Cisco continues to dominate the Dutch market for network equipment  

Fortinet relatively shows the largest growth

As in previous years, Cisco is the dominant party in the Dutch network equipment market. Compared to the numbers 2 and 3, HPE / Aruba and Fortinet, however, Cisco lost some market share to both. This is the conclusion of a Smart Profile market analysis for which almost 4,000 decision makers from Dutch organizations with more than 50 employees were questioned about the use of routers, switches, hardware firewalls and Wi-Fi equipment.

Fortinet grows at the expense of Cisco

Cisco’s position in the entire network market was still at a penetration of 83.1 percent in 2013, but has fallen to 73.3 percent in recent years. Fortinet is the party from the top 5 that shows the most clear growth. We saw network equipment from this vendor in 3.4 percent of the locations in 2013, now that has more than doubled to 9.5 percent.

If we take a closer look at the market segmentation from the analysis of Smart Profile, there are still some differences. For example, the use of Cisco is clearly the highest at business locations of multinationals. 91.6% of these organizations use Cisco network equipment in the Netherlands. In the public domain and in medium-sized companies (50-250 employees), Cisco is relatively less common with a penetration of 66%. In those segments, there is therefore most room for competition to gain ground.

Hardware firewalls

The use of hardware firewalls has been constant in recent years. In 2019, 41.5% of the locations surveyed will have this in-house. Cisco and Fortinet lead this market with respectively 29.3% and 20.4% of the market. Dell EMC accounts for 10.3% and Juniper 7.2%. Cisco has owned most of this market for years. From 2015 onwards, the same parties are invariably the same, with Juniper and Dell EMC switching places in recent years for a position in the top 3 of suppliers of hardware firewalls.

Routers

73% percent of the questioned sites say that they use router equipment. This was almost 80% last year. The market for routers was at its peak in 2015 when almost 90% of the organizations surveyed indicated that they used router equipment. Cisco is also the leader in this area with 76.8% of the market. HPE / Aruba accounts for 14.5% of the router market and the other vendors each have no more than 2% of the market. It is interesting to see that Huawei is on the rise in the market for router equipment. In 2017 the supplier entered the top 10 and in 2019 climbed to fourth place with (still) a modest share of 1%.

Switches

Switches are the most common form of network equipment. We encounter them at around 90% of the locations surveyed. The Smart Profile analysis shows that almost 60% of the switches used are supplied by Cisco. Almost 34% concern an HPE / Aruba switch and Huawei finishes the top 3 with 1.4 of the delivered switches in the Netherlands. The shares of Cisco and HPE / Aruba grew further compared to 2018, by 0.5 and 0.2 percentage points respectively.

WiFi equipment

Smart Profile encounters wireless network equipment at around 80 percent of Dutch organizations. After a slight fall in 2017, there is now another rising trend in the number of locations with WiFi equipment. 47.4 percent of the total number of systems in use are Cisco products. HPE / Aruba follows at some distance with 19.8 percent and Aerohive is the third party on the Dutch market with a share of 10.2 percent.

Juniper seems to be losing ground in the area of wireless network equipment in recent years. Where the share was around 4 percent for a few years, it seems to have fallen to the current 2 percent in the last 3 years.