Demand for SD-WAN is booming across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, a new report from IDC has claimed, predicting the technology will become one of the “key building blocks” in network infrastructure.
IDC said an increasing number of established vendors and start-ups are jumping onto the SD-WAN bandwagon. It said its strengths in enabling software-based intelligence and the ability for operators to pick and choose different kinds of connectivity into a hybrid network is increasing appeal.
The report noted that these hybrid networks provide “an optimal combination of cost and performance for every single location and application”. It predicted revenues across EMEA will grow at an average of 92 percent per year to hit $2.1 billion by 2021.
Jan Hein Bakkers, Senior Research Manager at IDC, said the rationale for adopting the technology was increasingly compelling.
He added: “SD-WAN has emerged as one of the hottest topics in the WAN industry. It will become one of the key building blocks of network evolution, driving the flexibility, manageability, scalability, and cost effectiveness that organizations require in their balancing act between rapidly growing requirements and much flatter budgets.”
Last month, Telefónica said it was deploying Nuage Networks’ SD-WAN product in a bid to strengthen its enterprise offering. The Nokia-owned company said businesses would benefit from great agility, faster deployment of services and reduced running costs.
The solution will be offered to customers in Spain first, before Telefónica takes it to other markets.
Also in May, Ericsson launched a new Dynamic Orchestration platform, which it said was a means for operators to add new virtualised services as well as manage existing technologies.
As well as SD-WAN, the platform also offers VPN and network slicing.