Q&A: Cisco Captures Lead in 10 Gigabit High-end Routing Market With 36% Share Gain

Cisco recently gained the lead in the 10G high-end routing market - posting a 36 percent rise. Roland Acra, group vice president discusses these gains and his insights into recently released market-share reports.

Q: To what do you attribute Cisco's market share increase?
A: The second quarter of 2001 was the first full quarter of shipments for the Cisco 12400 family of Internet routers, and it was tremendously successful. Cisco gained a phenomenal 36 points of market share in the 10G/OC-192 segment, moving from 16.6% in C1Q01 to take over first place in C2Q01 with 52.5% share according to the Dell'Oro Group. In the overall service provider IP core market, according to Infonetics Research, Cisco remained in first place with 70% share (a 5% gain). We also gained share in the service provider IP edge market, increasing our #1 market share by 2% to 66%.

Cisco's customer value proposition is unmatched in the industry. Our investment protection capabilities respects our customers' investments, enabling them to preserve all of their line cards (the bulk of their investment) as they upgrade to the new 12400 family platforms. In addition, all 12400 family products have modular, upgradeable switch fabrics, enabling future upgrades to capacities beyond 10G.

Unlike our competitors, whose 10G architectures cannot be repackaged into smaller form factors, the 12400 offers a full portfolio of 10G systems ranging from 4 per rack to 1 per rack. Cisco is the only vendor who can meet customer requirements for space-constrained small and medium POPs (points of presence) today.

Q: How was Cisco able to accelerate so quickly?
A: We attribute our market share gains to our ability to deliver superior products, a broader 10G portfolio, and more value for our customers.

Cisco enables more value-added IP services that will enable our customers to expand their revenues, market share, and profits. As customers move to add content and new services to their networks, the delivery of real time IP services such as voice and video will be critical. A recent VoIP test report by Miercomm demonstrated Cisco's superior guaranteed priority packet delivery capabilities, delivering an order of magnitude less latency and jitter than the competition.

Q: Cisco experienced a big jump with OC-192 (10G) can you continue to maintain this level of success?
A: Cisco's success in the 10G market is especially significant, as this segment is one of the few service provider markets currently experiencing sequential quarterly growth. We believe that we will continue to make positive strides in the service provider market with the best-positioned portfolio of next generation routers today a well as roadmap of future products that will build on our leadership.

Q: What are customers looking for that they aren't getting from competitive offerings? A: Customers have responded enthusiastically to our new product line, with major customers like Sprint, Qwest, China Telecom, France Telecom, Global Crossing, and AOL and many others placing significant orders for new networks as well as network expansions.

This past January, Cisco launched its new 10Gbps/slot 12400 next generation Internet router family with two new products: The Cisco 12410 and 12416 Internet Routers. The Cisco 12410 Internet Router is a 10-slot platform with enhanced features and performance. The Cisco 12410 and its big brother, the Cisco 12416 Internet Router established new benchmarks with over twice the performance and capacity of competitive offerings. In June, we announced the newest member of the family, the Cisco 12406 Internet Router, the industry's first small form factor 10G router. This revolutionary product delivers five times the performance relative to competitive offerings.

Q. How does the 12400 address the issue of lowering capital expenses?
A: Cisco has always offered the best investment protection for its customers. Our new Cisco 12400 family of 10G routers can run every line card from the previous 12000 platform. In addition, each 12400 router has a modular, upgradeable switch fabric, enabling future upgrades to higher system capacity. Cisco has always been respectful of our customer's needs and requirements by helping them to minimize the costs they face as they move forward and expand their networks.

Q. Why is Cisco's distributed architecture crucial to network design?
A: Cisco's 12400 Internet Router has the industry's only distributed system architecture, enabling Cisco to deliver the highest scalability, performance, capacity, and flexibility.

• Highest Scalability - Two times the capacity, three times as many 10G platforms and a two-fold improvement in PoP scalability, with the smallest form factor chassis and the highest capacity available for 10G Internet routing.
  
  
• Only Guaranteed Priority Packet Delivery - The only systems that deliver priority-based congestion control, dedicated low latency queuing, and packet sequence integrity under all conditions required by premium services such as Voice over IP.
  
  
• Highest Performance - Line rate performance for IP forwarding and MPLS switching in a fully loaded system with sustained throughput for all prefix sizes. A dedicated forwarding engine in each line card delivers 25% greater performance per slot than competitive solutions, with an industry-leading maximum of 375 million packets per second.
  
  
• Reduced Network Operations Costs - The 12000 series offers non-service impacting component insertion and removal, the only integrated element manager, and the industry's best investment protection. In addition, the high capacity of the 12416 reduces routing complexity, thus improving PoP scalability by a factor of 2 or more.