A standard that began life over three decades ago to connect computers to printers at 10 Mb/s, Ethernet continues to evolve to serve myriad of newer applications. Today, along with the intensification of Industry 4.0 among manufacturing and automotive sectors, the industrial Ethernet market is also pacing worldwide. The increasing need for higher bandwidth, easy scalability, interoperability, and cost-effective networking and cloud services across several verticals is bolstering the demand for fiber optics in data centers. Owing to this increasing need for cost-effective and fast communication, the Ethernet market is set to exceed USD 70 billion by the year 2025. And, to capitalize on the void left in the market for innovative Ethernet solutions, large tech corporations and small independent startups alike are developing next-generation solutions to help companies streamline their enterprise networking processes.
The Ethernet landscape combines new and existing data rates with other attributes to meet a multitude of application requirements. In the automotive industry, which requires lightweight cabling and robustness against harsh environmental conditions, modern Ethernet specifications provide 100Mb/s and 1000Mb/s speeds. At the same time, Ethernet is also leveraged over a single twisted copper cable in connected cars, which marks the entry of Ethernet into automotive applications in order to connect the increasing number of intelligent devices in the digital environment. In the world of industrial control and IT, Ethernet has emerged as the de facto wired interconnect replacing aging proprietary machine control with next gen connectivity and networking capabilities.
Currently, the need to host, process, and transmit more data quickly and in a secure manner is putting a lot of strain on the existing data center network, server, and storage architectures. Additionally, the growing demand for specific applications by incorporating artificial intelligence, machine learning, image recognition, and data analytics is exacerbating the problem. To address this challenge, Ethernet solution providers are providing innovative and robustly designed fiber optics and other cabling systems.
Today, Ethernet with speeds of up to 200 Gb/s are being tested and adopted alongside the establishment of thousands of 25Gb Ethernet servers in hyper-scale data centers. In the not too distant future, Ethernet is poised to deliver almost everything the modern hyperconverged or software-driven data centers need with respect to storage performance, capacity, and management. Furthermore, with Ethernet services and networking switches evolving in tandem with the changing enterprise networking realm, the future of the once archaic mode of connectivity looks bright.
Looking ahead, as the need for speed and diversification in next-gen servers continues to evolve, the enterprise applications of Ethernet with regard to data rates, throughput, distance, and physical media is predicted to experience a significant advancement.
To help CIOs navigate through the list of Ethernet solution providers, our distinguished selection panel, comprising CEOs, CIOs and VCs, industry analysts and the editorial board of Enterprise Networking Magazine narrowed the Top 10 Ethernet Solution Providers 2019 that exhibit competence in delivering solutions that tackle the various complexities in communication, information management, and enterprise networking.
We present to you Enterprise Networking Magazine’s “Top 10 Ethernet Solution Providers – 2019.”