Worldwide sales of carrier Ethernet switch/routers (CESRs) grew 14% year-over-year to $492m in the first quarter of 2010, according to a report by Heavy Reading.
The company said that the global CESR market will continue its recovery in 2010 due to increased signs of stabilisation and underlying market fundamentals favouring a shift from legacy Sonet/SDH networks toward high-performance carrier Ethernet/MPLS-based networks.
The CESR quarterly market tracker revealed that the CESR market declined 4% quarter-over-quarter in 1Q 2010, following strong 19% sequential growth in the previous quarter.
Stan Hubbard, senior analyst at Heavy Reading, said: "Although intense competition and the sluggish global economy has taken some wind out of CESR sales during the past two years, we continue to see indisputable, growing demand from network operators to deploy next-generation carrier Ethernet platforms to support business, wholesale, residential triple-play/VoD, and increasingly mobile backhaul applications.
"We expect the CESR market to have a combined annual growth rate of nearly 10% between 2009 and 2014, reaching $2.94bn at the end of this period."
Geographically, strong sequential CESR revenue growth for Cisco, Brocade, Extreme, and Ciena fueled a sequential increase in North American sales in 1Q 2010. While, revenues in Asia, EMEA, and Latin America declined quarter-over-quarter, but all regions were up year-over-year.
The company projects that the CESR market leader Cisco regained multiple share points between 4Q 2009 and 1Q 2010. While, its followers Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, and ZTE lost some ground in 1Q 2010, but their market shares were virtually unchanged on a rolling four-quarter basis.
Brocade and Extreme each at fifth and sixth position respectively, gained a share point between 4Q 2009 and 1Q 2010.
