IDC Reports Impressive Growth in Global Ethernet Switch Market

By Frank Griffin
Contributing Writer

The Ethernet switch market is segmented by speed, starting with 100Mb and going up to 1000Mb, 10Gb, 40Gb and 100Gb, which is measured in vendor revenue, value, and port shipments. On the other hand, the router market is segmented by product, deployment and conductivity, which is measured in vendor revenue, value, and unit shipments. In evaluating the global Ethernet switch and router market, the International Data Corporation (IDC (News - Alert)) Worldwide Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker and Worldwide Quarterly Router Tracker reports across different perspectives, including geography and vendors. The result was a tepid growth of 3.5 percent growth Year-over-Year (YoY) in the Fourth Quarter of 2016 (4Q16) for Ethernet switch and 1.5 percent for the router market.

As reported by IDC, global Ethernet switch market (Layer 2/3) recorded $6.7 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2016 (4Q16), with a total of $24.4 billion in revenue for the year, which was a full year growth rate of 2.4 percent. The router market for enterprise and service provider (SP) recorded $3.87 billion in revenue in 4Q16, an increase of 1.5 percent YoY basis. For the whole year, the growth was 1.3 percent with $14.58 billion total global revenue.

There were different results in mature and emerging markets, with Belgium at 33.5 percent, United Arab Emirates at 34.2 percent, India 23.9 percent and Peru at 54.2 percent. While some individual countries fared much better than others, the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region was the highest at 20.6 percent, followed by Asia/Pacific at 8.2 percent, Western Europe at 7.0 percent and Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) at 3.8 percent.

The Americas declined as a whole. North America decreased by 2.6 percent and Latin America by 4.4 percent.

“As the Ethernet switching market reaches a greater level of maturity from 1GbE to 10GbE, it is increasingly characterized by customers moving more quickly to higher speeds at lower port costs, especially in the datacenter. While overall port shipments continue to grow, it is the revenues from the fastest speeds that continue to buoy the market,” said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

When it comes to vendors, Cisco (News - Alert) still held the number one spot with a market share of 55.6 percent, even though this was a decline of 2.8 percent YoY for the 4Q16. Huawei holds the second position far behind at only 9.9 percent of the market share; however, the company's revenue rose by 67.8 percent YoY. Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE), Arista Networks and Juniper made up the remaining vendors in the IDC report.