Software-defined networking market set to rocket

IDC expects the market to be worth $8bn by 2018

The software-defined networking (SDN) market is set to grow eightfold in the coming four years, according to IDC.

The analyst expects the global SDN market for the enterprise to rocket from $960m (£578.85m) this year to $8bn in 2018 – thanks to a "robust" compound annual growth rate of 89.4 per cent.

It admitted that businesses are just dipping their toe into the market at the moment, but said once it catches on, growth will rocket.

"[We] see significant near-term use-case opportunities for SDN in both cloud-service-provider rollouts and enterprise deployments," the analyst said. "Although enterprises are largely still testing the waters to see what benefits will accrue from SDN, IDC sees the enterprise market as a major driver of overall SDN growth over the next several years."

IDC's vice president for network infrastructure Rohit Mehra added that the technology could transform businesses.

"SDN is taking centre stage among innovative approaches to some of the networking challenges brought about by the rise of the third platform, particularly virtualisation and cloud computing," he said.

"With SDN's growing traction in the datacentre for cloud deployments, enterprise IT is beginning to see the value in potentially extending SDN to the WAN and into the campus to meet the demand for more agile approaches to network architecture, provisioning, and operations."