Industry Moves To Virtualized Networks

With APAC adoption of SDN on the rise, India is poised to be a major market with a surging interest from all segments and an enormous opportunity for partners. The market adoption is led by telcos as seen anywhere across the globe, but the interest in SDN has taken rapid leaps and SDN/NFV PoCs, and solution deployments in other industries as well.

- Sanjay Mohapatra

In IT, it is always cheaper per unit to run a large thing rather than a small thing, unfortunately in networking that wasn’t always true. But then came SDN, sorting out labor intensive and costly tasks in network administration, software defined networking dramatically simplifies and automates networks. SDN is the evolution in terms of networking, and with everything connect today, SDN is rapidly being endorsed enterprises all over the world.

In India, there has been a visible excitement among organizations, big and small, public or private, with telecom and service providers leading the line in terms of early adoption. The SDN revolution has further been fuelled by adoption in IT/ITES and e-commerce companies and with it, and with the evolution of the technology, SDN has now reached a point where it has become simple enough to be embraced by the SME segment.

Global rise of SDN

From a $406 million industry in 2013 to more than a $6.6 billion market in 2017, as per IDC, the SDN market is expected to continue the big strides at a 25.4% compound annual growth rate, reaching to $13.8 billion by 2021. Increasing implementation of mobility services, huge data generation, wide data network, IoT, and a growing need of flexibility in network infrastructure segments like IT, FMCG & retail, BFSI, Defense, Healthcare, and Telecom have been driving this growth. As Venugopal N, Head Pre Sales, Check Point, India & SAARC puts it, “SDN is part of the wider movement to virtual network applications and services. Surely it is emerging out of the early adopter phase and into the early mainstream stage of its development. It is now a game changer that offers tangible benefits.”