3/11/2008 -- It was a mixed fourth quarter of sorts for the Ethernet switching market, which -- in spite of a 2 percent dip (vis-à-vis Q3 numbers) -- was up fully 9 percent for the year, growing to $17.3 billion worldwide, according to market watcher Infonetics Research.

What's more, according to Infonetics, the Ethernet switching downturn was a more or less expected phenomenon.

"The Ethernet switch market had an expected seasonally down quarter, although the market did slightly better than expectations," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data, in a statement. "Surprisingly, emerging segments didn't significantly buck the trend of seasonality; only the 1G unmanaged fixed configuration Ethernet switch segment grew strongly in the fourth quarter."

Cisco Systems Inc. was, of course, dominant, growing its share by 1 percentage point to control 66 percent of the overall market last year. But one strong up-and-comer was 3Com, which posted impressive year-over-year growth.

"On the vendor front, 3Com's revenue share nearly doubled in 2007 after buying out Huawei's ownership interest in H3C. Aside from that, there weren't any significant high-level market share shake-ups in the switch market this year," Machowinski said.

Elsewhere, Infonetics found, sales of application switches exceeded $1 billion last year, while the best-performing market segment was that for fixed managed Layer 3 Ethernet switches, where revenue jumped by 35 percent worldwide -- driven, not surprisingly, by strong 1G and 10G port shipments. Cisco and F5 dominate the application switching space, the market-watcher reported.

Just how dominant is Cisco? Its nearest competitors -- ProCurve, Nortel and 3Com/H3C -- each have roughly 4 to 5 percent of worldwide revenue. --Stephen Swoyer