Analytical company International Data Corporation (IDC) published the results of a study of the world market of network equipment. Sales of switches and routers grow quite confidently.
According to experts, in the second quarter of 2017, the volume of Ethernet switches (Layer 2/3) increased by 7.8% year-on-year and globally reached 6.43 billion dollars. Quarterly sales of routers to telecommunications operators and corporate users increased by 6.7%, reaching 3.92 billion dollars.
Analysts are going to closely monitor the development of demand for routers in the coming quarters, as software-defined architectures begin to capture corporate WAN-networks, and technology SD-WAN can affect traditional routing architectures, the study said.
From the geographical point of view, the best dynamics in the switches was recorded in the countries of the Middle East and Africa, and also in the Asia-Pacific region (excluding Japan), where in April-June 2017 there was an increase of 16.8%.
In Europe, network equipment sales increased by 5.5%, largely due to a 142.6% increase in Greece and 48.1% in Hungary.
"The surge in digital transformation projects and the continued proliferation of cloud computing contributed to strong market performance in the second quarter of 2017," said Rohit Mehra, vice president of network infrastructure research at IDC,. - These transformational trends lead to an increase in the supply of ports, and the prospect of increasing the speeds of these ports is constantly changing the dynamics of investments in Ethernet switches. Strong growth should continue throughout 2017, even if trends in consumer behavior regarding switches and routers will change ".
The largest manufacturer of Ethernet switches is Cisco, whose market share in the second quarter of 2017 reached 54.7% against 56.8% a year earlier. In the segment of routers, Cisco products accounted for 41.2% of equipment shipments, while in April-June 2016 it was about a 44.8%.
The three largest manufacturers of switching devices include Huawei and Hewlett Packard Enterprise with indicators of 8.5% and 5.6% respectively. The fourth place for Arista Networks (5.5%), the fifth - for Juniper Networks (4.3%), according to IDC data for the second quarter of 2017.