The worldwide market for software-defined networking for the enterprise and cloud service provider segments is expected to surge at a CAGR of 89% from $960 million in 2014 to over $8 billion by 2018, according to IDC.
This forecast covers in-use physical network infrastructure, controller and network virtualization software, SDN network and security services and related applications, and SDN-related professional services.
SDN has emerged as a key driver for innovation and change in networking as several market and technology factors converge.
Such factors include the growth of cloud applications and services across enterprise and cloud providers, and the focus on converged infrastructures (compute/storage/network) and on the software-defined datacenter.
There are also the lessons learned regarding the benefits and best practices of server virtualization have become apparent, and the increased demand for network flexibility to support mission-critical technologies based on 3rd Platform technologies -- particularly cloud, mobility, big data, and Internet of Things applications.
"With SDN's growing traction in the data center 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," said Rohit Mehra, VP for network infrastructure at IDC.
IDC sees significant near-term use case opportunities for SDN in both cloud service provider rollouts and enterprise deployments. 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.
Among the use cases for SDN are web scaling for hosting/public cloud providers, private/hybrid cloud deployments, network