Infotech Lead India: Cisco is leading the worldwide Ethernet switch market (Layer 2/3) in Q3 2012 with 62.2 percent share.
HP, the second largest player in the Ethernet switch market, has 9.3 percent market share.
While Alcatel-Lucent’s market share stands at 3.1 percent, Juniper and Brocade own share of 2.7 and 2.4 percent, respectively.
In Q3 2012, Cisco clocked year-over-year decrease from 65.6 percent in third quarter of 2011.
Cisco’s market share in the fast growing 10GbE market segment stands at 68.5 percent in 3Q12.
IDC said overall market suffered from increased macroeconomic uncertainty and weakness in the public sector in many regions.
The worldwide Ethernet switch market (Layer 2/3) reached $5.36 billion in the third quarter of 2012, down 4.4 percent year-over-year compared to Q3 2011.
Ethernet switch market increased in the mid to high single digit range, year over year, in Latin America, Japan, Central & Eastern Europe, and Middle East & Africa (MEA). On the other hand, Asia/Pacific (excluding Japan) was down overall with the market declining 3.5 percent year over year, whereas the U.S. declined 6.4 percent and Western Europe decreased more significantly just over 10 percent year over year in 3Q12.
“The surprising decline in the Ethernet switch market after several quarters of positive growth is a result of several factors, but the highlight was that the slower growth in the 10GbE core segment of the market could not completely offset the decline in the network edge/access segment,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC.
10GbE switch (Layer 2/3) revenue increased 10.7 percent year over year while 10GbE port shipments grew a remarkable 61.4 percent year over year to just under 3.5 million ports in 3Q12, and continue to be the main driver of the overall Ethernet switch market.
The Layer 4-7 switching market worldwide grew at 6.9 percent year over year to reach $414.9 million in 3Q12.
Meanwhile, the worldwide Router market declined 0.2 percent year over year. Regionally, the market saw a very strong 21.5 percent growth in Middle East & Africa and solid mid to high single digit increases were experienced in Asia/Pacific (including Japan) and the U.S. On the other hand, Central & Eastern Europe was down 8.7 percent year over year, Latin America declined 12.2 percent year over year, and Western Europe dropped 20.8 percent.
Where is the future?
IDC said 10GbE along with the emerging 40GbE Ethernet switch segments are the ones to watch as growth in virtualized applications and converged infrastructure will continue to drive the need for advanced networks in datacenter buildouts.
Petr Jirovský, senior research analyst in IDC’s Networking Trackers Group, said: “The overall market drivers, such as proliferation of video traffic on the network, and the need to support mobility and BYOD at the network edge will continue to keep the enterprise networking market relevant over the longer term.”
