The SDN market is likely to grow from USD 8.8 billion in 2018 to USD 28.9 billion by 2023, at a CAGR of 26.8% during the forecast period. The adoption rate of SDN is anticipated to grow owing to the growing demand for data centre services in businesses.

Technology Overview

SDN is a ground-breaking networking architecture, which is poised to entirely revolutionize the existing networking and data centre infrastructure. Along with the innovative idea of NFV, the control plane is decoupled from the data plane, with the provision for a separate controlling software layer and an application platform with the capabilities of policy making and providing network intelligence.

Top SDN and NFV Providers

1. Cisco Systems
2. Juniper Networks
3. NEC Corporation
4. IBM Corporation
5. HPE
6. Big Switch Networks
7. Huawei Technologies
8. Nuage Networks
9. Nokia Corporation
10. Intel corporation

SDN and NFV Solution Benefits

SDN and NFV make it possible for businesses to access network capacity on demand through a self-service portal. Also, routing and security policies can automatically acclimatize to address real-time bottleneck, security fears or network outages. Below are five business benefits enterprises can enjoy with SDN and NFV.

1. Enhance business agility - The flexibility of SDN makes it simpler and quicker to roll out new ground-breaking services like real-time HD video conferencing and cloud applications.
2. Enhance network visibility, performance and management control - SDN usually comes equipped with dashboards which allow businesses to view network-wide visibility, analytics and control information. A centralized controller determines the best route for each application traffic flow
3. Improve security - The central SDN controller in the core network can view end-to-end traffic flows and developing intimidations. It can push international security policy updates out centrally to every site.
4. Eliminate vendor lock-in - Open platforms are important in removing vendor lock-in and driving growth in SDN. This allows businesses to use multivendor solutions to gain advantage from healthy price competition and faster innovation.
5. Reduce costs - SDN combines many compute, storage and processing functions into low cost commodity servers to minimize capital expenditure.

Vendor competitive leadership mapping provides information about the major vendors of digital transformation solutions and services and outlines the findings and analysis on how well each market vendor performs within our criteria. The vendor evaluations are based on two broad categories — Product Offering and Business Strategy. Each category carries various criteria, based on which the vendors will be evaluated.

Vendors who fall into this category receive high scores for most of the evaluation criterion. The vendors in this MicroQuadrant have a strong and established product portfolio and a very strong market presence. They provide mature and reputable traffic management system solutions and services that cater to a wide range of verticals globally. They also have strong business strategies.

They are established vendors with very strong business strategies. However, they are low in product portfolio. They generally focus on a specific type of technology related to the product. The vendors included in this MicroQuadrant have a good customer base and are providers of software and services catering to other technologies as well.

Innovators in the MicroQuadrant are vendors that have demonstrated substantial product innovations as compared to their competitors. They have very focused product portfolio. However, they do not have very strong growth strategies for their overall business.

They are vendors with niche product offerings, who are starting to gain recognition in the market. They do not have very strong business strategies as compared to other established vendors. They might be new entrants in the market and require some more time before getting significant traction. The SDN solution segment is gaining traction, as it is more functional to manage and control the network centrally; this segment offered by the SDN technology is highly useful for telecommunication providers, cloud service providers, and enterprises. SDN solutions have functionalities, such as network automation, network security, network orchestration, centralized monitoring, and virtualization. The SDN technology improves the speed of data transfer using real-time bandwidth allocation as well as visualization of the data, which helps in delivering applications, content, and new services at a high speed. This section describes the SDN market size by end-user, namely, telecommunication providers, cloud service providers, and enterprises. The enterprises segment is further segmented into organization size and verticals. CLOUD SERVICE PROVIDERS The cloud service providers increase the number of data centers globally to decrease the latency, which increases the demand for massive integrated network infrastructure. Therefore, the network becomes complex for delivering business applications and other content at high speed rates. Consequently, it becomes essential to have a centralized solution to enable programmable network controller that can effectively manage the entire network. Moreover, cloud service providers spend huge amounts on maintaining their network infrastructure to eliminate any potential bottlenecks in the networks, thus making it ideal for them to invest in SDN and NFV architectural framework. With the increasing adoption of SDN and NFV within these networks, it has been well accepted as a comprehensive solution, which not only leads to CAPEX reduction but also increases the speed of the networks with minimal addition of physical appliances. TELECOMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDERS The increasing adoption of SDN and NFV technologies by telecom service providers has boosted the overall network capacity potential, by delivering flexibility in bandwidth. SDN transforms the network to a more open and programmable framework by implementing a decoupled centralized control layer, which in turn enables implementation of NFV that optimizes network resources. This in turn reduces network congestions, enhances network user capacity (bandwidth requirement), and minimizes cost associated with hardware requirement for network user expansions. Moreover, telecommunication providers are constantly striving to offer new and innovative services to their customers at better data transfer rates across their entire network. To achieve their motive, telecommunication providers need to effectively manage the network, optimize the routers and switches for the peak hour traffic, and enable data center networking equipment to handle large volumes of data during the peak hours. Thereby, telecommunication providers are inclined toward adopting the SDN and NFV infrastructure. ENTERPRISES The subsequent segments are based on final end-users or enterprises, which have been further segmented based on their organization size and industry sectors. Modern enterprises need to be flexible and agile, in their business operations. This essentially requires a robust networking framework to ensure smooth 24x7 management, control, and support services. SDN and NFV technologies provide benefits, such as improving the network performance, optimizing network resource utilization, and providing a secure network infrastructure, which eventually saves on operating costs for enterprises.