“SDN is going through a classic market adoption cycle, with many new entrants looking to gain a toe-hold, and the majority of enterprises still kicking the tires,” according to a new Data Center and Enterprise SDN Hardware and Software report from Infonetics.
“The important question that everyone wants answered is, ‘What’s the real market for SDN?’,” says Cliff Grossner, Ph.D., directing analyst for data center and cloud at Infonetics Research. “It’s still early days, but our research over the last two years confirms that SDN controllers and Ethernet switches in-use for SDN will play a role in enterprise and data center networks, growing to a $3.1 billion market by 2017.”
The report tracks and forecasts SDN controllers and Ethernet switches in-use for SDN — the ‘real’ market for SDN — separately from SDN-capable Ethernet switches. Some highlights:
- Vendors shipping SDN products in 2013 include Alcatel-Lucent, Big Switch, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus, Dell, Extreme, HP, Huawei, IBM, Juniper, Midokura, NEC, Pica8, Plexxi, Plumgrid, VMware and others
- The few early deployments for SDN—Google, NTT, AT&T, Verizon, DT, BT, and China Mobile—are in large data centers of cloud service providers and large enterprises
- 10% of Ethernet switches will be in-use for SDN by 2017
- North America is where SDN got its start, and the region will claim nearly 50% SDN revenue market share through 2017.
http://www.infonetics.com/pr/2013/Data-Center-and-SDN-Market-Highlights.asp