Cisco’s Dominant Share of Switching & Routers Holds Steady

RENO, NV, February 24, 2016

New Q4 data from Synergy Research Group shows that Cisco’s share of the total worldwide switching and router market was 56%, with shares in the individual segments ranging from 69% for enterprise routers to 42% for service provider routers. For the full year Cisco’s market share was also 56%, 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 had an overall switching and router market share of 6-8% in Q4. There is a reasonably long tail of other vendors but none has an overall market share in excess of 2%. Worldwide switching and router revenues approached $11 billion in Q4 and were $41 billion for the full year. Total 2015 revenues were up 3% 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% of the total, followed by service provider routers and enterprise routers. In Q4 North America remained the biggest region accounting for well over 40% 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. Part of the thinking behind Cisco’s partnership with Ericsson is to help it strengthen its sales channel into service providers and to further increase its share of this market segment.”