Winners emerge in SDN as market soars

Triple-digit growth in software-defined networking market in 2013

The race is on to lead the software-defined networking market, according to new research, which claims revenue in the space is soaring substantially.

Infonetics Research claims that in 2013, datacentre and enterprise SDN – including SDN-compatible Ethernet switches and controllers – rocketed 192 per cent compared with 2012.

The leaders of the SDN market will be decided in the next two years, the analyst added, claiming lab trials carried out at manufacturers this year will soon end up on the production line.

"There is no longer any question about SDN playing a role in datacentre and enterprise networks," said Infonetics' datacentre, cloud and SDN analyst Cliff Grossner.

"The early SDN explorers – NEC in Japan and pure-play SDN startups in North America – were joined in 2013 by the majority of traditional switch vendors and server virtualisation vendors offering a wide selection of SDN products."

The "software-defined" trend does not stop at networking, according to IDC, which claims that global sales of software-defined storage platforms grew 15.7 per cent sequentially in Q2.