Big strides for small net firms

While market leader Cisco is looking beyond its core LAN switching market for growth, smaller competitors with brands found more often in the isles of Best Buy and Circuit City are gaining ground in small and midsize businesses.

Even as Cisco looks to address smaller markets with its Linksys-One initiative - which combines Cisco and Linksys gear with MCI converged services for as many as 100 small-business end users - Cisco may find that many smaller businesses are getting what they need for LAN and wireless LAN (WLAN) technology from D-Link, Netgear, SMC and others.

Cisco has held the dominant position in market share for the LAN switch revenue for most of this decade. But in terms of the number of ports sold and installed, smaller vendors are giving the company a run. For 2004, Cisco held 68% of the $2.9 billion worldwide LAN switch market, according to market research firm In-Stat; however, it shipped only 28% of the 3.8 million ports sold. Right behind Cisco was D-Link, with 20% of shipments. Cisco's own Linksys SOHO brand was third, with 12.5%, and consumer networking power Netgear followed closely, with 11.5%.

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While market leader Cisco is looking beyond its core LAN switching market for growth, smaller competitors with brands found more often in the isles of Best Buy and Circuit City are gaining ground in small and midsize businesses.

Even as Cisco looks to address smaller markets with its Linksys-One initiative - which combines Cisco and Linksys gear with MCI converged services for as many as 100 small-business end users - Cisco may find that many smaller businesses are getting what they need for LAN and wireless LAN (WLAN) technology from D-Link, Netgear, SMC and others.

Cisco has held the dominant position in market share for the LAN switch revenue for most of this decade. But in terms of the number of ports sold and installed, smaller vendors are giving the company a run. For 2004, Cisco held 68% of the $2.9 billion worldwide LAN switch market, according to market research firm In-Stat; however, it shipped only 28% of the 3.8 million ports sold. Right behind Cisco was D-Link, with 20% of shipments. Cisco's own Linksys SOHO brand was third, with 12.5%, and consumer networking power Netgear followed closely, with 11.5%.

Much of the shipment success of smaller firms is because of increased demand for Ethernet ports in consumer markets - such as broadband-enabled homes with integrated routers/LAN switches. But businesses also are putting what they call simple, effective LAN switch products from such vendors to work.

"The worldwide SMB market has approximately 80 million potential customers," says Norm Bogen, an analyst with In-Stat. Many of these firms use the Internet as an integral part of doing business, with technologies such as WLANs and Gigabit Ethernet evolving in small offices.

One such firm is ImageSource, a firm in Olympia, Wash., that sells document and image-management technologies. The company recently built a LAN based on Gigabit Ethernet in the core and 10/100M bit/sec at the edge with D-Link switches. See a diagram of ImageSource's network .

The need for Gigabit came as the company's bandwidth needs ballooned: High-resolution image management for clients involves scanning more than 1,100 pages of documents per day and up to 300G bytes of digital storage, says Shadrach White, the company's CTO. White says that sending 5M byte files over the LAN was taking as long as 12 minutes, and backing up a day's work took almost as long as it did to produce it - 18 hours over the network.

The firm uses DXS-3350SR stackable switches in its core, which connect 15 servers and high-end workstations with Gigabit Ethernet links. These switches also are used to connect 100 workstations and workgroup servers via 10/100 links, with Gigabit links back to the two core switches. (Each port on the boxes can run at 10/100/1,000M bit/sec).

With Layer 3, triple-speed Ethernet and slots for four fiber-based uplink ports, the DXS-3350SR matches up approximately to Cisco's Catalyst 3750 stackable switch. But the $3,600 price for the D-Link boxes was a better fit for ImageSource than the 48-port Catalyst 3750, which starts at around $14,000.