Double-digit growth for core router market in 2014 says Dell'Oro

Market research firm Dell'Oro Group forecasts double-digit growth for the service provider core router market in 2014.

According to a newly published report, the service provider core router market grew by 7% in the third quarter of 2013 versus the year-ago period. After almost two years of year-over-year declines, Dell'Oro says this second consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth reflects the increased emphasis service providers have placed on the backbone of their networks.

"All major core routing vendors have recently introduced or will soon introduce new core routing platforms with significantly increased capacity," said Alam Tamboli, business analyst at Dell'Oro Group. "We expect the confluence of these new products to drive the core router market to double-digit growth for the full-year 2014 as service providers qualify these new products for their networks"

The top four vendors in the core router market hold 98% share between them, according the research firm. Cisco remained the number-one ranked vendor and has introduced two new core routing platforms during the past six months (see “Cisco CRS-X core router offers 10X capacity improvement over CRS-1” and “Cisco integrates optical transport in new Network Convergence System routers”).

Juniper held the second spot. New product offerings gave the company a more complete core router product portfolio and spurred year-over-year growth in the third quarter, according to Dell'Oro (see “Juniper Networks touts converged supercore via PTX3000 and 100G OTN DWDM card”).

Contract wins for Huawei Technologies Co Ltd. to provide its new higher-capacity router to both domestic Chinese and international service providers drove the vendor’s year-over-year growth, helping the vendor achieve third position in the market (see “Huawei supplies 400G core router system to DTAC in Thailand" and “Jazztel to deploy Huawei core routers”)

Alcatel-Lucent (Euronext Paris and NYSE: ALU) held fourth place with sales of its first core routing product, the XRS (see “Alcatel-Lucent unveils 7950 XRS core routers”).

Dell'Oro Group’s Routers Quarterly Report covers the service provider core and edge and enterprise router markets for current and historical time periods. The report includes qualitative analysis and statistics for vendor market shares, revenue, average selling prices, and unit and port shipments.

For more information on IP routers and suppliers, visit the Lightwave Buyer’s Guide.