Despite sluggish growth in the past couple of years, the Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) market is poised to take off, according to reports released today by market research firms Dataquest Inc. and Communications Industry Researchers (CIR) Inc.
The Dataquest report predicts that as enterprise users increasingly turn to ATM, the access concentrator equipment market will leap from US$76.9 million in 1996 to $1.28 billion in 2001 with 1998 proving to be a turning point. Likewise, CIR forecasts the U.S. market for ATM products and services to top $2 billion within a decade.
The CIR report concedes that fast Ethernet and gigabit Ethernet hurt the ATM workgroup market, but conversely have boosted companies selling ATM uplinks for local area network routers and switches. While LANs share high-speed bandwidths and therefore do not need ATM workgroups, LAN backbones benefit from using ATMs as gateways for network services, the report says.
CIR's report, ATM Markets: A Second Look -- The Enterprise Networking Environment, says that ATM has been transformed from a technology expected to dominate all aspects of enterprise networking to a platform specifically for backbones and network services. The report provides a 10-year look at ATM equipment and services markets in volume and value for the U.S., Pacific Rim, Latin America and western Europe.
Dataquest, a market research unit of GartnerGroup Inc., says in its report that the ATM equipment market should end 1997 with nearly triple the growth of last year, to $205.4 million, and almost double that in 1998, growing to $375.5 million.
Both the high-speed and low-speed access concentrator equipment markets will experience growth, Dataquest predicts.
Communications Industry Researchers, in Charlottesville, Virginia, can be reached at +1-804-984-0245 or http://www.cir-inc.com/. GartnerGroup, in Stamford, Connecticut can be reached at +1-203-964-0096 or http://www.gartner.com/.