Today, most people recognise SD-WAN technology to be essential or increasing in popularity for telecom operators who are looking to automate their solutions and reduce their service costs. In other words, if you’re looking for a more productive way to make your service budget go further, then this could be the technology solution you’ve been searching for. According to a new survey conducted by “Heavy Reading” around 84% of telco respondents believe that SD-WAN could be the next big thing.
Of the 121 survey participants that were addressed during this search, around 62% believed that SD-WANs should be seen as “important, but not critical”, while a further 22% said that the technology was an essential part of their needs. The results, which were conveyed during a Light Reading executive summit in Rome, were announced amidst a great deal of new and emerging activity throughout the SD-Wan market, with many major telecommunication services now launching or coming up with new plans for services.
What is SD-WAN?
To offer a little context, the Software-defined WAN (or wide area network) is a form of software-defined networking technology that can be used with WAN connections, which are used to link enterprise networks, including data centres and branch offices – across large distances.
For instance, a WAN may be used to connect branch offices to a full corporate network, or branch data centres separated across geographical lines. In the past, these connections frequently used technology that needed special hardware. The movement of SD-WAN focuses on transferring more network control into the cloud, through a software-based perspective.
The Emerging Importance of SD-WAN
As more companies recognise the importance of SD-WAN and target this community, a speculation has been triggered that a wave of consolidation from suppliers may be somewhere on the horizon. Despite the current momentum of the market, wide-scale deployments of SD-WANs are still seen as relatively limited when you consider the results of the survey by Heavy Reading. Around only 31% of all respondents are expecting to achieve wide-scale deployments either 2016, or this year, with the remainder expecting more deployments to take place from this year (2017) onwards.
Around two-thirds of the participants for the survey believe that wide-scale rollouts for the technology system will take place during a period of around 24 months, with the majority of the work taking place in 2017.
The Important Factors in Introducing New Services and Lowering Service Expenses
Making sure that the introduction of these new services is simple, and ensuring that service expenses are lowered are regarded to be two of the most important drivers of business for SD-WAN deployments at this time. Around 52% of respondents considered simplicity to be crucial, while 48% focused on the importance of expense.
Additionally, around 43% of respondents believed that the whole process required a closer integration with policy control if SD-WAN was expected to deliver the maximum benefits to businesses. Around 51% of respondents believed that the architecture needs to become purely based on software for companies to see the true benefits of this new solution.
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