Brocade 2015 Omega Award for HotSeat Video

Brocade Communications was the ACG Research HotSeat Winner of 2015 for the video Evolution of Mobile Network Visibility. The video features a discussion about Brocade’s significant new network visibility product announcement: carrier-grade, physical and virtual network packet brokers, virtual TAPs, an SDN based session director and a single pane of glass management application. Sanjay Munshi, senior director of product management at Brocade Communications, and Michael Bushong, vice president of product management, accepted the award on behalf of the company.

Roll It! ACG’s 2015 Omega Winners Are…

ACG Research is honored to announce the 2015 Omega Awards. The award recognizes excellence in message marketing for either a HotSeat, Whiteboard or Spotlight Innovation video as well as vendor operational excellence. The 2015 winners are Big Switch Networks, Brocade, Cisco, and iXia. Winners were cited and honored because “of their achievements in the areas of product innovation, message marketing or operational excellence,” said Ray Mota.

Big Switch Networks was the winner of the Breakthrough Innovation Product for its Big Cloud Fabric 3.0., which provides hyper-scale networking in public, hybrid and private clouds. BCF is unique in that it delivers on the core vision of SDN on more dimensions than any other solution currently available. Big Switch Networks is the first supplier to have achieved that goal. BCF uses open software running on low-cost, high performance merchant silicon switches from multiple white box partners. This makes the physical underlay network both efficient and programmable. BCF’s overlay virtual network is programmable in the same manner as the physical underlay network, supporting consistent policy deployments in a unified cloud computing fabric.

Left to Right Ray Mota, ACG; Douglas Murray, CEO, Kyle Forster, Founder; Shaun Page, VP of Worldwide Sales

BCF’s controller is also open and modular, able to integrate with cloud management systems like OpenStack and VMware, and providing visibility from the cloud management platform into the operation of its supporting network transparently. BCF’s controller is also open for extension and integration of optimization applications like Fabric Analytics to collect traffic data and use it to perform network optimizations directly. With BCF 3.0 “Big Switch Networks is achieving an important milestone in creating open, scalable, and versatile software-driven networking for the cloud. The true logic for the unified fabric’s operation is created in the BCF Controller and propagated to all participating network elements dynamically,” states Paul Parker Johnson.

HotSeat Winner was Brocade Communications. Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management at Brocade Communications, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss Brocade’s significant new network visibility product announcement: carrier-grade, physical and virtual network packet brokers, virtual TAPs, an SDN based session director and a single pane of glass management application. Sanjay highlights the challenges operators have in 4G/LTE visibility, how to address them in a cost effective manner and the critical need for new, next-generation network visibility architectures as mobile operators ramp up to virtual EPC and 5G with billions of M2M connections and Internet of Things in the not too distant future.

Left to Right, Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management; Michael Bushong, Vice President of Product Management; Ray Mota, CEO 

The Trusted Vendor Award went to Cisco, which has continued to demonstrate operational excellence and sustainability as measured by ACG’s financial vendor index. Cisco has very high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin, improved productivity and expense discipline; operating income increased 22.4% y-y. The company also has effective asset utilization, which yielded $3.52 for each fixed-asset dollar in 4Q15. Other operational factors contributing to Cisco receiving the award include efficient inventory management, one of the highest net cash ratios in the industry and a high receivables efficiency ratio.

Left to Right, Ray Mota and Sanjeev Mervana, Sr. Director, Cloud, Infrastructure, & Business Solutions for SPs

Ixia was awarded the Whiteboard winner category. In this video Dennis Cox, chief product officer of Ixia, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss the need for true 100% visibility. Today, many vendors claim to provide 100% visibility, but many drop packets and create blind spots in your application performance. Understand what is needed for true visibility and providing a secure network for optimal application performance.

Left to Right, Dennis Cox, Chief Product Officer; Ray Mota

Check out last year’s winners.

Congratulations to the 2015 Omega Award winners! 

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Evolution of Mobile Network Visibility: ACG HotSeat with Sanjay Munshi, Brocade

Sanjay Munshi, Senior Director of Product Management at Brocade Communications, and Ray Mota, CEO of ACG Research, discuss Brocade’s significant new network visibility product announcement: carrier-grade, physical and virtual network packet brokers, virtual TAPs, an SDN based session director and a single pane of glass management application. Sanjay highlights the challenges operators have in 4G/LTE visibility, how to address them in a cost effective manner and the critical need for new, next-generation network visibility architectures as mobile operators ramp up to virtual EPC and 5G with billions of M2M connections and Internet of Things in the not too distant future.

