Bengaluru, Oct 6: Riverbed Technology today announced the results of a survey conducted at VMworld 2015 that asked attendees about their current and future plans to adopt disruptive enterprise networking innovations, including Software-Defined Networking (SDN) and Software-Defined Wide-Area Networking (SD-WAN).
The survey found that SDN adoption in the datacenter is gaining strong interest with SD-WAN emerging as the next wave of network innovation for remote and branch office locations.
By all indications, a software-defined approach to networking is seeing an increased interest among organizations. Fully 77 percent of survey respondents said that their organizations are at some level of participation with software-defined networking solutions within their data center (SDN), including 13 percent that have already deployed SDN.
The survey found that 29 percent are exploring similar architectures for their remote branch office locations (SD-WAN), including nearly 5 percent who have fully implemented SD-WAN solutions today.
The top three drivers for adopting a software-defined approach to networking in order of importance are (1) being able to deploy new applications and services more quickly (71 percent said this was somewhat/extremely important), (2) reducing costs (69 percent of those pursuing) and (3) reducing mistakes when deploying applications and services (68 percent).
“The new Riverbed Software-Defined survey shows that with the increasing complexity in today’s hybrid IT environments, organizations seek better ways to have full visibility and deliver applications across their distributed enterprise,” said Paul O’Farrell, senior vice president and general manager of the SteelHead and SteelFusion business units at Riverbed Technology.
“With the rise of SaaS applications, coupled with an insatiable demand for more bandwidth, traditional approaches to wide-area networking no longer meet the needs of business. The emerging area of SD-WAN allows applications to be delivered securely and optimally across hybrid networks and hybrid clouds with reduced cost, increased speed/agility and streamlined management.”
“While the survey clearly indicates we’re still in the early days of SDN and SD-WAN, we expect that over the next 3-5 years many organizations will deploy a SD-WAN solution as a modern replacement for traditional branch networking solutions. Riverbed has been evolving our products the past several years to address this emerging market, and we plan to further invest R&D resources to ensure superior application performance in hybrid environments — from the datacenter to the branch to the cloud — over the most optimal network.”