Software-defined networking remains a major point of interest for members of the telecom industry, promising to enhance network performance and allow for greater asset management capabilities. The various business-boosting benefits of SDN have driven demand for the technology among telcos, and it appears to have firmly established itself as a force within the sector.
Recent figures suggest that SDN’s place within the telecom industry will only become more visible over time as carriers and service providers invest in the technology. While data center applications are currently viewed as some of the most readily deployable uses of SDN, other areas are closing the gap. According to ACG Research, core, metro and edge environments will account for a larger percentage of service provider SDN sales than data center operations by the end of 2017. Demand for SDN in these domains is being driven by the various performance-enhancing benefits offered by SDN. Assets such as multiprotocol label switching and packet optical transport systems can be improved upon with SDN. Altogether, sales of hardware outfitted with such capabilities will hit $7.5 billion by 2019.
This rosy outlook on the future of SDN deployment was shared by a recent MarketsandMarkets study. That report found that the global SDN market will be worth approximately $3.67 billion by 2019. The organization noted that numerous elements are increasing the need for SDN solutions across many industries.
“The major driving factors for SDN market are growing need for mobility, need for new architecture, surging cloud services, varying traffic patterns and network management of large networks along with the network management of geographically spread assets,” MarketsandMarkets stated.
Many of those issues will be particularly relevant in the telecom sector. Carriers have long sought to distinguish themselves through superior service delivery. SDN presents a viable method by which telcos can increase the performance of their existing networks. For instance, the oversight and control offered by SDN could be used to divert network resources to high-volume users or areas that are suffering from bottlenecks. Once the initial growing pains have been endured, SDN promises to aid the development of more dynamic telecom offerings.