Click for more information about ACG’s video packages.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

2Q Vendor Financial Index: Highest Number in Low-Risk Category

Strong revenue outlook, high operating margins and other factors put Adtran, Brocade, Cisco, Infinera, and Juniper into low-risk category

ACG Research has released its 2Q 2015 Vendor Financial Index report, which delivers independent information about the sustainability of a vendor or company to help providers assess the risk of selecting the right vendor to meet their business requirements and to ascertain a risk level on the stability of the vendor regardless of technology innovations.

Low-risk vendors for the quarter are Adtran, Brocade, Cisco, Infinera and Juniper. Characteristics of low-risk vendors include strong revenue outlook, high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin and expense discipline, low debt dependency, and high receivable efficiency ratio. Medium risk were Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson and Fujitsu.

Adtran has the highest equity to debt ratio (2.32) in the industry and financing its assets with more shareholders’ equity than debt. The company’s financial performance is predicted to improve in the second half of 2015 as a result of higher carrier expenditure in U.S. However, weakness in Europe will continue to impact Adtran’s revenue. Brocade’s operating margin is 20.9 percent, one of the highest in the industry. However, the company’s operating income decreased by 18 percent QoQ. Brocade’s growing data center presence, positioning as storage networking experts and innovation in software-enabled networking, will be the focus in 3Q15 as well. Cisco’s a very high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin, improved productivity and expense discipline led to its operating income increased 4.3 percent YoY. Application Centric Infrastructure and APIC are predicted to be the cornerstone of the Cisco’s next generation of networking architectures. Infinera's operating margin (8.0 percent) is high compared to industry average, driven by cost decline because of vertically integrated model and improved services profitability. Revenue for 3Q15 is estimated at $215 M, a 30 percent YoY growth and will be mainly driven by continued acceptance of DTN-X. Juniper’s revenue was up 14.5 percent QoQ, mainly driven by better demand from its cloud and cable service providers. The company’s services revenue increased 7.4 percent on YoY. Juniper’s partnership with VMware will enable highly automated cloud data center solutions for both service provider and mission-critical enterprise network.

The same as last quarter, Ciena, Cyan and ZTE remain in the high-risk category. ZTE, healthy but fluctuating net cash ratio, has had Difficulty establishing presence in North America markets. The company will focus on three key markets in the second half of 2015: carriers, government and corporate sectors and consumers. Cyan has the lowest operating margin in the industry. The company suffers from lack of customer diversification and revenue is concentration in one company, Windstream, which represented 52 percent of its revenue; two other companies accounted for more than 10 percent revenue each. Ciena has very low net cash ratio at $(6 M) and has substantial segment of revenue continues to come from sales to a small number of service providers. However, higher spending on optical upgrades and increased international orders will positively impact revenue.

“This is the highest number of vendors in the low-risk category we have seen since we started tracking vendor financial ratios and launched this report,” says Ray Mota, CEO, ACG Research. “Network vendors are taking operational efficiency and sustainability more seriously and the numbers show that they are running more efficient companies.”

For more information about ACG Research’s Vendor Financial Index service or other syndicated and consulting services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

Total Cost of Ownership Study:Network Packet Brokers

This study compares the total cost of ownership of hardware-based first generation network visibility solutions with Brocade’s next generation network visibility architecture. 

For information about ACG's business case analysis services, contact information@acgcc.com.

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

4Q Vendor Financial Index Results: Ericsson Jumps into the Low-Risk Category

ACG Research has released its 4Q Vendor Financial Index report, which delivers independent information about the sustainability of a vendor or company to help providers assess the risk of selecting the right vendor to meet their business requirements and to ascertain a risk level on the stability of the vendor regardless of technology innovations.

