EDITOR’S QUESTION
TO WHAT EXTENT
ARE REGIONAL CIOs
INVESTING IN SDN
TO RESTRUCTURE
EXISTING LEGACY
NETWORKS?
A
ccording to a recent
International Data
Corporation (IDC)
forecast, the worldwide softwaredefined networking (SDN) market
— comprising physical network
infrastructure, virtualisation/control
software, SDN applications (including
network and security services), and
professional services — will have a
compound annual growth rate (CAGR)
of 53.9% from 2014 to 2020 and will
be worth nearly $12.5 billion in 2020.
Software-defined networking
continues to gain market traction as
an innovative architectural model
capable of enabling automated
provisioning, network virtualisation,
and network programmability for
data centres at cloud-providers and
enterprise networks.
Although SDN initially found
favour in hyper-scale data centres
and at large-scale cloud service
providers, it is winning adoption
in a growing number of enterprise
data centres across a broad range
of vertical markets. Indeed, SDN
82
INTELLIGENTCIO
(Source: SDxCentral)
delivers the agility, flexibility, and
programmability that align closely
with IDC’s 3rd Platform for IT,
especially for public and private cloud
rollouts.
While the physical network,
encompassing data centre switches,
will still account for the largest single
segment of the SDN market in 2020,
the fastest growth will be found in
the two software categories – the
virtualisation/control layer and SDN
applications – which together will be
worth approximately $5.9 billion.
IDC expects the virtualisation/control
layer software market to reach $2.4
billion in 2020, with a CAGR of nearly
64% during the forecast period. SDN
applications – including Layer 4-7
network and security services and
analytics – are forecast to achieve a
CAGR of 66% through 2020, when
they will account for revenue of more
than $3.5 billion.
www.intelligentcio.com