SDN is the great business enabler says Verizon
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SDN is the great business enabler says Verizon

Verizon has unveiled the findings of its latest survey that aims to explore why companies are rapidly deploying software-defined networking (SDN).

The report entitled Move fast, stay ahead, surveyed 165 senior IT leaders from large global organisations to find out what is driving this quick adoption of SDN and why the urgency.

Of those surveyed, 15% of companies said that they are already piloting or deploying SDN technologies, with a prediction being made that this number will rise to 57% over the next two years. Over that same time frame 12% are expected to have deployed SDN throughout their entire organisation. Interestingly 31% foresee their SDN deployments happening at a slower pace and have predicted deployment to happen over the next three to five years.

“Increased deployment is inevitable,” said Mark Timbs, CIO of the UK construction, infrastructure and property group Lendlease, which has made a number of successful investments in SDN. “It’s already proving invaluable in remote places because it’s reducing the need to get skilled technical hands into far-flung areas at short notice, but also, this is the way industries are heading in terms of their telecoms and networking providers, so the evolution toward SDN is becoming a natural one.”

The business case for the deployment of SDN was also reinforced during the survey. Almost half (49%) of respondents see the need to scale their network functionality, 44% believe SDN will give them a competitive edge and help them remain agile enough to respond quickly to opportunities, the same percentage (44%) said that they need to deploy services to internal lines of business quickly.

According to the report, the key benefits of SDN adoption include: increased network security (56%), increased application performance (50%) and increased network resilience (48%).

“Like most organizations, we are doing a lot with the ever-increasing data sets. Having a good network that allows us to take advantage of media-rich applications across the firm, to communicate and share with one another in our firm and then out to our clients, that is all on our roadmap. We will be taking greater and greater advantage of this,” added Matt Peers, global COO at law firm Linklaters.

86% of respondents strongly agree that SDN can enable more rapid deployment of new applications, services and infrastructure. Further to this nine out of ten survey respondents strongly agree that the greater agility and simplicity of SDN will enable their businesses to be more innovative in their approach to new types of applications, services and business models.

“In and of itself, the internet is a pretty resilient thing and we’ve only seen improvements in resilience rather than reductions in our SDN trials,” said Shaun Baker, global director of network services at BP.

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