Infonetics Research report found robust SDN plans across North America
The market for software-defined networking solutions is expected to blossom over the next several years, with robust SDN opportunities for both incumbent and new entrants, according to a new report from Infonetics Research.
The report, “Data Center SDN Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey,” found that 79% of the 153 medium-sized and large businesses surveyed plan to deploy live SDN solutions in data centers by the end of 2017. Those deployment plans look set to favor the more-established players in the market, although Infonetics said it was surprised by the number of enterprise customers also looking at alternatives.
“As SDN in the enterprise data center grows legs in 2015, thought leadership in this nascent market will give way to market share leaders with measurable revenue,” said Cliff Grossner, research director for data center, cloud and SDN at Infonetics Research. “Now is the time for existing and new vendors to grab market share. Respondents are moving from lab trials in 2015 to production trials in 2016 and to live production in 2017.”
According to the survey, Cisco was the dominant vendor listed by enterprises, garnering a 71% share of those considered to be the top three SDN hardware or software vendors. IBM, Juniper and VMware were also mentioned as candidates. However, Grossner did note a surprising number of smaller players were also mentioned as potential partners.
“Many will turn to incumbent network vendors, of course, but a big ‘a-ha’ moment for us was seeing how many plan to look to non-incumbent network vendors, including third-party SDN vendors, open source vendors, existing virtualization vendors and others,” said Grossner.
For those vendors looking to garner a piece of the action, the survey found respondents expected data center SDN deployments to provide better security, application performance and simplified management without impacting current network activity. Data center orchestration software was noted as one of the biggest opportunities for both incumbent and third-party vendors.
Infonetics predicted last year that it expects the global service provider SDN and network function virtualization market to grow from less than $500 million in sales last year to $11 billion in sales by 2018.
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