Ethernet switch market reaches record revenue in 2012

USA: According to a recent report by Dell'Oro Group, the trusted source for information about the telecommunications and networking industries, 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.

"Ethernet Switch Market revenues in 2012 achieved a new record at $21 Billion. However weak spending by the US government as well as a customer preference change caused Modular switching to contract in 2012," said Alan Weckel, VP 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 US 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."

The report also shows 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.