Software-defined networking (SDN) is gathering momentum among U.S. enterprises, according to Infonetics, which predicts that 79% of them will have it deployed in their data centres by 2017.
From a survey of 153 medium and large businesses, the research firm found that 65% are currently conducting SDN trials, or plan to this year.
"Now is the time for existing and new vendors to grab market share," said Cliff Grossner, research director for data centre, cloud and SDN at Infonetics Research, in a statement late last week.
According to the study, Cisco is currently considered by enterprises to be the top SDN vendor, followed by IBM, Juniper and VMware. However, Infonetics said this is more a reflection of brand strength than anything else.
"We asked enterprises from which vendors they plan to source data centre SDN hardware and software for the physical network, network OS, controller, orchestration software, applications and virtual network overlays," explained Grossner.
"Many will turn to incumbent network vendors, of course, but a big ‘ah-ha’ moment for us was seeing how many plan to look to non-incumbent network vendors," he said.
These include third-party SDN vendors, open source vendors, and existing virtualisation specialists.
In terms of use cases, automation for disaster recovery, provisioning, application deployment, and hybrid cloud are proved popular among the respondents.
"As SDN in the enterprise data centre grows legs in 2015, thought leadership in this nascent market will give way to market share leaders with measureable revenue," Grossner predicted. "Respondents are moving from lab trials in 2015 to production trials in 2016 and to live production in 2017."
