Huawei managed to increase its share of revenues by 1 percentage point, hitting 10% at the end of 2020. Dell’Oro Group analyst Sameh Boujelbene noted in the report that the differing directions between the two vendors was due to Cisco’s “high exposure to hardware-based products and low exposure to China, which outgrew the market during the pandemic.”

When employees do go into the office post-pandemic, they’ll expect plenty of bandwidth to support multimedia collaboration with their remote peers, Dell’Oro said. That will require better network intelligence to assist with capacity planning and space monitoring, as well as improved management to handle the network needs of the distributed workforce, the analyst said.