Australian Networking and Infrastructure Market to Surge in 2018, IDC Forecasts

The Australian Enterprise and Service Provider (SP) Ethernet Switch Market grew by 12.4 percent year-over-year (YoY) in the first quarter of 2018, according to IDC's APAC Quarterly Ethernet Switch Tracker. The market, which includes data centers, ended up generating revenues of $122.4 million.

The market experienced an increase in shipment of high-speed ports (such as 25 Gigabits per second (Gbps), 50 Gbps and 100 Gbps). Revenue coming from the enterprise space grew by 15 percent, while SPs revenue growth was stagnant.

“Good year-over-year growth experienced by the Networking Infrastructure Market in Australia is indicative of the fact that this year may prove to be a promising year for the networking vendors”, says Ahmar Karimullah, IDC Australia’s ANZ Networking Infrastructure Market Analyst.

Most of the revenue generated in the SP landscape was from shipments of 25 Gbps and 100 Gbps speed ports. Cisco continues to lead the way as they held 66 percent of the market, followed by HPE Networks (7.5 percent), Juniper Networks (3.7 percent), Arista (3.6 percent) and Dell (2.5 percent) in 2018 Q1.

The Australian Router market for Enterprise and SP's also showed strong YoY revenue growth of 25.5 percent, ending at $78.67 million in Q1, according to IDC's APAC Quarterly Router Tracker. Shipment of High-End routers (greater than $20,000) in SP and Mid-Range routers ($8000-$20,000) in enterprises contributed to growth.

Cisco continued as the top vendor with a market share of 70.8 percent, followed by Juniper Networks (14.2 percent), Nokia (7.8 percent), Huawei (4.7 percent) and Ericsson (1.5 percent).

Although small in comparison to the Ethernet Switch and Router markets, the Australian Wireless Local Area Network (WLAN) market in 2018 Q1 made its mark by generating $33.32 million in revenue and experiencing year-over-year growth of 19.1 percent.

This quarter, 88 percent of the total units shipped were 802.11ac access points (latest Wi-Fi standard which provides connectivity up to 1 Gbps). In this market as well, Cisco remained on top by holding a market share of 58.3 percent. They were followed by HPE (15.4 percent), Riverbed (6.8 percent), ARRIS Networks (5.14 percent) and D-Link (2.5 percent).

“Australians continue to adopt technology at a good pace thus generating increased data traffic,” Karimullah said. “The development of both, On- and Off- Premises Data centers, adoption of Hybrid Cloud environments, Service Providers’ preparation for 5G Mobile Technology adoption, Cloud controlled Wi-Fi Solutions, are factors driving growth in the computer networking market in Australia.”

(For more information visit https://www.idc.com).