The Layer 2-3 Ethernet switch market is expected to exceed $US25 billion in 2019, a compounded annual growth of over 2 per cent from 2014, according to Dell'Oro Group.
Datacentre switching will drive most of the growth in the market. Data center switching growth will be driven exclusively by the Cloud, with the enterprise market declining slowly, towards the end of the decade, Dell'Oro expects.
Cloud will also help spur the adoption of software-defined networking, another factor in the transition from an enterprise-driven to a cloud-dominated Ethernet switching market, Dell'Oro notes.
"The Cloud's need to scale, be flexible, and differentiate are ultimately all governed by what can be achieved in software," states Alan Weckel, vice president of Ethernet switch market research at Dell'Oro.
Dell'Oro's five year forecast also notes that 25G Ethernet will be a major driver for growth in data center switching and will help propel 100G Ethernet volumes, with enterprises adopting a different class of switch to support 25G compared with switches used in the cloud. The report also states that software will transform how Ethernet switches are consumed by customers.
Infonetics Research also noted the imminent emergence of 25G and 50G Ethernet in a recent report. It will be driven by large cloud service providers looking to migrate from 10G Ethernet switching and server connectivity to 100G switching and 25G server connectivity, the firm notes.
The global datacentre Ethernet switch market was up 5 per cent sequentially to $US2.2 billion in Q3, 2014, with US public sector and Cloud service providers providing a boost, Infonetics states.