Sales of disaggregated WDM systems for data center interconnect up 225% year-over-year: Dell'Oro

According to Dell'Oro Group's recently released "2Q17 Optical Transport Quarterly Report," the employment of disaggregated WDM systems in data center interconnect (DCI) is booming.

"Disaggregation isn't a new concept, but the strong adoption is," said Jimmy Yu, vice president at Dell'Oro Group. "We estimate that in 2Q17, disaggregated WDM systems reached an annualized run rate of $400 million, growing 225% year-over-year. In most—if not all—purchases, we found that these new systems were being employed in DCI across both metro and long-haul spans. So far, the largest consumers have been Internet content providers that appreciate the platform for its simplicity, capacity, and power savings. Based on second quarter results, where disaggregated WDM systems represented nearly one-third of the optical DCI equipment purchases made, we have to say that disaggregated WDM systems are truly hitting the sweet spot for DCI."

In the second quarter of 2017, Ciena, Cisco, and Infinera were the three manufacturers that secured most of the disaggregated WDM systems market, with a combined 85%, according to the report. The market research firm also reports that the share of 100+ Gbps WDM wavelength shipments going to DCI was 14% in the quarter.

Meanwhile, the total WDM market, comprising WDM metro and DWDM long haul, experienced a 2% year-over-year growth in 2Q 2017. WDM adoption in the Asia Pacific region, especially China and India, was a primary driver of this growth. Growth in the second quarter wasn't quite as strong as in the first quarter of this year, when the market saw a year-on-year improvement of 4% (see "WDM demand remains in growth mode in 2017: Dell'Oro").

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