Cisco is unifying its security and software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies to help organisations embrace the cloud faster with choice and confidence.
Scott Harrell, senior vice president and general manager, Enterprise Networking at Cisco said the WAN is undergoing a radical transformation. Today, organisations host their applications in multiple clouds – public, private and SaaS.
Networking resellers are seeing a surge in sales for software defined-WANs.
Software defined networking has hit the WAN market and IDC is reporting that demand will grow over the next few years.
IDC reports a gathering momentum around SD-WAN with established vendors and a growing number of start-ups providing options.
It said that there were a growing number of service providers “jumping on the bandwagon” to take a slice of a market that it expects to grow at an average pace of 92 percent a year to hit $2.1 billion by 2021.
Jan Hein Bakkers, senior research manager at IDC said that SD-WAN had emerged as one of the hottest topics in the WAN industry.
“It will become one of the key building blocks of network evolution, driving the flexibility, manageability, scalability, and cost effectiveness that organizations require in their balancing act between rapidly growing requirements and much flatter budgets,” he added.
SD-WAN also got a mention as one of the top things to look for as a major trend from Cisco in its Visual Networking Index.
It expects SD-WAN traffic to grow at a CAGR of 44 percent increase six-fold by 2021 and represent a quarter of WAN traffic.
The optical component market is going to grow to a peak of $10 billion in 2018, according to the analyst outfit Ovum.
In a report, Ovum said that the optical components market will grow four percent in 2013 thanks mostly to WAN and datacom demand.
Between 2012 and 2018 the total optical component market will expand at an eight percent rate to a new high of US$10.5billion.
In a forecast, the independent telecoms analyst firm identifies datacom, which constitutes components used in data centres and enterprise networks, as the fastest growing segment.
This will be pushed by a demand for 10G, 40G and 100G components to support server, switch and storage connectivity.
Daryl Inniss, Practice Leader of Components at Ovum and author of the forecast, said that demand to support data centres for cloud services is a large driver for datacom sales.
High-speed transceivers are needed to support this segment and this means that the datacom market will grow by 16 percent between 2012 and 2018.
The wide area network market is still experiencing annual double-digit traffic growth, leading to high demand for 100G ports.
It is not all great though. The access segment, which includes FTTx, CATV and optical transceivers to connect base stations to antennae is declining primarily due to maturing FTTx deployments.
“We expect stable performance from fronthaul and CATV throughout the forecast period, but the access segment as a whole is expected to decline at a seven percent due to contracting FTTx revenues,” Inniss said.
Optical component revenue growth might be slowed if too many equipment vendors make their own components.
Inniss added: “Datacom has depended on component vendors delivering standards-compliant products, but equipment vendors are now developing their own components.”
Component suppliers are now competing with their own customers, he said.
Optical component revenue depends on OC suppliers’ ability to drive out cost and deliver products at scale fairly quickly.
“While excellent OC execution minimises the impact of vendors’ captive supply, poor execution reduces the OC vendor revenue opportunity,” Inniss said.
We might be a bit closer to bottoming out. According to a study commissioned by Riverbed Technology, 71 per cent of CIOs in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region expect IT spending will go up this year, reports IT Web.
A total of 400 CIOs across the region took part in the study and answered a few questions about their spending priorities over the next 12 months. They were asked to pick their top five priorities and virtualisation and consolidation programs ranked first. About 50 per cent believe server virtualisation will be their primary spending priority. Data consolidation ranks second at 40 per cent, followed by storage consolidation, desktop virtualisation, server upgrades security and compliance, and WAN optimisation, all in the 32 to 34 per cent range.
Oddly enough, the study found that 10 per cent of CIOs plan to make rather aggressive investments in an effort to boost competitiveness. However, 28 per cent claim their focus will be on efficiency and overall cuts in spending over the next 12 months.
It is hardly surprising that 33 per cent of CIOs plan to approach investment cautiously in 2013, but most plan to keep spending at current levels. Only 9 per cent said their IT budgets were shrinking and that they would spend less than last year.
Although most outfits see potential to cut costs through data centre and server consolidation, there’s apparently a lot of room for improvement in WAN performance. As many as 38 per cent of the CIOs said application performance over WAN is a barrier to consolidation.
Beancounters working for research outfit Ciena have discovered that European enterprises are falling over themselves to get to WAN connectivity.
Interest is particularly strong in the UK, France, Germany and the Netherlands.
Dubbed the Vanson Bourne survey, the report indicates that corporates are most interested in a WAN connectivity model that adapts to peak and off-peak demands.
Four out of five enterprises describe themselves as very or somewhat interested in adopting Network-as-a-Service (NaaS). The report said that this reflects the increasing bandwidth requirements that enterprises face today as well as the need for a more cost-effective connectivity model.
More enterprises are considering a ‘Data Centre Without Walls’ model where they can pay for connectivity according to usage.
The survey was made up of senior IT decision makers in Western Europe. German companies were particularly keen on Network-as-a-Service as a way of reducing IT costs.
Almost half of interviewees in the finance and manufacturing sectors describe themselves as very interested in such a model, while the public sector seems more reluctant with only 14 percent seeing it as an option.
Dutch and French enterprises are the most receptive to a pay-per-use model for WAN connectivity, followed by the UK and Germany. A third of French and British enterprises are attracted to this model by lower cost while the Dutch like the fact it is very predictable.
The report also shows the extent of IT outsourcing. About two thirds of companies have outsourced IT services, and among those more than a third intend to outsource more.
Ian Harris, EMEA system integrators leader at Ciena said that with most enterprises outsourcing part of their IT services, the next step for enterprises will be to move part of their infrastructure requirements to the cloud.
He thinks that the Data Centre Without Walls idea will catch on because it allows enterprises to share resources while dealing with peak and off-peak demands.
The research backs up findings from Gartner’s IT Spending Report for 2013 that overall spending on IT infrastructure will surpass $3.7 trillion this year and $4 trillion by 2015.
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 12th, 2024
August 9th, 2024
August 9th, 2024