IHS Markit Reports Optical DCI Sales Reach $2.6 Billion
Optical data center interconnect (DCI) hardware revenue increased by 26 percent worldwide year-over-year, reaching (USD) $2.6 billion in 2017, according to a biannual IHS Markit report. The researchers predict that this market will surpass $5 billion in annual sales by 2022, representing nearly 30 percent of all wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) equipment spending.
"The optical DCI equipment market experienced very strong momentum in 2017," said Heidi Adams, IHS Markit senior research director for IP and optical networks. "Moving forward, we are forecasting continuing growth as service providers, internet content providers and enterprises make additional investments..."
Researchers reported that within the optical DCI market that compact DCI transport equipment sub-segment revenue grew to (USD) $483 million in 2017, which is more than a 200 percent increase. The continual rise of digital technologies at enterprises worldwide along with increases in video, enterprise applications, and additional content that is hosted and delivered through the cloud will lead to ongoing growth in this segment, they stated.
Compact DCI equipment demonstrates an expanding industry trend toward optical equipment disaggregation, as different functions in the optical network can be addressed by open hardware platforms and connected via software-defined networking (SDN) controllers and applications.
"As disaggregated equipment configurations get proven out in DCI applications, we can see usage expanding to address other areas in metro optical and enterprise applications," said Adams.
IHS Markit noted that the packet-optical transport system (P-OTS) segment revenue grew by 10 percent compared to the previous year, hitting $2.5 billion in 2017. The firm expects that as DCI becomes an essential application for optical networks in the future, the effect will be a pull-through for P-OTS platforms. The ability for P-OTS equipment to support both will make it an ideal platform for service providers to deliver DCI as a service, or to offer a combination of dedicated Ethernet and wavelength services for DCI, says the firm.
The biannual IHS Markit DCI, OTN and packet-optical hardware report covers worldwide and regional vendor market share, market size, forecasts through 2022, analysis and trends for OTN transport and switching hardware, packet-optical transport systems and data center interconnect equipment.
