Trends Report

Is Software-Defined Networking Ready For The Enterprise? Part 2 Of 3

Enterprises And Vendors Need A Lot More Wrinkles On Their Face

March 5th, 2014
Andre Kindness, Principal Analyst
Andre Kindness Principal Analyst
With contributors:
Doug Washburn , Christopher Voce , Heather Belanger

Summary

Even though software-defined networking (SDN) is widely popular with cloud providers, carriers, and universities, today's SDN solutions won't cure enterprise infrastructure and operations' (I&O's) ills for three reasons: 1) They don't yet meet the criteria of enterprise technology management; 2) key vendors don't offer SDN functionality as part of their mainstream product lineup; and 3) SDN doesn't address all the changes that need to occur within the network stack or platform. Even if the market was delivering enterprise-ready solutions, most enterprise I&O teams lack the experience and maturity to manage such an environment. This report reveals that the one-percenters are using SDN and discusses why they aren't a good yard stick. More importantly, this report lists the questions I&O teams should ask vendors to ascertain the maturity of their solution, and the even tougher questions I&O executives should ask their teams about their own readiness.

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