SD-WAN FEATURED ARTICLE

SD-WAN Made Major Strides in 2016

December 29, 2016

By Laura Stotler, SD-WAN Contributing Editor

It’s been an exciting year for software-defined wide area network (SD-WAN) technologies and solutions. From carriers and operators to networking equipment manufacturers, SD-WAN is being promoted and adopted at an astounding rate. The technology’s future looks bright too, with Gartner (News - Alert) predicting that 30 percent of enterprises will use SD-WAN in all their branches by the end of 2019.




The path into the enterprise has been paved by a broad industry acceptance of SDN for its efficiencies, interoperability and cost effectiveness. IDC expects the overall SD-WAN market to generate $6 billion in annual revenues by 2020, largely thanks to a number of early adopters that have embraced the technology and promoted solutions as a viable enterprise networking option.

In July, CenturyLink (News - Alert) announced an agreement with Versa Networks for SD-WAN and SD-Security solutions to enhance the service provider’s newly announced SD-WAN service. That month, AT&T also announced a partnership with Orange to roll out a set of SDN offerings via a white box approach. And Verizon (News - Alert) made its own SDN play later that month, announcing its Verizon Virtual Network Services, defined and activated via software. Including SD-WAN, security and WAN optimization, the Verizon offerings feature technology from SD-WAN bigwigs like Cisco, Juniper, Riverbed Technology, Palo Alto Networks, Viptela and Fortinet (News - Alert).

VMware made a significant SDN play as well this year, rolling out a comprehensive SDDC solution with its VMware Cloud Foundation. The offering includes compute, storage and networking virtualization and works with the IBM public cloud, with plans to integrate with AWS and Microsoft (News - Alert) Azure. And Nokia also made a key announcement on the back end, unveiling their Dynamic Enterprise Services solution to help handle the challenges of enterprise network migration to SD-WAN.

CloudGenix has also been a massive player in the SD-WAN space this year, and the company’s ION offering lets enterprise customers layer SD-WAN intelligence on top of their existing networks. The company claims its solutions can reduce WAN costs by up to 70 percent while enabling a steady migration to SD-WAN without the inherent complexities.

2017 promises to be a significant year for SD-WAN technologies and solutions, as more enterprises learn about its massive benefits for connecting remote and branch offices. With more operators and service providers rolling out their own offerings while companies like CloudGenix directly simplify the migration process for businesses, adoption rates are set to skyrocket.




Edited by Maurice Nagle

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