According to a recent report published by market research firm Dell’Oro Group, the layer 2-3 ethernet switch market reached $21 billion in 2012.
The maximum growth for the market was driven by the data center network deployments, as spending in campus networks remained weak for majority of the vendors.
Alan Weckel, vice-president, Dell?Oro Group, says, ?Weak spending by the US government as well change in customer preference resulted in the market for modular switching contracting in 2012. We were expecting a shift towards fixed switching in campus deployments as it offers improved stacking and resiliency. However, the lack of spending by the US government, affected the shift from modular to fixed switching in 2012.?
As per the report findings the fixed top-of-rack (purpose built) 10 gigabit ethernet revenues increased by 50 per cent in 2012. This segment witnessed strong demand from both enterprise data center, and especially service provider cloud customers. Leading vendors with offerings in the ethernet switch market include Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Avaya, Brocade, Cisco, Dell, Enterasys, Extreme, HP, IBM, and Juniper Networks.
In 2013, Dell?Oro expects the market to register a robust growth on account of strong demand for data centres. However, it expects marginal increase in the sale of modular switches.
