexible fault-tolerant features to increase reliability, quality of technicalcustomer support, reliability on on-time delivery and future
prospects of the potential vendors.
In summary, it is important to consider both market and customer driven factors when designing a telecom product and define the features according to the relative importance as mentioned above.
E. Market Trends
