The VAR Guy Poll: Partners Expect 2014 to be Year of SDN

The results are in from the latest The VAR Guy poll on software-defined networking (SDN), and although there’s a mix of opinions as to whether 2014 really will be the year of SDN, the “ayes” have it by a slim margin.

We asked readers, “Will 2014 be the year of software-defined networking?” Nearly a third of readers responded “Yes” and another 18 percent selected “Too soon to say, but all signs point to yes.”

Contrast that to the 27 percent who selected “Too soon to say, but I’m leaning toward no” and the 9 percent who said “No.” Another 15 percent of readers selected “What is software-defined networking?”

Several vendors have been talking publicly about how 2014 would be the year that SDN caught on, and it looks as though the VAR community agrees with the industry sentiment that this is going to be SDN’s big year.

Take Brocade’s claim in December that 2014 would be the year both SDN and network functions virtualization (NFV) would gain serious momentum in the market. Kelly Herrell, vice president and general manager of Brocade’s Software Networking Business Unit, noted the technologies “will evolve from being simply ‘research,’ and enterprises—particularly in the service provider space—will begin to roll out production deployments.”

And so far, the year has been shaping up to be one in which SDN is much talked about. (Just look how often SDN shows up in our headlines.) Brocade (BRCD), Juniper Networks (JNPR), Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), Dell, Huawei, Cisco Systems (CSCO) and so many others have been not only beefing up their SDN portfolios, but also ramping up their channel go-to-market strategies. From incumbent networking players to startups, there is a growing number of players approaching the SDN market with a variety of solutions.

That’s not to say there isn’t skepticism about the pace at which the market is progressing, as shown in our poll results, but also in comments from the likes of Nathan Pearce, head of cloud and SDN marketing architecture at F5 Networks (FFV), who noted a lack of coherency in vendor strategies and cautioned that SDN could become a technology looking for a problem to solve.

How is SDN shaping your business this year? Chime in below in the comments section.