8 | Business World Magazine |
April 2014
EXECUTIVE
SUMMARY
IDC: Cloud-Managed Wi-Fi Market
to Reach $2.5 Billion by 2018
As the traditional worldwide enterprise
wireless local area network (WLAN) market
experiences relative maturation and the lofty
gains of the past two years begin to flatten,
the WLAN market for cloud-managed Wi-
Fi presents notable growth opportunities in
both hardware and services. According to
new research from International Data Cor-
poration (IDC), worldwide cloud-managed
infrastructure and managed services revenue
will reach $653 million in 2014 and $2.5 bil-
lion by 2018.
In recent years, cloud-managed Wi-Fi
growth has been fueled by increased adop-
tion in the midmarket and distributed enter-
prise (e.g., retail, K-12 education).
“Enterprises are seeing the big picture and
definitely considering cloud-managed Wi-Fi
for their remote sites when upgrading their
networks,” said Rohit Mehra, IDC’s vice
president of network infrastructure. “These
upgraded network architectures can accom-
modate unique needs around bring your
own device (BYOD), scalability, application
visibility and management.”
Today, having a strong, robust wireless
network is mandatory for enterprises, and
the proliferation of BYOD and mission-
critical network applications has helped
drive new wireless LAN deployments within
a growing number of enterprise segments.
Cloud-managedWi-Fi, with its central man-
