Cisco holds dominance of global router and switch market

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco’s share of the total worldwide switching and router market was 56 percent, with shares in the individual segments ranging from 69 percent for enterprise routers to 42 percent for service provider routers.

For the full year, Cisco’s market share was also 56 percent, the same as it achieved in 2014. Behind Cisco the ranking of vendors was different in each of the three main segments but in aggregate Cisco is followed by Juniper, HPE, Huawei and ALU.

Each of these had an overall switching and router market share of 6-8 percent in Q4. “There is a reasonably long tail of other vendors but none has an overall market share in excess of 2 percent,” said Synergy.

Worldwide switching and router revenues approached $11 billion in Q4 and were $41 billion for the full year. Total 2015 revenues were up 3 percent from 2014 with most of the growth coming from enterprise Ethernet switching.

Enterprise Ethernet switching is also the largest of the three segments accounting for almost 60 percent of the total, followed by service provider routers and enterprise routers.

In Q4, North America remained the biggest region accounting for well over 40 percent of worldwide revenues, followed by EMEA, APAC and Latin America. North America’s share of the worldwide market also increased by over half a percentage point from Q4 of the previous year.

In Q4 some of the highest growth rates were seen in service provider routers in Latin America and enterprise routers in EMEA.

“Despite challenges on a variety of fronts, Cisco is successfully maintaining its position as the dominant supplier of switching and router technology with revenues about seven times the size of its nearest rival,” said Jeremy Duke, Synergy Research Group’s founder.

“This dominance is more pronounced on the enterprise side, where HPE is the only other vendor with a double-digit market share, while on the service provider side ALU, Juniper and Huawei are all pushing hard and all have double-digit market shares.”

Duke added: “Part of the thinking behind Cisco’s partnership with Ericsson [recently covered on ChannelBiz] is to help it strengthen its sales channel into service providers and to further increase its share of this market segment.”

@AntonySavvas