IDC said the global software-defined networking (SDN) market for the enterprise and cloud service provider segments will grow to over $8 billion by 2018 from $960 million in 2014 – with compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 89.4 percent.
SDN ecosystem includes in-use physical network infrastructure, controller and network-virtualization software, SDN network and security services and related applications, and SDN-related professional services.
Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC, said: “With SDN’s growing traction in the datacenter for cloud deployments, enterprise IT is beginning to see the value in potentially extending SDN to the WAN and into the campus to meet the demand for more agile network.”
IDC said it sees significant near-term use case opportunities for SDN in both cloud service provider rollouts and enterprise deployments.
The following are some of use cases for SDN:
Web scaling for hosting/public cloud providers
Private/hybrid cloud deployments
Network programmability/customization
Security applications
