A new forecast suggests steady growth is ahead in the so-called Enterprise Edge market.

The Dell’Oro Group report, which reacts to the trend toward convergence of wired Ethernet and wireless LAN, says that this market reached nearly $3.5 billion in the first quarter of the year, up 5 percent from the same period a year ago. Look for more of the same the rest of the year as new technologies are adopted.

"In the second half of 2015, the enterprise edge market will be stimulated by the availability of new enterprise-class 802.11ac Wave 2 access points, which in turn will drive demand for a new type of multi-gigabit Ethernet switch," said Chris DePuy, vice president of Enterprise Edge research at Dell’Oro Group. "While initial Wave 2 wireless access points will be delivered with single or dual 1 Gbps Ethernet connections, we expect by the latter part of 2015, 2.5/5 Gbps Ethernet connections will be available.”

The top ten vendors tracked in Dell’Oro Group’s Enterprise Edge report include, in alphabetical order: Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise, Brocade, Cisco Systems, Dell, Extreme Networks, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei Technologies, Juniper Networks, Ruckus Wireless and Ubiquiti Networks.  

Meantime, Dell’Oro also reports good news for partners selling in the Ethernet switch-data center market. The market research firm says it grew strongly last quarter to more than $2 billion.

"When Dell’Oro Group looks at the overall data center market, many trends are similar between servers, storage and networking, such as the movement by cloud customers to white box/bare metal solutions. We are often able to leverage our holistic coverage to forecast trends early and accurately before they become widespread, such as the upcoming market migration to 25 GE server access, or the recent movement in large US Cloud customers to 40 GE," said Alan Weckel, another of the firm’s VPs.

The report also predicts that major cloud players such as Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft will begin migrating to 25 and 100 GE at the end of the year.

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