"The sweet spot continues to be midrange products," said Brad Nisbet, program manager, IDC Storage Systems. "A lot of the features and functionality once only in the high end has migrated its way down to lower segments of market. That combined with the fact that many midrange products offer multiple tiers of storage is driving the growth."

Multiple-tiered storage is helping users to address such challenges as data protection and business continuity, Nisbet said.

Networking

Networking has been dominated by IP telephony and convergence as well as growing areas such as network optimization which we haven't included in this year's awards as its still an emerging market.

The overall enterprise telephony equipment market in Asia Pacific has grown 8 percent in Q3 2005 compared to 2Q 2005 in terms of revenues, according to IDC. This increase was mainly attributed to the 16 percent quarter-over-quarter growth in the IP telephony equipment segment. The migration to IP continued with 3Q 2005 sales of IP telephony equipment again overtaking sales of traditional telephony in mature markets in Asia at 58 percent IP versus 42 percent Time Division Multiplexing (TDM). In the overall Asia/Pacific region, one out of every four telephony lines shipped were IP.