SDN in Early Stages While Video Conferencing Goes Mainstream

SDN in Early Stages While Video Conferencing Goes Mainstream

by Jeffrey Burt

SDN Adoption on the Way Up

More than one in five organizations—22 percent—will have deployed SDN this year, and that will grow to one in three by the end of 2015. Still, 68 percent of respondents said they have no plans to implement the technology.

What Is SDN, Anyway?

Thirty-four percent of respondents said they thought SDN was about the automated provisioning of network resources. Another 37 percent said it was undefined, like a trip without a road map.

SDN Still in the Early Stages

Twelve percent of network engineers and managers said they need SDN now, but 53 percent of engineers said they’ll wait to see how the market unfolds. Almost half of managers—47 percent—have no plans to implement SDN.

Justification for SDN

The top three reasons for adopting software-defined networking center on the need for greater agility in the face of such trends as cloud computing, virtualization, BYOD and big data.

UC Hits the Mainstream

Seventy-one percent of respondents said they’ve adopted voice-over-IP (VOIP) while 63 percent are implementing video conferencing. Businesses also are using enterprise instant messaging (49 percent) and Web collaboration applications (46 percent).

Video Conferencing a Priority

The adoption of video conferencing has been rapid. Over the five years between 2009 and 2014, video conferencing implementations have more than doubled, from about 25 percent of survey respondents to 63 percent.

UC Picture Is Cloudy

More than half of the survey’s respondents said the lack of visibility into the user experience is the top management challenge regarding UC.

Hunger for Bandwidth Grows

Twenty-five percent of organizations expect their bandwidth demand to grow 51 percent to 100 percent by 2015. For 12 percent, the growth will be more than 100 percent. Sixty-three percent will see increases of up to 50 percent.

Looking to 40G bps

Twenty-five percent of businesses will have implemented 40G-bps data rates in their enterprise networks by 2015.

Where’s the Trouble Coming From?

By far (74 percent), the top application troubleshooting issue is determining whether the problem is being caused by the network, system or application.

Businesses Going Mobile

By the end of 2015, 62 percent of organizations will have adopted policies for mobile devices and BYOD.