The market for carrier SDN (software-defined networking) software, hardware and services is expected to grow to $5.7 billion in 2019 from $103 million in 2014, said IHS.

The growth driver will be the demand for service agility and operational efficiency in networks to stay competitive.

Today, research agency IDC India said IT, ITeS and telecoms are early adopters of SDN in the country. In fact, 22 percent of respondents are users of SDN and 19 percent intenders and 28 percent users are ready to spend 7 percent of their IT budget on SDN implementations.

“We’re still early in the long-term, 10- to 15-year transformation of service provider networks to SDN. Momentum is strong, but we won’t see widespread commercial deployments where bigger parts of–let alone whole–networks are controlled by SDN until 2016 through 2020,” said Michael Howard, senior research director for carrier networks at IHS.

Telecom service providers will increase their spending on SDN software by 15 times from 2015 to 2019.

Outsourced services for SDN projects will grow at a 2014–2019 CAGR of 199 percent, said IHS.

IDC, which conducted the survey among 150 enterprises in India in association with Juniper Networks, said improved network performance and efficiency emerged as the top benefit of adopting SDN.

Initial concerns related to SDN are difficulty in integrating SDN with already deployed or available infrastructure, security concerns, technical skill gap, total cost of ownership and lack of management, said IDC India.

IHS said due to the newness of SDN technology and the fundamental changes it brings to networks, there is an incredible demand for expertise to design, deploy and operate SDN-based services, and carriers are looking to vendors for this expertise.

Baburajan K
[email protected]