The Ethernet switch market grew almost 20 per cent during the fourth quarter, with Cisco, HP and Juniper Networks leading the way. According to a recent study by Dell'Oro Group Cisco's share actually declined for the full year but made up for a bit in the fourth quarter.

According to Dell'Oro's Alan Weckel, director of Ethernet switch research, the worldwide market in Q3 was $4 billion and Dell'Oro had forecast it to be $4.2 billion in Q4, an increase of 5 per cent Dell'Oro expects the market to continue to expand in 2010 due to the growth of 10G Ethernet as a server connectivity and aggregation application in data centres.

Dell'Oro discovered that the 10G Ethernet segment was the only part of the Ethernet switch market to show sequential port and revenue growth. It seems that strong shipments of fixed 10G Ethernet switches for data centre caused the boom.

Cisco is losing market share.  In the In 2007, Cisco had a 72 per cent share of the market and that has fallen to 67 per cent in 2009. Cisco's losses were gains for HP, 3Com, Juniper and Brocade.