According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) study, the US-based Cisco Systems has emerged as a leader in India’s networking market with a clear lead over rivals such as Nokia and Hewlett Packard Enterprise in the Ethernet, router and wireless local area network (WLAN) segments in the third quarter of 2018.

“Cisco continues to dominate the Ethernet Switch market with a 65.7% share in Q3 2018, followed by Hewlett Packard Enterprise and Huawei,” IDC in a statement Wednesday said, adding that Cisco accounted three-fourth of the router market in the same quarter.

With 65.7% market pie, Cisco took a high lead over Hewlett Packard Enterprise (6.7%), Huawei (3.3%) and Nokia (2.8%) in the Ethernet Switch market in the quarter.

The California-headquartered company also dominated the router segment with 75% share, while Nokia (11.2%), Huawei (7%) and Juniper (5.5%) trailed behind in Q3 2018.

Ethernet Switch market in India, according to the research firm’s quarterly track report, stood at $160.3 million by vendor revenue with an excellent year-on-year growth of 34.4% while in Q3 2018, the router space reached to $214.9 million with an exceptional year-on-year growth of 140.4%.

Cisco has retained the top spot in the WLAN market with a 24.8% market share in Q3 2018, followed by TP-Link (17.3%) and Hewlett Packard Enterprise (15.3%).

“The Ethernet switch, router, and WLAN market are expected to grow in single digits in terms of compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for 2017-2022,” IDC in a statement said.

"Software-defined networking solutions are expected to gain prominence as the enterprise infrastructure evolves from human-dependent systems to self-servicing, fully automated and seamlessly integrated systems," Ranganath Sadasiva, Director— Enterprise at IDC India said.

The firm, however, believes that government and enterprise digitalisation initiatives would be expected to drive growth across product categories.

Dileep Nadimpalli, Research Manager— Storage at IDC India said "Mobile workforce, anytime anywhere access to enterprise networks, security across multiple channels and shift towards cloud-based application workload are key drivers for investment in network infrastructure”.