The L2-3 Ethernet Switch market is forecast to approach $25 billion in 2017, with future growth to be driven primarily by sales of higher speed Ethernet switches optimized for larger data center deployments, according to a recent report from Dell’Oro Group. The report expects a quick migration to 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet at the core of the data center.
The report also shows that Fixed and Modular 10 Gigabit Ethernet port shipments are expected to expand beyond the data center to campus devices, such as high-end workstations and 802.11ac access points.
“The data center will be the site of almost all revenue growth during the forecast horizon, as the Cloud forever changes how networks are built. In general, we are moving toward a period of data center consolidation and change, where there will be fewer, larger, data centers and the ownership of data center equipment will change,” said Alan Weckel, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “At the same time, single vendor wins at these large data centers will be sufficient to shift market share in the overall market as well as vendor ranking in individual segments. We expect many large-magnitude Cloud wins throughout the forecast period and believe a dominant Cloud provider could apply significant pricing pressure on this market and the vendor(s) it selects,” Weckel stated.
