2012 Predictions: Networking

On the mergers and acquisition front, the networking industry has had a relatively quiet year compared to the 2009/2010 which saw HP gobble up 3Com and the troubled Nortel finally chopped up into little pieces with the bulk going to Avaya.

The most notable purchase of 2011 was probably Dell acquiring Force 10 Networks, but the king of direct still has a relatively weak portfolio – although it has made strides at engaging with the channel.

Another notable effort was Brocade’s emergence as a true IP company without losing its FC credentials. Meanwhile, king of the hill Cisco decided to retrench a bit with the shedding of its Flip video business, 10 percent of its staff and a better alignment to its core networking market.

The spat between Cisco and HP is less public now but the underlying problem of HP ramping up its network credentials while Cisco heads into servers is not going away. 2012 might see Cisco enhance its portfolio in both servers and storage but that is an earlier 2011 predication that was proven wrong last time it aired.

A few notable start-ups have made headway in 2011. Firms like Arista Networks have won a few big scalps in the low latency market and shown that innovation is still key, even in a industry where the top four firms carve up 70 percent of the deals.

Ethernet is still the preferred route for many but multi-protocol fabrics are now not looked at as unusual or high end. As virtualisation, VDI and cloud computing continue impressive growth, the underlying network is starting to need another upgrade frenzy and fabrics seem to be the way many are heading. Well, that’s what the vendors who sell them keep telling us!

The wireless space has seen the fiercest competition with Ruckus, Xirrus and newcomers like Aerohive giving the incumbent “legacy” products a really hard time. Technologies like cloud-based multi-tenant management consoles and distributed controller-less designs have shown that unlike core switching where Cisco is dominant, the wireless space is more of a wild west theme.

A betting man might wager that 2012 will see a few of these innovators get bought by bigger rivals. Maybe Avaya? A firm that could need a good wireless networking story to add to its growing data business.

Microsoft unveiled Lync as its successor to OCS but it was the hosted telcos that made the most gains as cloud became the hottest network related talking point this year.

However,  if you had to make a prediction about what or who will be big in 2012, you would be wise to first look to the east.