[May 24, 2012] IDC's Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Networks Tracker Highlights Ethernet Switch Results Tweet May 24, 2012 (Close-Up Media via COMTEX) -- The International Data Corp. (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Enterprise Networks Tracker revealed that the worldwide Ethernet switch market (Layer 2/3) reached $5.1 billion in the first quarter of 2012 (1Q12), representing strong growth of 7.4 percent year over year. Meanwhile, the worldwide router market increased a more modest 2.8 percent year over year in 1Q12. According to a release, the preliminary 1Q12 results also show strong Ethernet switch market growth in Latin America, which increased 24.6 percent year over year, and a solid performance in Asia/Pacific and in North America, up 9.2 percent and 7.1 percent year over year respectively. On the other hand, Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) was relatively soft and increased just 4.2 percent year over year in 1Q12. "The positive market performance in the first quarter of 2012 speaks well to the network infrastructure needs of enterprise IT as it embraces cloud technologies," said Rohit Mehra, director, Enterprise Communications Infrastructure at IDC. "While Gigabit Ethernet is alive and well at the network edge supporting a myriad of applications, it is 10GbE along with the emerging 40GbE that will continue to drive incremental growth in datacenter and campus core deployments." 10GbE switch (Layer 2/3) revenue increased 20.6 percent year over year and 10GbE port shipments grew to a record 2.8 million ports in the quarter and continue to drive the overall market growth. The Layer 4-7 switching market in 1Q12 also grew at 21.1 percent year over year to reach $388.7 million, although it stayed relatively flat over the previously strong seasonal quarter. The 1Q12 worldwide Router market increased 2.8 percent year over year. This was an improvement over the results from the previous quarter (4Q11) when the overall router market was down 3.9 percent on an annual basis. Regionally, the 14.7 percent growth in North America, 10.8 percent increase in Latin America, and 5.1 percent growth in Asia/Pacific were offset by a decline of 14.7 percent in EMEA in 1Q12. From a vendor perspective, Cisco's Ethernet switch (Layer 2/3) market share in 1Q12 came in at 65.1 percent reflecting a significant year-over-year improvement from 63.0 percent in 1Q11. Cisco's market share in the 10GbE market segment stands at 69.4 percent in 1Q12. A graphic showing the 1Q12 market shares of the top 5 vendors in the worldwide Ethernet switch market is available at IDC.com. The chart is intended for public use in online news articles and social media. Instructions on how to embed this graphic can be found by viewing this press release on IDC.com. "The Ethernet switch market continued to build on its momentum established in the second half of last year. The year-over-year growth in 1Q12 was the highest since the fourth quarter of 2010," said Petr Jirovsky, senior research analyst in IDC's Networking Trackers Group. "The overall market drivers, such as proliferation of video traffic on the network, are mitigating to a large extent the increased macroeconomic uncertainty and weakness in the public sector in many regions." More information: www.idc.com ((Comments on this story may be sent to [email protected])) [ Back To TMCnet.com's Homepage ]