Must not be the season of the switch: Someone flipped the you-know-what in global ethernet switch and router supply chain

Disrupted supply chains and falling customer spending caused a bloodbath in the global ethernet switch and router markets in Q1, with Juniper and HPE the only top five players to report any sales progress. Turnover in switch sales shrank by 8.9 per cent to $6.16bn but things were even worse in enterprise and service providers …

[Duncan Macdonald]

Cisco

And in my opinion this is the real reason that Cisco et al got the orange buffoon to try to block Huawei. Huawei was selling equivalent (or better) products than Cisco for lower prices thereby hurting Cisco's profits. (The NSA probably disliked Huawei because there were no baked in NSA backdoors.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Cisco

"And in my opinion this is the real reason that Cisco et al got the orange buffoon to try to block Huawei."

Let's look at that objectively:

- where was Cisco's biggest growth region in 2015-2018 (pre-tariffs) in AP? China

- where did the trade war hit Cisco the most? China (approximately 25% decline resulting in ~$1bn/year lost sales)

- what is actually hurting Cisco? The combined move away from Enterprise and telco equipment to cloud providers. The majority of cloud providers use their own equipment or white label boxes, with Azure/Arista being the exception.

- does Huawei support the "lawful intercept" features that Cisco/Juniper et el include for state/federal communication taps? Yes

- does Huawei have bugs? Yes

So which manufacturers actually benefit from US tariffs? Possibly Intel if their move to 5G had been a success (spoiler - it wasn't and may even cripple Nokia Siemens), maybe Qualcomm from a IP perspective and protecting future markets. The delay in rolling out 5G means telcos are holding onto existing equipment longer but that doesn't help the big network companies where the big money is in sales of new licenses and hardware.

And regardless of the outcome for Cisco, the NSA, its friends and its competition will still have access to your data as it travels through the Internet if it crosses the right paths.

[Robert Grant]

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins tried to sound the refresh klaxon during the call, saying a bunch of customers, those "not at the centre of the crisis", were mulling over refreshes as they "realised during this pandemic that they have a fair amount of technical debt and they have a lot of aged equipment."

Robbins said: "Many of them have said this is a wake-up call and this is going to give us air cover to talk to our most senior leadership team about upgrading and building out a more robust modernised infrastructure."

Most transparent nonsense ever. "We happened to realise we needed networking kit during the pandemic. Realising this has magically given us air cover."

[jtaylor]

"You know all those employees working remotely now? They're all connecting to this old VPN server which can't handle the load. A lot of our staff can't do their jobs until we buy a new one. Here's a vendor quote.

And now that we're routing all calls through the external VoIP gateway, our Internet link is literally line-of-business. We need a bigger pipe and a new router with advanced QoS features.

With so many people connecting from home, our perimeter is really not going to keep out security threats. Here's a proposal for a network-wide IDS and endpoint security system."

With crisis comes opportunity, and not just for salespeople.