8/15/2005 -- Anyone else notice how quiet it’s been on the enterprise switching front of late? Nary an announcement of any real significance for several months now, even though switch revenues continue to record healthy growth numbers, at least according to market researcher In-Stat.

Last month, of course, fallen networking giant Nortel Networks announced a new 10-Gigabit switch designed to shore up its shortcomings relative to Cisco Systems Inc. and Enterasys Networks Inc., but other than that, there’s been hardly a peep from Cisco -- or any other established player, for that matter.

To some extent, says Steven Schuchart, a senior analyst for enterprise infrastructure with consultancy Current Analysis Inc., this summer’s fallow period is understandable: During the first few months of the year, new or enhanced switches were introduced at a breakneck pace.

“Vendors in the Ethernet switching market are taking a breather after a veritable orgy of product announcements since the first of the year. Virtually every vendor has announced new capabilities or capacity for existing products and many of them have announced specific new platforms this year. Yet since late June, the vendors seem to have stopped with real product announcements,” he writes. “The truth is that most vendors are simply taking a breather for the summer months, after long and difficult bouts of product engineering and rollouts earlier this year.”

So when and how will this interregnum end? Schuchart thinks things will kick off with a bang in September or October, when vendors roll out new products focused on security and policy management. “Increasing and improving the security at the network level is a paramount concern not only for network administrators, but also for the vendors themselves. A holistic approach that tightly ties IDS appliances, switches and end-station verifications services to lock out attacks on the network at the switch level is key. To meet this demand, vendors have had to come up with not only new capabilities, but also with new ways to manage switch policy that allow the majority of the network security to be self-correcting and automatic,” he writes.

Given the general availability of standard merchant silicon in the enterprise switching market, competitive differentiation is more important than ever, says Schuchart. “Competitive differentiation in that market is at a particular premium and integrated security policy is a good way for vendors to add differentiators to their products,” he argues.

As a result, Schuchart says, it should be business as usual in the red-hot enterprise switching space come this autumn. “There should also be a rash of new announcements, if not new products, in the enterprise high-capacity switch-router space, where Force 10 Networks and Foundry Networks have a product lead on competitors in pure port density at Gigabit- and 10-Gigabit speeds,” he writes. “Companies such as Cisco, Nortel and Extreme Networks are not likely to allow such a gap to continue. However, the short-term market for such products is generally limited to high-performance verticals and many enterprises are not anticipating the need for 10-Gigabit Ethernet at a very high port density.” -Stephen Swoyer