The campus switching industry is entering a new era of growth with spending expected to exceed $100 billion over the next five years, Dell’Oro Group reports.

“When the pandemic first hit the market and spurred the work-from-home phenomenon, many people thought that campus switch sales might collapse and never recover,” Sameh Boujelbene, senior research director at Dell’Oro Group, said in a statement, “The pace of recovery, however, has exceeded our expectations.”

A major upgrade cycle of aging infrastructure spurred by the digital transformation acceleration during the pandemic and an exponential expansion in devices connecting to the network like IoT drove the growth, she added. “We believe that digital transformation is a multi-year journey that will benefit the campus switch market for many years to come and currently project sales to exceed $20 billion by 2026.”

Boujelbene anticipates multi-gigabit switches will comprise nearly 20% of that sales, propelled by the rapid adoption of Wi-Fi 6 and the expected introduction of Wi-Fi 7 access points.

Cisco, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), and Huawei remain to be the top three campus switch vendors by market share, according to Boujelbene. 

While Cisco’s share has been hovering around 55% for the past few years, the vendor faces growing competition from vendors like Arista, Extreme, HPE, and Juniper, she told SDxCentral in an earlier interview.

In the third quarter of 2021, Extreme, HPE, and Juniper each gained more than 1 percentage point of revenue share in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, according to Dell’Oro Group.

The competition is also driving both incumbent and new entrants in the switching space to develop new features and artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities as a way to differentiate themselves, Boujelbene said in response to questions. “Juniper with their Mist AI is a perfect example of that.”

Juniper bought Mist for $405 million in early 2019. Mist started out as an AI-enhanced wireless and LAN switching vendor. The company’s AI functionality won Juniper over, and now Mist serves as the heart of Juniper’s AI-based enterprise strategy with Marvis, the company's digital assistant, as its brain. Juniper’s integration of Mist into its network portfolio is a key differentiator, Gartner echoed in its recent report. 

In addition to AI, Boujelbene expects to see more security, analytics, and automation capabilities in the near future. “Automation would require telemetry, network visibility, troubleshooting, etcetera,” she added.