Cisco has been feeling the competitive pressure from rivals such as HP, which acquired networking vendor 3Com in 2010, and Dell, which late last year acquired Force 10 Networks. But Cisco's Kiran says the company is maintaining its market share lead measured either by revenue or the number of ports sold. Its revenue share was 71.8 percent in the third quarter of 2011, up from 68.6 percent in the previous quarter, and port share was 51.7 percent in the third quarter, up from 49.8 percent in the second. The figures are from the networking equipment research firm Dell'Oro Group. Meanwhile, Gartner research shows Cisco's share of the fast-growing 10GbE market is 76 percent based on port count.
"There's a lot of noise out there in the market today, a perception that Cisco is losing its port or revenue market share and the facts say otherwise," said Kiran. "Despite all this noise we're in a very strong position."
The Catalyst 6500, becoming available in April, supports 44 ports of 40GbE and 176 ports of 10GbE connectivity. The Nexus 7000 line, available sometime in the second quarter of this year, offers 96 ports of 40GbE and 32 ports of 100GbE connectivity.
Also new and available now is a Catalyst 4500-X switch that offers 40 ports of 10GbE connectivity and up to 1.6 terabits (TB) capacity. It is designed for deployment on campus networks. Coming in March is a Nexus 3064-X switch supporting 40GbE connectivity and targeted at data center deployments for high-frequency trading, big data or Web 2.0 environments.
Pricing information was not shared.
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