The movements in the telecom space were also responsible for the switches market being the most vibrant in the last fiscal. The total switches market in the country has grown from Rs 798.7 crore in the last year to Rs 960.4 crore this year, growing by 20 percent. Cisco has a 65 percent share of the switches market too, with the main competition coming from Intel, Cisco and D-Link. In the high-end chassis-based Layer 3 switch category, the main competition was between Cisco and Enterasys, while Nortel dominated the Layer 4-7 segment.

The market witnessed compartmentalization of switches into various categories. In terms of numbers, unmanaged fast Ethernet switches were sold in large quantities. Among managed switches, 24 port switches were the most popular.

The layer 3 switches sales did not really pick up. Even now there are more layer 2 switches being sold than layer 3 switches.

This is because it is not very easy to configure the layer 3 switches. The layer 3 market in India itself is not very well defined.

What a network needs is a high backbone coupled with a non-blocking architecture, and only then will the features of the switch be best exploited, be it layer 3, 4 or 5.

EXPERTS PANEL Anand Mehta, marketing manager, D-Link Manoj Chugh, president, Cisco Systems Ravi Chauhan, vice president, Nortel Networks