EDITOR’S QUESTION
Ashley Woodbridge
Customer Solutions Architect,
Cisco UAE
SDN is changing how Middle East
organizations deploy their networks whether for data centers, service provider
networks, or Internet of Things applications.
While the SDN market is still in its early
stages, the Middle East region is an early
adopter of SDN, and we are seeing strong
interest and early success with a variety of
deployments in the region.
SDN deployment in the region is based on
three factors: industry segment, complexity
of the network, and culture of the
organization. We are seeing strong demand
for SDN from industries with complex
networks that need to quickly process
large amounts of data – especially service
providers, banking and finance; energy,
oil and gas; aviation and transportation;
malls and retail; and safety and security.
Academia and the scientific research
community have successfully applied
network programmability to facilitate
data sharing across institutions, and to
deploy new types of distributed computing
applications.
Currently Middle East companies rolling-out
change across network infrastructure face
a complex and time-consuming process
by configuring networks box-by-box. As
the number of people, devices, machines
and sensors coming online across the
IoE, Middle East organizations require
new capabilities to lead in the delivery of
value-added, cloud-based services and
applications.
The Middle East hosts among Cisco’s
first and largest SDN deployments
worldwide. Thanks to a largely “greenfield”
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environment, many organizations do not
have legacy investments – enabling them
to leapfrog other businesses and reap the
benefits.
Middle East CIOs can sell the idea of SDN
to their CFOs and CEOs by focusing on
the business case rather than IT case –
especially in reducing opex and capex for
business agility.
While SDN may be a big shift for many
Middle East IT departments, what
trailblazers like du, STC, and Etisalat have
shown is that major organizations now have
the network visibility and reliability on vital
mobile networks and IPTV – proving that
SDN both disruptively and positively reduces
opex and capex.
Demonstrating the strong opportunity for
SDN field in the region, the Middle East and
Africa is set to post the world’s fastest cloud
growth rate, and second-fastest growth
in total, traditional and cloud data center
workloads, according to the Cisco Global
Cloud Index (2013 – 2018).
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