The Ashimmy Blog: The wide, wacky world of Ethernet switching

October 08, 2009

The wide, wacky world of Ethernet switching

I have written before that to many the Ethernet switching market is a fairy tale of Cisco and the seven dwarfs, except that these dwarfs really aren’t so little. Companies like HP, Brocade, Nortel, 3Com, Enterasys, Juniper, Force 10 are constantly biting at the heels of the Cisco monolith.

Recently, some of these have actually made solid progress. HP’s ProCurve network gear division claims to be solidly in the 2nd place slot and closing. Foundry’s merger with Brocade created a viable competitor to Cisco across storage and Ethernet switching. 3Com has actually shown some signs of life recently in the international market.

Today though three articles caught my attention that show that it is still a wide and wacky world in the switch business. First comes word that Ciena is offering $521m for the assets of bankrupt Nortel. Hard to believe that once might Nortel has fallen so far. Next Extreme Networks, which has always had the rep of having great technology was hammered by the markets yesterday after releasing guidance that they will badly miss this quarter. They blamed the shortfall on supply chain problems. Listening to that you would think they had all of these orders they were unable to fulfill that as a result were pushed our or cancelled. Maybe that is true, but it just doesn’t seem so to me. I think there might be other issues at play there. Finally, the latest rumors are that Brocade is now shopping themselves and likely buyers are HP or Oracle. A sale to HP would certainly make for a powerhouse. I am not sure what Oracle would do in this market though. Here is my prediction; look for IBM to get into this market soon.

One thing for sure though is that the constant jockeying for position to take on the still undefeated Cisco will continue.