Week in Research: Cisco, HP battle for enterprise router supremacy; Q2 broadband CPE rises 5.6%

Enterprise routers get competitive: According to Infonetics' Q2 2011 Ethernet Switches and Enterprise Routers market share report, Ethernet switch sales were up 6 percent to $4.4 billion worldwide, but have declined 3 percent year-over-year from Q2 2010. Meanwhile, Ethernet switch port shipments were up 8 percent sequentially and 11 percent year-over-year in Q2 2011, reflecting ASP declines due to heavy competition. Of course, Cisco and HP remain the top contenders for the top spot in the market segment. "While the battle is mostly playing out between Cisco and HP, other vendors are caught in the crossfire, with declining ASPs being one side effect. In the switch market, we expect this to result in stagnating revenue despite robust demand in 2011," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise networks and video at Infonetics Research. Release

Infonetics Ethernet switch vendors 2011

Broadband expansion boosts CPE sales: Aggressive broadband buildouts by cable and telcos drove an uptick in broadband CPE sales in Q2 2011, says In-Stat in its Q2'11 Broadband CPE Database: By Region, Product, Technology, and Vendor report. During the quarter 39.8 million CPE units were shipped, a 5.6 percent increase over Q1 and a 13.9% increase from the same quarter in 2010. However, total CPE revenues were only $1.49 billion, a 3.1 percent decrease from Q1 2011 and down 1.4 percent from Q2 2011. "In terms of overall unit shipment market share growth, TP-LINK continues to gain market share growing over 20% while NETGEAR also gained that amount," says "Pace and Cisco Small Business also experienced market share gains from the previous quarter."

Data center networking sales continue to rise: During the period between Q2 2010 and Q2 2011, Synergy Research reports that the data center equipment market grew 10 percent with an annual growth rate that's closer to 20 percent. Cisco led data center segment with a 49 percent market share, with Brocade and Juniper not far behind. In the computing equipment segment of data center networking, IBM and HP accounted for over 30 percent. However, the data center storage equipment remains fragmented with EMC commanding the segment with a 25 percent market share followed by five other vendors that have market shares between 8-13 percent. Release

Flexibility drives softswitch: Service providers are more open to deploying softswitches in their respective networks because there's less reduced risk of vendor lock-in and they are not dependent on any hardware components like traditional TDM-based network switches. During the period 2010-2014, Technavio forecasts the softswitch market will grow at a CAGR of 13.5 percent. Release