This IDC study presents a competitive analysis of the application networking market and Layer 4?7 switch market vendor shares for 2007 and the first quarter of 2008.

"The datacenter is undergoing a significant transformation with considerable investments in new physical datacenters, storage networking, and new virtualized x86 platforms. As a result, the datacenter network itself is playing a greater role in the design of a resilient, reliable, and available datacenter architecture. IDC believes the datacenter Layer 4?7 switch market will continue to benefit from and provide a critical role in this new datacenter innovation. As a result, vendor activity will continue to be brisk and market share will be hotly contested." ? Lucinda Borovick, IDC research vice president, Datacenter Networks