June 06, 2008
Infonetics Research: 10G Ethernet Rises Despite a Low Market in 1Q
By Arvind Arora, TMCnet Contributor
According to a report by communications market research firm, Infonetics Research (News - Alert), sales of Ethernet
switches have come down 4 percent sequentially in the first quarter of 2008. However, the company did see a rise of 9 percent year-over-year from the first quarter of 2007; meaning the overall status of switch market is good. The Ethernet switch market usually registers a downfall in the first and fourth quarters.
switches have come down 4 percent sequentially in the first quarter of 2008. However, the company did see a rise of 9 percent year-over-year from the first quarter of 2007; meaning the overall status of switch market is good. The Ethernet switch market usually registers a downfall in the first and fourth quarters. The report, “Ethernet and Application Switches”, believes that Ethernet switch market made $4.3 billion globally in first quarter of the year 2008, and worldwide revenue is expected to have a slow, yet incremental growth every year till at least 2011.
Matthias Machowinski from Infonetics Research said that the fears of economic uncertainty impacting the switch market haven’t proved to be true so far, although some vendors posted dismal sequential results, seasonality was the main cause. He added that at this point, there isn’t any solid evidence to reduce the outlook for the Ethernet and Applications switches market.
The report also underlines some other key results, including that a large number of the Ethernet and application switch market segments didn’t fare well in 1Q08. Two emerging segments, fixed managed layer 10G Ethernet ports and 1G Ethernet unmanaged ports, have defied the downward trend and shown strong growth in the quarter. They have also seen a general rise in average selling prices (ASPs) for most categories, and port speeds has been observed as a positive indication.
Cisco's (News - Alert) Ethernet switch revenue has fallen by 1 percent sequentially in the quarter, which is seen as a good performance as various company competitors have fallen, and the global application switch revenue has dropped 7 percent in from the last quarter of 2007.
The report by Infonetics has made an analysis of application switches and Ethernet switches on the basis of different parameters like fixed configuration, viz., unmanaged vs. managed with a layer 2 vs. layer 3 split, chassis, and Power over Ethernet (PoE) by form factor and speed.
The market share and forecasts made in the reports are updated quarterly and cover all regions. The companies taken into consideration under the analysis consist of various names like 3Com (News - Alert)/H3C, Adtran, Alcatel-Lucent, Blade, Cisco, Citrix Netscaler, D-Link, Extreme, F5, Force10, Foundry, Huawei, Linksys, NETGEAR, Nortel, ProCurve, Radware and SMC, to name a few.
Arvind Arora is a contributing editor for TMCnet. To read more of Arvind’s articles, please visit his columnist page.
