The worldwide Ethernet switch market recorded $6.9 billion in revenue in the fourth quarter of 2017 (4Q17), an increase of 3.2% year over year. For the full year 2017, the market recorded more than $25.7 billion in revenue for a year-over-year growth rate of 5.4%.

Meanwhile, the worldwide total enterprise and service provider (SP) router market recorded just under $4.0 billion in revenue in 4Q17, increasing 2.4% on a year-over-year basis. For the full year 2017, the router market finished at $15.2 billion, an increase of 4.0% over 2016. These results are according to new data from the IDC (www.idc.com) research group.

"The Ethernet switching market continues to rapidly mature with customers quickly moving to higher 100GbE speeds, especially in datacenter deployments," said Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC. "While different regions are in varying stages of maturity viz-a-viz public and private cloud growth, the market is clearly looking to capitalize on new infrastructure rollouts, which is helping to drive vendor revenue growth."