Software-defined networking is coming, but Europe may take two years to catch up with the size of US deployments, says an expert.
Dr Clifford Grossner is Directing Analyst for Data Centre, Cloud, and SDN at Market research firm Infonetics Research and tells IT Europa: "Software-defined networking (SDN) spells opportunity for existing and new vendors, and the time to act is now. The leaders in the SDN market serving the enterprise will be solidified during the next two years as lab trials give way to live production deployments in 2015 and significant growth by 2016. The timelines for businesses moving from lab trials to live production for the data centre and LAN are almost identical."
“Looking at data I have from another report, the hot spot for SDN deployments for 2012 was in APAC, driven by NEC, and in 2013 we saw a large ramp in North American SDN deployments putting NA as leading the market for SDN deployments, APAC 2nd and EMEA 3rd. We forecast going forward that EMEA and NA will be roughly equal in SDN deployments by 2018, driven mostly by the Bare Metal switching adopted by CSPs and large enterprises.
The timing between the US and Europe is difficult to predict he adds: “If I had to guess, I would say that EMEA is very active in lab trials and production trials today, same as NA, but it will take 24 months before the size of EMEA deployments start to be equal the that of NA. This may also be an unfair comparison because of the differences in the average size of enterprises in EMEA.”
In released excerpts from his 2014 SDN Strategies: North American Enterprise Survey, which analyzes the trends and assesses the needs of corporate private-network businesses deploying software-defined networking, he says of the wider market: "There's still some work to do on the part of SDN vendors. Expectations for SDN are clear, but there are still serious concerns about the maturity of the technology and the business case. Vendors need to work with their lead enterprise customers to complete lab trials and provide public demonstrations of success."
Infonetics' enterprise respondents in the US are expanding the number of data centre sites and LAN sites they operate over the next 2 years and are investing significant capital on servers and LAN Ethernet switching equipment. A majority of survey respondents are currently conducting data centre SDN lab trials or will do so this year; 45% are planning to have SDN in live production in the data centre in 2015, growing to 87% in 2016.
The top drivers for deploying SDN are improving management capabilities and improving application performance, while potential network interruptions and interoperability with existing network equipment are the leading barriers. Meanwhile, enabling hybrid cloud is dead last on the list of drivers, a sign that SDN vendors have some work to do in educating enterprises that SDN can be an important enabler of hybrid cloud architectures.
It is interesting to note that nearly 25% of businesses surveyed are ready to consider non-traditional network vendors for their SDN applications and orchestration software.