It looks like green tendrils of recovery are sprouting throughout the economy, and a recent report by Dell’ (News - Alert)Oro Group, which focuses on the networking and telecommunications industries, shows the Ethernet switch market is one of those.

 

The market research firm’s study resulted in a forecast of a return to growth in 2010, which should “continue to grow annually through 2014.”

 

This growth is expected to come in large part from sales of Ethernet switches optimized for larger datacenter deployments that are being driven by virtualization, together with the improved economics of fewer, larger datacenters, according to the study.

 

“We believe the performance of the datacenter will drive growth in the Ethernet Switch market over the next five years,” said Alan Weckel, director of Dell’Oro Group: “For the data center, we expect above-market growth with modest port growth and significant revenue growth during the forecast period.”

 

The sector has been tipped for recovery before. In September TMC (News - Alert) contributing writer Vivek Naik reported that the Ethernet switch market “experienced a rebound in the second quarter of 2009, with North America reportedly having the largest sequential quarter-over-quarter gain of 19 percent, according to the latest market research analysis and report by Infonetics Research (News - Alert).”

 

That study, Naik wrote, found that the “Ethernet switch market grew by five percent sequentially quarter-over-quarter in 2Q09 to register revenue of $3.4 billion globally, and that Web-managed Ethernet switch revenue and port shipments increased to more than 10 percent in Q209.”

 

Weckel admitted that the industry is still “very early” in the migration towards 10 GE for server connectivity, but said “we believe that we will see 10 Gigabit Ethernet as a catalyst for growth in the Ethernet switch market.”

 

The report also shows the Fixed 10 Gigabit Ethernet revenues are projected to grow the most during the forecast period. Which comes as music to the ears of 3Com/H3C, Arista, Blade, Brocade, Cisco (News - Alert), Extreme, Force 10, HP, Juniper and other vendors with current Ethernet switch offering.