Declining revenues in the Chinese data center switch market during the second quarter impacted that market globally, according to a Dell'Oro Group report released this week.

"Data center switch market revenue in China declined for the first time in more than five years, due to a slowdown in spending from both cloud service providers as well as enterprises," said Sameh Boujelbene, senior director at Dell'Oro Group, in a statement.

The report found Chinese switch revenues began slowing in the first quarter of 2019, but was still positive year over year. However, in the second-quarter, Chinese switch revenues were down 4% year over year while global revenues were up just 3%.

"We were really surprised by the weakness in China," Boujelbene wrote in an email to SDxCentral. "We haven't seen such weakness in China during the quarter in other markets such as routers, optical, ... [etc.]."

According to Boujelbene, several factors led to a softening switch market in China during the quarter, not least of which were actions taken by the U.S. government banning trade with Chinese networking giant Huawei. Macroeconomic headwinds in China and a slowdown in cloud capital expenditures over the last two years also contributed to the slowdown.

"We will likely continue to see a pause in demand due to the ban on Huawei from U.S. suppliers as customers are weighing their options," Boujelbene said, adding that it is difficult to make predictions as to when the market will shift to competing vendors or when or if the U.S. will end its ban.

Cisco Takes the Cake

While the switch market faltered in China, revenues continued to show growth in North America despite a slowdown in spending by many major cloud service providers.

Here, Cisco emerged as the clear revenue leader.

According to Boujelbene, large enterprises contributed to market growth as 100-gigabit Ethernet adoption accelerated. "Large enterprises usually pay higher prices than cloud service providers, which helped Cisco gain the leading position in 100G revenue, but not shipments," he added.

While Cisco led the pack in revenues, competitor Arista managed to out ship the networking giant.