Cisco's SP edge router market share down -12% since 2005
Tue, 12/14/10 - 3:21am View comments
Shin Umeda, vice president of network and telecommunications industry research dynamo, Dell'Oro Group, has been studiously keeping track of Cisco's service provider edge router market share.
Heck, only five years ago (2005), Cisco held a 58% share of the service provider edge router market.
However most alarmingly, Dell'Oro this week released its new share count for Q3'CY10. Cisco's market share is now only 46%, down -12% over the past 5 years:
Cisco had more to say about its Q1'FY11 router sales in its most recent Form 10-Q filing (page 44) with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission:
"We categorize our routers primarily as high-end, midrange, and low-end routers. The growth in sales of our Routers product category in the first quarter of fiscal 2011 was driven by a 16% increase in sales of our high-end routers.
"Within high-end router products, the increase was driven by sales of the Cisco ASR 1000 and 9000 Series Aggregation Services Routers, and the inclusion of the Cisco ASR 5000 products from our acquisition of Starent, partially offset by lower sales of our Cisco 12000 Series Routers and Cisco CRS-1 Carrier Routing System.
"Our sales of midrange and low-end routers increased by 7% and 8%, respectively, for the first quarter of fiscal 2011 compared to the first quarter of fiscal 2010."
Nonetheless astonishingly (at least in my opinion), during Cisco's Q1'FY11 earnings call, Cisco CEO John Chambers ballyhooed to all the Wall Street analysts who had dialed in:
"The ASR edge routers grew approximately 200% year-over-year with a current annualized run rate of approximately $1.4 billion. The ASR 9000 was especially strong with over 700% growth year-over-year with an annualized run rate of $280 million."
Personally, I find it amazing that Cisco's CEO bats-around700% and 200% router growth rates to Wall Street and then seemingly without embarrassment sheepishly reveals 13-days later on his Form 10-Q (page 44) that sales of Cisco's high-end routers only grew by a mere 16%.
I mean, something just doesn't add-up in my opinion.
Finally in conclusion, I'd like to state that I find Network World's story yesterday on Cisco's Q3 edge router market share to be woefully lacking from a big-picture-perspective.
My challenge to Network World, tell it how it really is, don't be pushovers, crack that whip!
