The Layer 2-3 Ethernet Switch market reached $21 Billion in 2012 with almost all growth coming from data center deployments as spending in campus networks remained weak for most vendors, according to a recent report by Dell’Oro Group.
The report found that Fixed Top-of-Rack (Purpose Built) 10 Gigabit Ethernet revenues grew over 50 percent in 2012, with strong demand from both enterprise data center, and especially Service Provider Cloud customers. Vendors with current Ethernet Switch offerings in this segment include: Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, Enterasys, Extreme, HP, IBM, and Juniper.
“Ethernet Switch Market revenues in 2012 achieved a new record at $21 Billion. However weak spending by the U.S. government as well as a customer preference change caused Modular switching to contract in 2012,” said Alan Weckel, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “We expected a shift towards Fixed as improved stacking and resiliency in Fixed switching helped campus deployments make the shift away from Modular, but we believe the lack of spending by the U.S. government, which typically purchases Modular, was an additional pressure that caused the 2012 weakness. In looking forward to 2013, while we expect the market to grow robustly with strong gains coming from the data center, we expect Modular will not improve significantly,” stated Weckel.
