At the moment, the market leader of advanced Ethernet services for local area networks (LANs) is Cisco Systems (News - Alert) Inc., an American corporation that sells networking equipment.

Its network switches, used to connect the network segments, process and route data, placed the company at the top of market for the first quarter of 2012 (Q1), as reported by Telecom Lead America, and revealed by the latest Infonetics Research (News - Alert) quarterly market share and forecast service.

According to an Infonetics Research report, Cisco leads the global Ethernet switch market over competitors like HP and Juniper Networks (News - Alert), two other popular vendors that have seen revenue increase in the Ethernet switch market last quarter.

Overall, Cisco shows it is still the leader in total switch share. Though revenue growth in Ethernet switching has gone down from the previous quarter, it shows a tremendous improvement compared to Q1 last year: a double-digit increase of 14 percent in North America.

These days, businesses choose Cisco’s network switches to inspect data packets, determine the source and destination of each packet and forward them appropriately. With the rapid adoption of 10GbE, the high-speed interconnect of choice for LANS, it is Cisco’s Ethernet switching systems which have proven to meet evolving business requirements and easily support the deployment of new applications.

Cisco offers a range of data center network switches that promote infrastructure scalability, architectural flexibility, reliability and security. In terms of performance and functionality, Cisco offers businesses a good quality-price ratio when compared to other vendors in the 10-Gbit per second (Gbps) market at this time.

Cisco switching systems bring cost-effective solutions to connected users and deliver business value to networked organizations of all sizes and industries.

Although Cisco has suffered a loss of market share after HP acquired 3Com (News - Alert), it has been able to return to the top positions of the Ethernet routing, switching and services market, becoming one of the main providers of 1/10/40/100 Gigabit Ethernet.

Cisco not only leads the carrier Ethernet switch market, but is seeing its revenue climb year after year for its networking equipment for virtualization. 

Cisco supplies switches that can benefit different types of organizations and network structures. To learn more about Cisco products, its series switches and the different models of network switches available, visit http://www.cisco.com and select “Switches” from the Products & Services drop-down menu.