Cisco is surprised at the introduction of Amazon's network business
As Amazon, the world's largest e-commerce company, said it was considering selling low-cost switches, share prices of network equipment companies such as Cisco plummeted.
According to major outside sources such as Business Insider, Amazon is considering selling low-cost white-box networking switches to its existing customers in its Web services (AWS) business.
Amazon has hired it in its AWS data center to do this and has been testing it with some of its customers.
Amazon switch equipment is expected to be available at a price point of 70 to 80 percent of Cisco products as early as 18 months.
Large Internet service providers, including Facebook and Google, are using their own switching equipment. Google has even made artificial intelligence (AI) chips and adopted them in the switch.
Amazon is likely to focus more on converting its computing environment to AWS cloud services for enterprise customers rather than generating new revenue from network equipment sales.
Cisco is not going to be hit hard enough to get into Amazon's network market. Low-cost networking products are not new, and they are already available. If price alone was an important benchmark, it would have been hard for Cisco to dominate the market.
According to market research firm IDC, Cisco's market share in the switch market in the first quarter of 2018 is 53.4%.
Here, other cloud computing companies are likely to work with network equipment companies to check Amazon.
Cisco and Google have already partnered to develop software to optimize Cisco equipment for Google cloud services. Cisco is partnering with Microsoft, a cloud operator.