Cisco buoyed by 16G Fibre Channel equipment; Ethernet a potential $10B market

Fibre Channel is the new hotness: Cisco (Nasdaq: CSCO) bucked a downward trend in the SAN (storage area network) equipment market during the second quarter thanks to the introduction of its widely anticipated 16G Fibre Channel ports. The overall SAN equipment market, including Fibre Channel, suffered an 8 percent year-over-year decline, according to Infonetics Research. "Cisco's 16G Fibre Channel ports are finally hitting the market, and we believe its customers' pent-up demand for Fibre Channel inter-switch connection will help push 16G revenue past 8G by the end of 2013," said Michael Howard, Infonetics co-founder and principal analyst for carrier networks. "Meanwhile, Brocade (Nasdaq: BRCD), which enjoyed a similar jump start when it came to market with 16G Fibre Channel in 2011, is settling in for the longer-term 16G replacement of 8G as the speed of choice." Release

Infonetics SAN equipment

Managed telematics approaches ubiquity: SaaS-based telematics systems for commercial vehicle fleets are growing in popularity, according to ABI Research, thanks to their scalability and potential capex/opex savings possible by locating data analysis functions in the cloud rather than in the vehicle. "Virtually all of the major commercial fleet telematics providers have moved to some form of cloud-based system, and are offering SaaS-based services, although there are wide differences in the types of services offered by these companies," said Gareth Owen, principal analyst at ABI Research. "As a result, a number of these companies are reporting an increase in higher-margin software revenues and a corresponding decrease in hardware revenues. However, most SaaS-based revenue lines include a hardware component in the monthly subscription fee although this is not normally broken down." Release

Ethernet drives enterprise growth: Ethernet still plays a critical role in enterprise and carrier operations and will be a $10.1 billion market by 2016, a new report from IDC forecasts. Cost effectiveness, flexibility and "high-bandwidth scalability" are among the reasons cited for the segment's growing popularity. "Today enterprises are increasingly utilizing 100 Mb, Gigabit, 10 Gigabit, and even some 40 Gigabit Ethernet services for their domestic and international WAN networking," said Nav Chander, research manager of U.S. Enterprise Communication Services for IDC. "We are also seeing a lot of U.S. enterprises upgrading their Ethernet bandwidth and adding more applications and business locations on net because of the economics and faster time-to-service compared to the alternatives." One of the fastest-growing requirements from enterprises is the ability to implement high-bandwidth Ethernet connectivity between data centers. Release