Cisco, Juniper, Huawei and Nokia have set themselves apart from router and switch pack, commanding nearly 86% of the worldwide revenue market share for the router and carrier Ethernet switching (CES) segments.
Michael Howard, senior research director and advisor of carrier networks at IHS Markit, said in the research company’s latest Router and Switch Survey that this quartet of vendors forms “a top tier separated by a wide margin from other router and switch vendors.”
Specifically, respondents to IHS’ survey named these four vendors as leaders in next-generation routing technologies such as 100 Gigabit Ethernet (GE), virtual router (vRouter) and IP data center interconnect (DCI).
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This group of vendors led five of the carrier respondent’s vendor selection criteria: price-to-performance ratio, product reliability, service and support, technology innovation and product roadmap.
Howard said “there was a big gap between these four and their competitors, with the sole exception being price-to-performance ratio.”
There were differences between the vendors in terms of individual vendor selection criteria.
Nokia topped the carriers’ survey response for product reliability and service and support, followed by Cisco and Juniper. On the technology innovation and product roadmap front, Cisco and Nokia were numbers one and two, respectively. Finally, for the price-to-performance ratio, China's Huawei was named number one and ZTE took the number two spot.
Cisco, Juniper, Huawei and Nokia also led in other categories including unaided awareness, familiarity (or aided awareness), and equipment installed and under evaluation. Likewise, these vendors ranked at the top when survey respondents named leaders in next-gen routing technologies including 100GE, vRouter and IP DCI.