UPDATED 12:43 EST / OCTOBER 12 2011

Cisco Grows and Loses in the WLAN Market

Networking giant Cisco is still the dominant player in the networking industry, despite a substantial decline throughout the past few quarters.  This was enough to get CEO John Chambers to rethink his strategy and start a recovery process, and that may already be bearing its first fruits for Cisco.

An IDC report picked up by Forbes concludes that Cisco‘s enterprise WLAN revenue increased  36.2 percent year-over-year in the second quarter of 2011. The presence of the competition has become very evident however, and Cisco’s market share decreased to a little over 50 percent in the same period.

“While Cisco maintained its leadership position in the  market, the firm lost market share to all its major competitors – Aruba, HP and Motorola Solutions – who grew at a much faster rate that the market leader itself.”

The rise of the mobile worker and the influx of connected devices resulted in a 43.4 percent global enterprise WLAN revenue growth according to Forbes, which stood at $725 million in the second quarter.

Cisco’s main focus right now is its core networking and switching business, though it hasn’t abandoned all of its other ventures.  After several cuts, its communications business is still around and growing, with the latest example of that being a new partnership with Citrix. As a part of that partnership Cisco will integrate the VXI product line, a VDI-optimized video and voice delivery platform, with Citrix XenDesktop. It will be shipping starting this quarter and early 2012.

Competitor Juniper Networks has also been busy. VP of Developer Marketing and Evangelism Eddie Amos elaborated a bit on that in a recent visit to theCube, where talked about his company’s objectives, the highly-competitive networking market and the company’s good work culture, which he credited to the management team.


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