Low-risk vendors for the quarter are Adtran, Brocade, Cisco, Juniper and Ericsson. Characteristics of low-risk vendors include strong revenue outlook, high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin and expense discipline, low debt dependency, and high receivable efficiency ratio. Adtran’s growth continues with new product launches, such as high- performance routers, momentum of TA 5000 and FTTN platforms, and new product wins in EMEA, which will contribute significantly to the company’s revenue in 2015. Brocade, which is focusing on efficiency, is targeting software networking investments, advanced fabric switches and datacenter markets. Cisco’s diversification strategy of relying less on specialized routers and switching devices and more on rolling SDN tools and security services will add to growth in 1H15. Juniper continues to pursue its restructuring plan, cost cutting initiatives and diversification of revenue with the goal of increasing efficiency in delivery of services and customer support. Ericsson’s sales in most regions are expected to increase sequentially in 1Q15 with rising demand for managed services, consulting and system integration.

Cyan, Ciena and ZTE are high risk, which is characterized by low inventory turnover ratio, revenue decreases and low value of equity to debt ratio. Cyan’s cautious ordering pattern by its customers will impact the revenue in 1Q15, which is estimated at $30.2 M. Ciena’s substantial segment of its revenue continues to come from sales to a small number of service providers. The firm is focusing on diversifying and broadening its customer base and increased spending on optical upgrades and higher number of international orders should positively impact its top line in 1H15. ZTE will continue to focus its efforts on major global carriers and government segments. Future growth will rely on flagship device range. 

For more information about ACG Research’s Vendor Financial Index service or other syndicated and consulting services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgcc.com

www.acgcc.com

Making the Business Case: Network Analytics for the New IP

An analytics offloading use case conducted by ACG Research compares the total cost of ownership of Brocade’s architecture with two PMO alternative architectures. The Brocade architecture has 23 percent to 33 percent lower TCO than the PMO alternatives. Brocade’s advantage is due to its use of virtual network functions hosted on virtual machines and the agility and elasticity achieved though Brocade’s orchestration system. A network monitoring and customer experience management use case compares the TCO of Brocade’s virtual architecture to an appliance-based architecture (PMO) and finds a 43 percent TCO savings for the Brocade architecture.

Click to download the Brocade NVA TCO Whitepaper_ACG.

For more information about ACG's business case analysis services contact info@acgcc.com.

ACG HotSeat: Brocade on Mobile Analytics for Next-Gen Networks

Michael Kennedy

mkennedy@acgcc.com
www.acgcc.com

New SDN Apps Bring a More Open Lens to the Future of Network Operations

Some vendors are starting to leverage a truly open architecture for optimization of unified fabrics with extensible service control applications.

One of the great opportunities in software-defined networking is to amplify the efficiency of network and service operations teams by allowing them to leverage a powerful set of logically centralized and abstracted control functions for the infrastructures and services they manage.

While this model is simple to articulate it takes great vision and talent to realize in the world of real, deployed solutions that deliver the result.

The goal is only partially realized by the use of SDN controllers themselves. Controllers indeed do help simplify by normalizing and abstracting control plane functions for the given domain. In parallel, though, operators are driving to achieve additional optimizations, efficiencies, and innovations by leveraging what I call SDN Service Control applications that work in tandem with the centralized SDN controller code. Examples of focus for these include traffic analytics, service level monitoring and management, and custom traffic steering design for various operating goals (application performance, service availability, cost optimization, etc.).

The dynamics for how these goals can be pursued vary a bit between internal data center and adjacent wide area network infrastructures. I focus on data center implementations here.

The end game we’re looking at is one where the logically centralized and streamlined controls for the network being managed dynamically serve the needs of the applications and users relying on it for their services. In many data centers this will include a sizable overlay virtual network running in parallel with a high-performance physical underlay network. It will include a blend of control plane and value-adding service control apps to make it all work automatically and with maximum performance, efficiency, security, and stakeholder satisfaction (phew!).

A challenge in getting to this end game is achieving these results in a streamlined, integrated manner for both underlay and overlay networks. As implementing SDN in data center environments has gotten started, we’ve largely had operationally separate deployments of underlay and overlay networks. Services such as VXLAN and virtualized router modules are operating in their own logical scopes, and a sometimes heterogeneous fabric of underlying physical network nodes is implementing its own L2 and L3 functions in parallel. Each piece can do its part on its own, but it doesn’t create an especially streamlined operational model.

