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The market for traditional “carriage connectivity” services in Australia is being rapidly replaced by new software-defined networking offerings as enterprises seek to control costs and manage efficiency, according to new analysis from IDC.
While it found that enterprises’ wide area networks continue to support mission critical applications for a majority (80%) of Australia enterprises, IDC expects non-critical services to be offloaded to internet-based connectivity supported by software-defined WAN technologies going forward, erasing any future growth for traditional networking services.
“There is little growth left in the market for traditional carriage connectivity and the move towards software defined control of networks by the enterprise will see new classes of products and vendors in the market,” said IDC research manager Jamie Horrell.
“Rather than rely on forklift upgrades to the WAN, the flexibility brought to networking by software defined approaches will see a move towards a hybrid WAN environment incorporating public internet and taking advantage of internet offload, application specific policy control, and intelligent path selection.”
According to IDC, 79% of enterprises are using their WAN to access cloud services, while another 69% rely on it for performance-sensitive video conferencing services. As such, network availability, mean-time-to-repair and application performance ranked as the top priority for enterprises.
However, IDC expects to see non-critical services to move from traditional MPLS-based WAN connectivity onto the public internet enabled by SD-WAN solutions that are coming to market.
“The stars are aligned for SD-WAN at present,” said Horrell. “Almost nine out of ten branch office routers shipped since 2014 in Australia have basic SD-WAN functionality; the WAN cost, and capacity equation is yet to be solved, and controller software is mature and being implemented as a service.
As service providers bring controller based solutions to market, SD-WAN will be very difficult to ignore.”
