Players

Trends

Industry analysis

Value chain

Companies section

Technology briefing

Sector scorecards

Glossary

Further reading

Appendix: Our "thematic" research methodology

The explosion of available bandwidth, the emergence of cloud computing, and dramatic year-on-year improvements in the price-to-performance ratios for commodity hardware have all combined to ensure that technology functionality previously only achievable using specialist hardware can now be delivered using a combination of general-purpose computing hardware and software.

 

In the world of software defined everything (SDE), the details of the underlying hardware become irrelevant and the focus shifts to a virtualized software layer instead. In this world, we no longer think of servers, or even central processing units (CPUs). Instead we describe the resources that our application requires, and the environment manages the rest. Software defined networks are a part of this new world.

 

Scope

This report analyzes how software defined networking technology will impact the world.

 

It identifies the companies most impacted by the SDN theme and where they sit in the wider value chain.

 

It highlights the main trends impacting the SDN theme over the next 12 to 24 months.

 

It provides an overview of the SDN market, competitor analysis, information on mergers and acquisitions, a timeline to understand the evolution of this emerging technology, and the SDN value chain.

 

It also evaluates the key benefits of using this technology.

 

Key Highlights

SDN adoption will be driven by demand from both enterprises and service providers for greater levels of automation and flexibility. While much of the early SDN growth has been driven by its adoption within data centers, from 2022 the SD-WAN market will begin to show significant growth as SDN breaks out of the data center and into the wide area network. SDN has its greatest appeal in the domain of hyperscale computing users. The major cloud providers have the most to gain both economically and operationally from SDN, but the promise of greater flexibility and higher levels of automation mean it is appealing to any organization with a significant investment in networking.

 

Reasons to buy

One of the key drivers in SDN is a battle royal between the software tribe (developers and cloud providers) and the hardware tribe (network equipment vendors and telecom providers). This report identifies the winners and losers in this struggle, in particular highlighting how SDN will impact three broad groups: cloud providers; communications service providers; and network equipment vendors.

 

Companies mentioned

Alibaba

 

Alphabet

 

Amazon

 

Amdocs

 

Arista Networks

 

AT&T

 

Broadcom

 

BT

 

China Mobile

 

Ciena

 

Cisco

 

Citrix Systems

 

Ericsson

 

Extreme Networks

 

Hewlett Packard Enterprise

 

IBM

 

Juniper Networks

 

Nokia ...