Some amount of overlay and underlay integration has occurred. From the open networking point of view, a number of OpenFlow controllers have started to bring a degree of integration of underlay switches with a range of centralized control plane functions. And in a proprietary context, Cisco’s ACI framework and APIC service control system have brought a range of application policy controls to both overlay and underlay network infrastructures—the only glitch from an optimization point of view is it’s not being implemented on a fully open platform.

Neither of these early stage developments has brought a design that unlocks the potential of the open network control environment of SDN with the power of value-add that can be obtained from service control applications running in parallel with the SDN controller that have the ability to optimize both the virtual and the physical network environments according to the operator’s service delivery requirements. Most SDN controllers delivered to date open up control of either a virtual overlay or a physical underlay but not both. And while the APIC is logically elegant within its own technological silo, it’s not opening up the opportunity for streamlining to the same extent—across a heterogeneous SDN infrastructure—as a solution leveraging, say, and Open Daylight-based set of network control plane functions could.

A glimpse into a more open framework for streamlining whole data center networking fabrics has started to appear in a set of recently introduced SDN service control applications from Big Switch and Brocade. Each has the attribute of bringing a distinct set of added value to managing a data center’s SDN deployment, while leveraging the abstraction of the SDN controller as a means of streamlining the deployment of the application’s work. In this manner they have the potential of leveraging the versatility and openness of the SDN control plane for implementation of the service controls they are generating in either a virtual or a physical deployment or both.

Simplifying analytics, traffic engineering, and application policy controls in this way brings an order of magnitude increase in the level of efficiency that an operations and service management team can achieve toward the services they are managing.

Big Switch’s Fabric Analytics module and Brocade’s Volumetric Traffic Management and Path Explorer applications are each pursuing this path. Examples of implementations approaching this design have been developed in wide-area or transport SDN solutions such as Cisco’s WAE and NCS solutions and Ciena’s recently introduced Agility software suite. But in the data center the Big Switch and Brocade applications are early entrants in the market that are starting to leverage a truly open architecture for optimization of unified fabrics with extensible service control applications. Whether additional similar applications arrive in the market using a similar model in the near future will be interesting to see. But in the meantime, kudos to both suppliers for advancing the state of the art in managing open data center fabrics with the versatility and extensibility of their designs.

For more information about ACG's SDN services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Paul Parker-Johnson

pparkerjohnson@acgresearch.net 

ACGcc.com 

ACG HotSeat: Brocade on Mobile Analytics for Next Gen Networks

Ray Mota of ACG Research and Sanjay Munshi of Brocade Communications discuss the role of analytics as a key enabler in the evolution of mobile network architectures and business models. Watch Sanjay make the case for analytics architectures to evolve alongside mobile architectures, citing a few leading use cases that highlight the benefits of NFV, SDN and dynamic policy control.

Click to view.

For more information about ACG's HotSeat services, contact sales@acgcc.com.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch.net

4Q Vendor Financial Index Announcement

ACG Research has released its 4Q Vendor Financial Index report, which delivers independent information about the sustainability of a vendor or company to help providers assess the risk of selecting the right vendor to meet their business requirements and to ascertain a risk level on the stability of the vendor regardless of technology innovations.

Low-risk vendors for the quarter are Adtran, Brocade, Cisco, and Juniper. Characteristics of low-risk vendors include strong revenue outlook, high operating margins because of sales, solid gross margin and expense discipline, low debt dependency, and high receivable efficiency ratio. Adtran’s growth with the Deutsche Telekom and AT&T opportunities and improved spending by carriers is projected to accelerate the company’s revenue 10% in 2014. Brocade, which was in the medium-risk category in 3Q, is now in the low-risk category because of solid operating margin, high receivable efficiency ratio, good inventory management practices and healthy equity to debt ratio. Although Cisco’s revenue is projected to decline in the fiscal calendar year, the company is aggressively pursuing major technology developments, including Internet of Everything and SDN. The question is how long will the transition take? Juniper has posted its sixth consecutive quarter of YoY growth and is focusing on improving operational execution and managing costs. 

