How to specify a campus switching refresh for a quotation

On 6 August 2026 Dell'Oro Group said that replacing unsupported equipment was the main driver of the campus switch market, and that concern about AI-assisted attacks was likely to speed up replacement. Its analyst Siân Morgan added that supporting multigigabit interfaces and more Power over Ethernet becomes critical when replacing older switches, and Dell'Oro expects ports of 2.5 Gbps and above to account for more than half of campus switch revenue by 2029. A month later Dell'Oro reported that campus switch average selling prices had risen 19 per cent year on year in the second quarter, that nearly all vendors had raised list prices because of AI-driven component shortages, and that memory shortages would shape the market well into 2027.

In that market, a vague request produces quotations that cannot be compared and may need repricing. A request that states the following points avoids most of the back-and-forth.

What to put in the request

• PoE budget, worked out per switch: list the powered devices on each closet switch by type and power class, add them up, and state whether full power is needed on every port at once. Wi-Fi 7 access points are the usual driver; Cisco's CW9178I, for example, draws up to 47 W and runs with fewer radio chains on a 30 W PoE+ port. A switch such as the Catalyst C9350-48HX can supply 90 W on all 48 ports from a 4,320 W budget, but on many switches the usable PoE budget depends on the power supplies fitted, so state the power supply configuration you expect.
• Ports, uplinks and stacking: give the number of 1G and multigigabit access ports (2.5G, 5G or 10G), the uplink speed and count per switch (10G, 25G, 40G or 100G), and the optic type and reach for each uplink, since optics are usually separate line items. State whether switches will be stacked, how many per stack and whether a dedicated stacking kit is expected; the C9350, for example, stacks up to eight units over dedicated ports.
• Licences and management: name the management model (on-premises controller, cloud dashboard or both), the licence tier required for the features you use, such as segmentation, MACsec or EVPN, and the subscription term. Newer platforms such as Cisco's 9350 and 9550 use one licence model for on-premises or cloud management, but tiers and terms still differ by vendor, and a quotation without them is not comparable.

What it means for buyers

Add the non-hardware items explicitly: support level and term, spares ratio, and delivery location and Incoterms. Ask suppliers to state lead time per line, the price validity date and whether the quotation reflects the latest list prices, because Dell'Oro expects prices to keep rising while memory remains short. Where a refresh will run over several phases, consider ordering the first phases early rather than waiting for a full design. InTechnologies can quote Cisco Catalyst and Juniper EX switching against a specification of this kind.