Gartner: The State of SDN – September 2017

Here we are in the Fall of 2017 and Software-defined networking (SDN) remains a widely used and misused term that means everything and nothing at the same time. In fact, most of the networking products today marketed as SDN do not quality as SDN (note: this is based on our definition which aligns with the ONF). There was (and still is) rampant “SDN-washing” as many vendors called anything new in networking SDN (side note:  today, this is kind of like how any on-prem data center is now called a private cloud, but I digress…). SDN is an architectural model for networking, not a reference design based on a well-defined set of protocols or standards, and there are many ways to implement it. Thus, SDN is not a product, or a market.

In reality, the original architectural approach behind SDN has achieved limited acceptance despite high-interest (we’ve received 1,700+ SDN-related inquiries since 2016). However we estimate, there are less than 2,000 deployed networks that meet the architectural requirements for SDN. Not surprisingly, it is pretty close to the trough of disillusionment in our 2017 Enterprise networking hype cycle. There are several reasons for this including:

• the conservative nature of networking buyers
• concerns of stability and scalability of SDN
• technological immaturity of the standards
• lack of immediate business drivers
• difficulty in putting a value on agility and innovation to prove ROI
• market power of incumbent vendors that had a vested interest in protecting their market position.

Read the entire article here, The State of SDN (September 2017)

via the fine folks at Gartner