The global carrier routing and switching market grew a solid 3.1% year-on-year during the second quarter to $3 billion, driven by strong demand in the core routing segment, ACG Research estimates.
Core routing sales grew 12.5% over the same period to $638 million. Edge and switching revenues grew a more modest 0.9% to $2.4 billion, but sales still rose 8.7% from the first quarter.
Huawei was the strong performer among the top five vendors during the quarter, increasing its market share by 1.7 percentage points year-on-year.
Brocade's market share increased by 0.5 points and Cisco's by 0.3 points, while Juniper's share contracted by 1 point and Alcatel-Lucent's by 1.8 points.
One trend helping to drive growth in the market is providers focusing on networks that connect data centers, ACG Research CEO Ray Mota said. It is expected that by 2019 there will be 60% more data centers in metropolitan areas than there are today, and data center interconnect volumes will increase by more than 400%.
“Despite so many POCs in SDN and NFV being deployed, the overall market still needs scalable reliable routers for providers’ critical services,” Mota said.
“Routers aren't going away any time soon. What we will see is a variety of physical and virtual deployments with expanded TAM into Webscalers that need carrier-grade virtual routers and high-performance MPLS switching.”