Of note in 4Q:

• Adtran claims the highest Altman Z-Score in the industry: 7.3
• Brocade had the highest receivable efficiency ratio: 2.59
• Cisco posted the highest R&D potential: 28.7%
• Juniper has a high receivable efficiency ratio: 2.20, compared to industry average

Cyan, Ciena and ZTE are high risk, which is characterized by low inventory turnover ratio, revenue decreases and low value of equity to debt ratio. Cyan, with one of the lowest operating margin in the industry, is dependent on a few customers (Windstream contributed 39% revenue). A substantial segment of Ciena’s revenue continues to come from sales to a small number of service providers. ZTE has the lowest receivable efficiency ratio in the industry, indicating significant risks associated with the credit policy and finances. 

For more information about ACG Research's Vendor Financial Index service or other syndicated and consulting services, contact sales@acgresearch.net.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch.net

Business Cases for Brocade: Software-Defined Networking Use Cases

Brocade has developed three SDN use cases built around an SDN controller and Brocade’s MLXe series routers that are compliant with the recommendations of the Open Networking Foundation.

ACG Research analyzed the TCO, network capital expense (CapEx), network operation expense (OpEx), and labor cost to process service orders of the three use cases. It found that SDN dramatically increases the speed of bringing order processing systems online and the speed of processing individual service orders. The time to set up the order processing system is reduced from one year under the PMO to four months using SDN. The time to process a single order is reduced by a factor of seven. Though direct costs of building and operating the network are reduced by using SDN the majority of the business benefit of SDN is derived from speeding up and reducing the cost of the service order process.

Click here to download the whitepaper.

For more information about ACG Research's business case analysis service and SDN services, click here.

For more information about Michael Kennedy, click here.

Michael Kennedy
mkennedy@acgresearch.net
www.acgresearch

Cisco Benefits from Service Providers’ Expansion and Capacity Build-out

Cisco reports that its quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year increases were due to service providers’ build outs and expansion of their networks. 

Although vendors cited weak economies and decreased demand from service providers as factors that contributed to their weak revenue increases in Q1, ACG Research still anticipates solid growth in the Worldwide Carrier Routing and Switching markets in 2012 as mobility and demand for video continues to drive providers to invest in wireless networks. “Service providers have certainly held tight reins on their CapEx, but they are still spending and vendors need to fully understand the their buying patterns, market trends and consumers’ demands to capitalize on SPs’ limited spend,” states Ray Mota, managing partner. “Yes, some service providers are taking a wait and see approach on expansion, but although it might feel comfortable to wait it is rarely a successful investment strategy. Providers should look at long-term investments in new services.”

Q1 Total Worldwide Carrier Routing & Switching market posted revenue of $2.7B. The global market decreased 4.5% q/q and 0.6% y/y. Core Routing revenues were down 0.8% q/q and down 8.2% y/y. Edge Routing and Switching revenues were down 5.6% q/q but up 1.9% y/y. 

Cisco posted total worldwide growth at 2% q/q and 14% y/y. Cisco continues to gain traction with the CSR-3, reporting triple-digit growth and that the company “has achieved $1 billion in total orders to more than 190 SP customers in 30 countries in just 1.5 years, 20 new customers in Q1 alone.” Brocade also posted positive increases, 30% q/q and 57% y/y. Juniper decreased worldwide routing revenue 4.8% q/q and 28.3% year over year; however, the company posted 39% q/q increase in access aggregation switching, which is in part due to solid sales of infrastructure products. Alcatel-Lucent, which is benefiting from the market momentum for 100G IP/optical as well as providers replacing and leveraging 100GE and IPv6 transition technologies decreased 11% q/q but increased 11% y/y.

Vendor	Rank	Market Share ($)	Q-Q MS Point +/-
Cisco	1	57.4%	3.7
Alcatel-Lucent	2	17.7%	-1.3
Juniper	3	16.4%	0.0
Tellabs	4	2.0%	-0.6
Brocade	5	1.9%	0.5

QUARTERLY TREND and DRIVER HIGHLIGHTS

• Emerging markets are fueling growth in most telecomm sectors and the rapidly growing demand for services and products is fragmenting the customer base and putting pressure on market leaders to innovate to maintain market share.

• Service providers held tight reins on their CapEx in 2011, and vendors are approaching 2012 with caution as they anticipate that this trend will continue.

