Infotech Lead Asia: Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman recently said Cloud, networking and SDN technologies attract investments from HP and will bring in profitability in 2014.
Last week, senior HP officials — during the HP University summit 2013 in Bangalore — also reiterated that software-defined networking (SDN) is its top priority in the country.
However, HP is yet to officially announce any major SDN deals with enterprises in India. Enterprises and cloud providers will benefit as they can simplify and maximize agility across data center, campus and branch networks.
Prakash Krishnamoorthy, country manager, HP Networking, HP India, said: “We are the first company to offer SDN for all three critical layers—infrastructure, control software and application—to simplify networks and improve agility across the enterprise. SDN will be an important component for Indian enterprises as well.”
According to IDC, the global SDN market for the enterprise and cloud service provider segments is likely to grow from $360 million in 2013 to $3.7 billion by 2016.
Uday Birje, country manager, Network Consulting and Services, HP India, said: “SDN separates network data traffic processing from the logic and rules controlling the flow, inspection and modification of that data. Traditionally, network management software has been vendor-specific for hardware such as switches and routers, but now vendors are responding to enterprises that require more control.”
Globally, margins of HP’s Enterprise Systems have taken a beating for the last nine straight quarters. It was a big and profitable business for HP. In the Q1 2013, it declined 24 percent year over year.
HP CEO — during an analyst call — admitted that the traditional storage business is declining.
At present, enterprises are in the process of migrating from traditional storage to converged storage. In fact, HP’s Converged Storage solutions grew 18 percent year over year.
In Q1 2013, HP’s Networking business increased 4 percent year over year.
HP will look at offering a differentiated experience to enterprise users through Moonshot, its SDN offering. HP recently termed this as the mid range 3PAR product combined with some Autonomy software.
Infonetics Research says nearly 1/4 of the enterprises it interviewed for its new data center and SDN survey have already deployed SDN technology in their data centers, and 1/3 plan to do so by the end of next year. This is impressive given the nascent nature of most SDN technologies and the relatively sophisticated IT community required to implement them
Meanwhile, Cisco and IBM top the list of SDN and programmable network technology vendors installed and under evaluation among enterprises Infonetics surveyed.
Recently, Rohit Mehra, vice president, Network Infrastructure at IDC, said: “Providing better alignment with the underlying applications, this programmability allows for greater levels of flexibility, innovation, and control in the network. Logic and policies that can be defined, changed, and modified result in a more dynamic network, providing the scale network administrators so desperately crave.”
HP believes that Indian enterprises will start deploying SDN in a significant way to benefit from scalability and better RoI.
Baburajan K
editor@infotechlead.com
