SDN not eating into comms hardware market

Infonetics report finds virtualisation and SDN are not ringing the death knell for PBXs and routers

Reports of the telecoms industry's demise at the hands of software-defined networking (SDN) and virtualisation have been greatly exaggerated.

That is the conclusion of a report from Infonetics Research, which finds that a cool $1tn (£586bn) will be spent on telecom and datacom equipment over the next five years. Jeff Wilson, principal analyst at Infonetics, revealed that the industry is on track to keep growing for at least another half decade.

"Despite the fact that enterprises and service providers are in the middle of massive network upheavals due to the evolution of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualisation (NFV) technology, the telecom and datacom networking equipment and software market is on track to grow annually through 2018, with the fastest growth coming in 2015," he said.

The field of leading vendors across the telecom and datacom equipment space is set to remain fairly stable this year, with – in rank order – Cisco, Huawei, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent, and ZTE to remain in place with roughly the same market share as in 2013.

Last year Huawei claimed top spot in the service provider space, overtaking previous leader Ericsson. In the enterprise arena Cisco remains the dominant force, comfortably ahead of Avaya, Brocade, Juniper and HP, who are in a "tightly bunched" group, Infonetics claims.

Last year the telecom and datacom software market saw global sales increase three per cent to $183bn.