• The strong growth in IP traffic is driving the demand for switches and routers in service providers’ networks. This growth will most likely increase in 2012 as fixed and mobile broadband subscriber penetration rates increase. The growth in demand by consumers for video applications will also fuel the demand for more switches and routers. The result will be that carriers will need to continue investing in their IP infrastructures or risk losing subscribers.  The market is seeing the build-out of 3G wireless networks in developing countries; in developed nations carriers are investing in LTE to meet the demands for mobile bandwidth.

For more information about ACG Research's Router and Switching services, click here or contact sales@acgresearch.net.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch.net

Despite Softness, Winners Emerge in the Router and Switching Market in Q4

Weak economies and decreased demand from service providers contributed to a soft Q4 for the Worldwide Carrier Routing and Switching markets for some vendors. The Total Worldwide Carrier Routing & Switching market grew revenue $2.9B in Q4/11. The global market increased 1.1% sequentially but declined 10.7% year over year. This decline was due to a perceived negative economic macro climate and reallocation of CapEx shifting from wireline to wireless. Core Routing revenues were down 6.5% q/q and down 17.9% y/y. Edge Routing and Switching revenues were up 3.4% q/q but down 8.5% y/y.

Cisco gained in Core, Access Aggregation, and Carrier Ethernet, which it attributed to a solid book of orders across all regions. The company has been reorganizing and announced that it had reached its goal of reducing $1B in annual expenses. Cisco is gaining share against Juniper, which decreased routing revenue 8.1% sequentially and 22.4% y/y. However, Juniper posted a 36% y/y increase in switching revenue and a 33% y/y quarterly increase, which is in part due to solid sales of infrastructure products such as QFabric and Juniper's wireless LAN products. Alcatel-Lucent, which is benefiting from the market momentum for 100G IP/optical as well as providers replacing and leveraging 100GE and IPv6 transition technologies has 16.5% of the total market share. ALU posted gains in Total Carrier Routing, ESER, MSER, and Carrier Ethernet.

We still see mixed signals on the economic outlook and overall CapEx spending for 2012, but despite the macro climate, mobility and business video services are strong areas for spending and growth in 2012. The US economy has had slow growth over the past two years, yet earnings by companies in Standard & Poor’s 500 companies increased by more then 15% each quarter, which is a good sign for the economic recovery/growth. Traditionally in a presidential election year, perceptions and fundamentals may widen since debates tend to highlight the problems and not the positive fundamentals.

Vendor	Rank	Market Share ($)
Cisco	1	53.7%
Alcatel-Lucent	2	19.0%
Juniper	3	16.5%
Tellabs	4	2.6%
Huawei	5	2.5%

QUARTERLY TREND and DRIVER HIGHLIGHTS

• New technologies are driving innovation, which is being driven by market pressures and demands for enterprises to move critical and nonbusiness critical processes to cloud or virtualized infrastructures. With many countries reaching 100% mobile device penetration and with more people owning multiple mobile devices, fixed and mobile operators have to evolve their broadband access networks to create scalable capacity to deliver multiservice support, operational efficiency and an exceptional user experience. Vendors will need to react and offer innovative solutions that address these requirements.
  

• Mobility and cloud computing are two segments driving all aspects of the telecom industry. Both markets continue to be driven by vendors introducing new technologies for data centers, security, mobile Internet, and storage.

• Data plane traffic growth is being driven by the rapid adoption of video services and cloud services; control plane traffic growth is being driven by migration from fixed and fairly static information sources to personalized, socially-inclusive, and mobile information sources.

With global CapEx for wireline networks estimated to decrease 5.3% in 2012, ACG Research anticipates that 2012 will be challenging for providers and vendors as global economies continue to fluctuate. According to the Conference Board, global growth is projected at only 3.5% in 2012. In spite of this slow growth, service providers will continue to migrate to new technologies and routers will play a key role within the IP network. 2012 will be challenging for the telecom industry, but vendors must focus and invest in developing and introducing new products and services, especially those that support the data center, cloud computing, security and mobility. These solutions, which are putting pressure for differentiated solutions, must deliver innovation, support innovative business models, produce cost and operational management benefits and meet enterprises’ strategic requirements.

For more information about ACG's syndicated service or to purchase this report, contact sales@acgresearch.net.

Ray Mota

rmota@acgresearch.net

www.acgresearch.net