Gartner Symposium/ITxpo: Defining the Software-Defined Future

We’ve written much about software-defined networking (SDN) and its partner in crime, network functions virtualization (NFV). It’s the future of networking, a way of bring the cloud to the network (and, in the case of NFV, bringing the network to the cloud).  But according to Gartner research director Akshay Sharma, that future is now.

“We’ve been seeing a lot hype around SDN and NFV, but it is now more than just hype,” he said, speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Oct. 5. “We are seeing real deployments and real solutions occur.”

Specifically, Sharma pointed to the telco space as a hotbed of SDN action, as carriers march deeper into the IT space with their cloud services offerings and the lines between IT and telecom blur to the point of nonexistence. It makes sense that SDN would be so well accepted in those large data center environments, where space and equipment and energy costs are huge issues—SDN has the ability to reduce elements by a factor of four, Sharma said. Plus, an SDN environment is ostensibly much easier to program and manage.

What’s more, it can be deployed in a hybrid fashion, which means such companies can avoid the dreaded rip-and-replace and instead incorporate a pay-as-you-grow model.

However, SDN also brings its own set of hurdles. For one, Sharma said, is manpower—specifically, ensuring IT has the knowledge to build and maintain an SDN infrastructure. “It requires new competencies,” he noted.

That’s where the opportunity lies in the channel, in the form of managed services plays. Sharma noted many carriers now are looking to vendors to offer SDN elements they can’t—or don’t want to—manage on their own. It’s not a great leap to see how MSPs can also help bridge the gap.

“A managed services element becomes more critical,” Sharma said. “We are seeing examples of outsourcing because companies are realizing they don’t have the expertise. What was a carrier-vendor relationship is now a partnership mindset where the vendor becomes a critical partner and manages [an element] as a service. We will see newer services occur as a result.”

Sharma noted there are myriad opportunities for new services with SDN, such as cloudbursting as an app, ”where a company is not just buying siloed network, siloed compute and siloed storage—it’s now an atomic transaction,” Sharma said.

The end result will be a whole slew of new service offerings not envisioned today, and that definitely spells opportunity for the channel.