A Bumper Crop Of Ethernet Switches Harvested In Q4 by TPM
The Next Platform, March 13th, 2023
With each passing year, the phrase 'The network is the computer,' coined in 1984 by John Gage, director of research and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, becomes more and more true. And it was certainly at its most truest in 2022 if you use Ethernet datacenter switching revenues as a gauge.
It has been a bumper year for switch sales, and it is not just the upgrade cycle for high end 200 Gb/sec and 400 Gb/sec Ethernet leaf and spine switches for the hyperscalers and cloud builders that is driving the market. Everybody has a need for more speed, and everybody is finally getting around to swapping out slower-speed devices for faster ones, up and down the span of Ethernet bandwidths.
In the fourth quarter of 2022, according to market research performed by IDC, sales of Ethernet switches across all speeds rose by 22 percent to $10.3 billion, and routers pottered along as they have been doing for years, rising by a mere 7/10ths of a point to $4.6 billion worldwide.