Ethernet switch market up 2%: IDC
The worldwide Ethernet switch market grew 2%, racking up revenues of $6.29 billion in the third quarter, according to IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker and Worldwide Quarterly Router Tracker reports.
Router revenues, meantime, rose 2.6%, to $3.56 billion as enterprises and service providers beefed up their infrastructures.
Cisco continued to see erosion in its Ethernet switch market share, IDC said, with the vendor now capturing 57% of the market, down 6.5% from Q3 2015 totals. Hewlett Packard Enterprise’s switch sales also fell, but Juniper Networks and Arista Networks both saw increases in Ethernet switch sales, with Arista notching a 31.5% hike in revenues year over year. Huawei’s Ethernet switch sales almost doubled in the period; the Chinese vendor now has 7.2% of the switching market.
“Recent macro-economic developments and maturing IT architectures have led to a spectrum of reactions by IT decision-makers across the regions with regard to Ethernet switching investments in 3Q 16,” said Rohit Mehra, IDC’s vice president of network infrastructure, in a statement. “Strong growth in the 40 GbE and 100 GbE segments specific to data center deployments brought a degree of stabilization to a market in transition where the enterprise campus market for switching declined.”
40 GbE switch sales grow
IDC said 10 GbE switch sales dropped 1.3% year over year, to $2.22 billion, while 40 GbE switch revenue jumped 20%, to $756.4 million. The two Ethernet switch market standards are now being joined by an emerging 100 GbE switch market, which saw a tripling in revenues on an annualized basis in the third quarter of the year. One-GbE switch revenue dropped 4.3% year over year, IDC said.
The increase in router sales was sparked by an 8.2% increase in enterprise routing, IDC said, cautioning that the market bears close review as more companies evaluate the use of new SD-WAN technologies.
“Software-defined network architectures and network transformation for the digital economy are among the factors shaking up the core network infrastructure segments,” said Petr Jirovsky, IDC’s research manager, Worldwide Networking Trackers, in a statement.