Cisco's Catalyst 9000 switches helped fuel campus switching market growth in the first quarter of this year, according to a report by Dell'Oro Group.
In the quarter, Cisco gained five points of revenue share in the market, but that growth was slightly offset by declines by HPE and H3C. HPE's revenue declined in North America "due to a change in market dynamics and sales execution issues, but is expected to recover next quarter," according to Dell'Oro Group's research.
"The worldwide campus switching market grew 6% year-over-year in 1Q 2019, with most of the growth driven by Cisco. Excluding Cisco, the combined revenue of all other vendors declined," said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell'Oro Group, in a statement. "Demand for Cisco's Catalyst 9000 is being driven by customers upgrading older products, but Cisco is still in the early stages of the refresh cycle.
Cisco's Catalyst 9600 campus core switches, which are part of its enterprise networking portfolio, are purpose built for cloud scale networking. Cisco started offering the Catalyst 9000 series switches two years ago.
"Dell'Oro Group has a long history of tracking Cisco's Catalyst switch business, and our analysis of historical data indicates that only a small fraction of the installed base been refreshed so far," said Boujelbene.
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Dell'Oro's report said that growth took place across all regions—with the exception of China—in the first quarter, and that 2.5Gbps/5.0 Gbps shipments nearly doubled year over year, surpassing more than one million ports.