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SDN Market Expected to Experience Strong Growth

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

SDN is not expected to truly catch on in 2016, according to some experts on APMdigest's 2016 predictions list, however a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast says: the worldwide software-defined networking (SDN) market — comprising physical network infrastructure, virtualization/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.

IDC says software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualization, and network programmability for datacenters at cloud-providers and enterprise networks. Although SDN initially found favor in hyperscale datacenters and at large-scale cloud service providers, it is winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise datacenters across a broad range of vertical markets.

While the physical network, encompassing datacenter switches, will still account for the largest single segment of the SDN market in 2020, per the IDC research, the fastest growth will be found in the two software categories – the virtualization/control layer and SDN applications – which together will be worth approximately $5.9 billion. IDC expects the virtualization/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.

"Cloud computing and the 3rd Platform have driven the need for SDN, which will represent a market worth more than $12.5 billion in 2020. Not surprisingly, the value of SDN will accrue increasingly to network-virtualization software and to SDN applications, including virtualized network and security services. Large enterprises are now realizing the value of SDN in the datacenter, but ultimately, they will also recognize its applicability across the WAN to branch offices and to the campus network," said Rohit Mehra, VP, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

“While networking hardware will continue to hold a prominent place in network infrastructure, SDN is indicative of a long-term value migration from hardware to software in the networking industry. For vendors, this will portend a shift to software- and service-based business models, and for enterprise customers, it will mean a move toward a more collaborative approach to IT and a more business-oriented understanding of how the network enables application delivery," said Brad Casemore, Director of Research for Datacenter Networking at IDC.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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SDN Market Expected to Experience Strong Growth

Pete Goldin
APMdigest

SDN is not expected to truly catch on in 2016, according to some experts on APMdigest's 2016 predictions list, however a recent International Data Corporation (IDC) forecast says: the worldwide software-defined networking (SDN) market — comprising physical network infrastructure, virtualization/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.

IDC says software-defined networking continues to gain market traction as an innovative architectural model capable of enabling automated provisioning, network virtualization, and network programmability for datacenters at cloud-providers and enterprise networks. Although SDN initially found favor in hyperscale datacenters and at large-scale cloud service providers, it is winning adoption in a growing number of enterprise datacenters across a broad range of vertical markets.

While the physical network, encompassing datacenter switches, will still account for the largest single segment of the SDN market in 2020, per the IDC research, the fastest growth will be found in the two software categories – the virtualization/control layer and SDN applications – which together will be worth approximately $5.9 billion. IDC expects the virtualization/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.

"Cloud computing and the 3rd Platform have driven the need for SDN, which will represent a market worth more than $12.5 billion in 2020. Not surprisingly, the value of SDN will accrue increasingly to network-virtualization software and to SDN applications, including virtualized network and security services. Large enterprises are now realizing the value of SDN in the datacenter, but ultimately, they will also recognize its applicability across the WAN to branch offices and to the campus network," said Rohit Mehra, VP, Network Infrastructure at IDC.

“While networking hardware will continue to hold a prominent place in network infrastructure, SDN is indicative of a long-term value migration from hardware to software in the networking industry. For vendors, this will portend a shift to software- and service-based business models, and for enterprise customers, it will mean a move toward a more collaborative approach to IT and a more business-oriented understanding of how the network enables application delivery," said Brad Casemore, Director of Research for Datacenter Networking at IDC.

Pete Goldin is Editor and Publisher of APMdigest

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77% of leaders say their teams need AI skills urgently. 64% say their organization plans to train current employees rather than hire new ones. So far, so reasonable. The part that surprised me is who's been put in charge: 34% of those leaders say IT and engineering own the AI skills mandate. Learning and Development or HR own it at 7% of organizations. That's roughly five-to-one in favor of the people who understand the tools, over the people whose actual job is teaching adults how to learn new ones ...

In the ever-evolving digital landscape, enterprises are increasingly focused on enhancing their observability stacks to gain deeper insights into their IT environments. Observability has become a cornerstone of modern IT operations, enabling organizations to monitor, diagnose, and optimize their systems with unprecedented precision. However, a critical piece of the puzzle often goes unnoticed in this transformation: IBM i ...

We just surveyed 300 frontend and mobile engineers across 16 countries, and the finding that keeps sticking with me isn't the one about AI. It's this: 74% of engineering teams rate themselves in the "middle" of the observability maturity scale. Not reactive, not strategic. Stuck in the middle. They have dashboards, they have tracing, they have alerts. And yet when something goes wrong, they still can't tell you why ...

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Application performance monitoring (APM) dashboards are only as useful as what they are configured to measure. The default setup covers obvious failure modes such as downtime, error spikes, and latency breaches, but it does not cover everything. Some failures produce no alerts or anomalies. The dashboard stays green while users experience a broken product. Here are six signs that is happening ...

The race to deploy AI is largely over. Most enterprises have entered it. The question now is not whether artificial intelligence is running inside the organization. The question is whether anyone is genuinely responsible for what it does. That is not a technical question. It is a leadership one. And most organizations are not yet structured to answer it honestly ...

A new analysis of 250 real-world queries across common retail tasks, such as product pricing, availability, ratings, shipping and specifications, reveals systemic inefficiency at the heart of web-based AI agents. On average, 97.9% of the data retrieved by agents from live web pages is irrelevant to the query being answered. Specifically, the average page ingested ran nearly 9,000 characters, while the average answer was just 32 characters, resulting in a noise-to-signal ratio of 278:1. Price queries were the most extreme outlier, with noise rates approaching 99.5%. That's not a rounding error. That's a structural problem ...

The enterprises that will define the next decade are not the ones that deployed the most technology. They are the ones who understood what their technology was actually doing. That distinction is not a philosophical point. It is the central operational challenge facing every organization that has spent the last five years modernizing at speed ...

AI is becoming the operating system of the enterprise. It acts as an invisible coordination layer that understands intent, connects systems, and executes work across complex SaaS environments. Previously, employees had to click through multiple systems — CRM, ERP, support tools, collaboration platforms — to complete a single task. Now, instead of navigating each application manually, they can simply state what they need to accomplish ...