40-, 100 Gigabit Ethernet seen topping $4B by 2017, driven by cloud

Dell’Oro Group is forecasting that, within the larger Ethernet switch market, revenues for 40 Gigabit Ethernet and 100 Gigabit Ethernet will exceed $4 billion by 2017.

According to the firm's latest research, the L2-3 Ethernet Switch market is forecast to approach $25B in 2017, with future growth to be driven primarily by sales of higher speed Ethernet switches optimized for larger data center deployments, as the core of the data center quickly migrates to 40 Gigabit and 100 Gigabit Ethernet.

“The data center will be the site of almost all revenue growth during the forecast horizon, as the cloud forever changes how networks are built," comments Alan Weckel, vice president at Dell’Oro Group. "In general, we are moving toward a period of data center consolidation, where there will be fewer, larger data centers and the ownership of data center equipment will change.”

See: Report says cloud will forever change data center switch market

Weckel continues, “At the same time, single vendor wins at these large data centers will be sufficient to shift market share in the overall market as well as vendor ranking in individual segments. We expect many large-magnitude cloud wins throughout the forecast period and believe a dominant cloud provider could apply significant pricing pressure on this market and the vendor(s) it selects."

The new report from Dell'Oro also shows that fixed and modular 10 Gigabit Ethernet port shipments are expected to expand beyond the data center to campus devices, such as high-end workstations and 802.11ac access points. Learn more about the report.

More: Why invest in 10-Gigabit Ethernet cabling?