IHS-Infonetics recently released excerpts from its Data Center and Enterprise SDN Vendor Leadership Analysis report, which profiles and analyzes 10 leading data center and enterprise software-defined networking (SDN) vendors: Broadcom, Brocade, Cisco, Cumulus Networks, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), Huawei, Juniper, NEC, Nuage Networks from Nokia and VMware.

The report looks at vendors from a number of segments, including Ethernet switch, Ethernet switch silicon, Ethernet switch operating system (OS) and SDN control, examining their approaches to and overall activities in the market to understand how they are approaching this emerging opportunity and gauge the most likely winners as the market matures. 

“The leaders in the data center and enterprise SDN market are emerging for physical network equipment and SDN network virtualization overlay (NVO), but there’s still opportunity. The second and third tiers of the market have yet to be solidified, and perhaps the most innovation-driven part of this market — SDN controllers, orchestration, and applications — is still wide open,” saidCliff Grossner, Ph.D., research director for data center, cloud and SDN at IHS.   

“Many service providers and enterprises will carry out production trials and live deployments in 2016, which IHS expects will solidify the market,” Grossner said. 

DATA CENTER AND ENTERPRISE SDN LEADERSHIP HIGHLIGHTS:

·    Broadcom is a merchant silicon market pioneer providing SDN-aware switching chips and developer tools

·    Brocade is a  data center fabric innovator offering open source SDN controller distribution

·    Cisco, the #1 data center network vendor, is leveraging its experience with silicon to drive innovation in the SDN market with custom chips that gather application traffic flow data

·    First to market with a Linux OS for Ethernet switches, Cumulus Networks is driving transformation in the networking market by disaggregating Ethernet switch hardware from software

·    SDN pioneer Hewlett Packard Enterprise seeded the market with over 30 million OpenFlow-capable switch ports and branded bare metal switches, and was first to launch an SDN app store

·    Huawei provides a comprehensive SDN portfolio that allows the use of 3^rd-party components and is bringing advances to the SDN market via software and silicon programmability

·    A pacesetter in silicon and software, Juniper Networks was one of the first vendors to open source its SDN controller and disaggregate its switch OS and hardware

·    SDN market pioneer NEC has proven large-scale deployments and an open solution that allows choice for customers rather than lock-in

·    Nuage from Nokia is an early SDN market entrant providing a Border Gateway Protocol (BGP)–based SDN network virtualization overlay and SD-WAN solution

·    VMware, the server virtualization and SDN controller forerunner, is innovating by applying software abstraction techniques to network control

For more information about the report, contact the sales department at IHS in the Americas at +1 844 301 7334 or [email protected]; in Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) at +44 1344 328 300 or[email protected]; or Asia Pacific (APAC) at +604 291 3600 or [email protected].