6/10/2008 -- It might be hard to believe, but Ethernet switch sales actually decreased in Q1, slipping 4 percent over the previous quarter.

That said, sales of Ethernet switches are still up nearly 10 percent year-over-year, which market watchers say indicates a healthy switching market.

That's good news for Cisco Systems Inc. and other enterprise switching giants. After all, switch sales are usually depressed in Q1 and Q2, according to market-watcher Infonetics Research.

Nor is that the extent of the good news, Infonetics said. Cisco's sales -- like those of all of its competitors -- were down in the first quarter (Cisco posted a 1 percent decline in switching revenues), but Cisco actually outpaced the market; many of its competitors had double-digit slips, according to Infonetics.

There's other good news, of a sort: Sales of Gigabit Ethernet (GigE) switches actually bucked the downward trend. Both 1 GigE managed ports and fixed managed layer-3 10 GigE ports posted double-digit growth in the first quarter.

"Fears of economic uncertainty impacting the switch market aren't panning out so far; while some vendors posted dismal sequential results, much was attributable to seasonality, and other vendors picked up whatever slack was left," said Matthias Machowinski, directing analyst for enterprise voice and data with Infonetics, in a statement. "At this point, we don't have any solid evidence-based reasons to reduce our outlook for this market." --Stephen Swoyer