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Hewlett-Packard is touting first-quarter market share gains against rival Cisco Systems, even as a leading market researcher warns it is simply too early to tell just what kind of impact HP's networking business is having on Cisco.
With Cisco Live, the networking leader's premier end-user technology event kicking off in Las Vegas on July 10, HP issued a press release Monday pointing to market share gains across all networking segments, including network switching/routers, in every region of the world in the first calendar quarter of 2011.
Citing a a recently issued report by Dell’Oro Group, a Redwood City, Calif.-based market research firm, HP said it gained 2.5 percentage points worldwide for Layer 2/Layer 3 Ethernet switching revenue market share in the first quarter of 2011, while Cisco’s share fell 5.8 points in the same period.
HP also pointed to a 2.5 percentage point gain in routers and 2.2 points in WLAN revenue market share over the same period, while Cisco’s share declined by 3.1 points in routers and 0.4 points in WLAN, according to the Dell'Oro Group numbers.
Alan Weckel, a director at Dell'Oro Group, verified the HP share gains, but cautioned that the networking market share results need to be examined over a three-year period from 2009 through the end of 2011 given "abnormal" Q1 2010 numbers. In fact, he said in an interview with CRN, the quarterly 2011 numbers could be misleading, favoring HP, given an "abnormal" increase in sales in the first quarter 2010.
"Q1 2010 was a bad year for corollary results," Weckel said. "It remains to be seen just what gains are being made. We don't know what is going to happen in 2011. We have to look at all of 2011, 2010 and 2009 and then see who has really gained share and lost share. Because of the economic crises, 2010 was abnormally high and 2011 is a year of normalizing or catching up."
"You really have to be careful looking at anything on a quarter to quarter basis," continued Weckel. "You have to look at it longer term to get a sense of what is happening. You have to look at what is happening regionally and in the data center."
NEXT: Cisco Addresses The Market Share Issue
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