Software defined networking is coming, but Europe may take two years to catch up with the size of US deployments, claims Dr Clifford Grossner, Directing Analyst for Data Centre, Cloud, and SDN at Infonetics Research.
"Software defined networking (SDN) spells opportunity for existing and new vendors, and the time to act is now," he said.
"The leaders in the SDN market serving the enterprise will be solidified during the next two years as lab trials give way to live production deployments in 2015 and significant growth by 2016. The timelines for businesses moving from lab trials to live production for the data centre and LAN are almost identical."
The timing between the US and Europe is difficult to predict he adds: "If I had to guess, I would say that EMEA is very active in lab trials and production trials today, same as NA, but it will take 24 months before the size of EMEA deployments start to be equal the that of NA. This may also be an unfair comparison because of the differences in the average size of enterprises in EMEA."
The top drivers for deploying SDN are improving management capabilities and improving application performance, while potential network interruptions and interoperability with existing network equipment are the leading barriers. Meanwhile, enabling hybrid cloud is dead last on the list of drivers, a sign that SDN vendors have some work to do in educating enterprises that SDN can be an important enabler of hybrid cloud architectures.