2/20/2007 -- Worldwide switching revenue grew only modestly between Q3 and Q4 of 2006, but not modestly enough to prevent Cisco from notching a revenue milestone of sorts: The networking giant officially passed the $10 billion mark in enterprise switching sales last year, according to market watcher Infonetics Research.

During the fourth quarter of 2006, enterprise switching revenues crested at $4.3 billion, a gain of only 3 percent over the preceding quarter, Infonetics says. That's just a taste of what's to come, of course: Between 2006 and 2009, the market watcher projects, annual worldwide Ethernet switching sales could grow by as much as 20 percent, surging from $15.6 billion to $18.6 billion.

"It was a good year for enterprise Ethernet switch manufacturers, with revenue growth picking up again and the market growing in the double digits," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst at Infonetics Research, in a statement. "Cisco passed the $10-billion revenue mark, shipments of 10G ports almost doubled and both PoE and 1G port shipments increased almost 50 percent. The next big segment to watch is 1G PoE."

Elsewhere, Infonetics reports, worldwide Ethernet switch port shipments shot up by more than one-sixth (17 percent) between 2005 and 2006. Conversely, worldwide 10/100 switch revenues fell -- even as port shipments grew by 11 percent. At year's end, Cisco held more than half -- 54 percent -- of worldwide port share in the layer 2 managed fixed configuration segment, followed by Chinese giant Huawei with 13 percent. In the Layer 3 segment, however, the race is much tighter: Hewlett-Packard Co.'s ProCurve division trails Cisco's market-leading 24 percent port share by just 3 percentage points.

Finally, D-Link was first in worldwide revenue and second in port shipments for unmanaged fixed configuration switches; Netgear was first for ports, second for revenue, Infonetics concluded. -- Stephen Swoyer