| NOTAS: | "Network providers looking for a best roadmap for future enterprise services have SD-WAN (software-defined wide area network), NFV (network functions virtualization), and cloud connectivity to populate their advanced service portfolios. Providers are picking up the pace to launch commercial services leveraging SD-WAN, NFV, and cloud. SD-WAN leverages all these technologies, but under the hood SD-WAN is a collection of features, not a discrete new platform. Growing numbers of SD-WAN competitors and suppliers offer variants and techniques that make for growing market confusion. Some network providers have launched enterprise-facing commercial NFV offers: They have found that assembling the pieces takes a daunting amount of development work. When it comes to the cloud opportunity, many telcos that were once bullish on data center and cloud services have retreated to cloud connectivity services. Ovum maps out how SD-WAN services influence enterprise managed network services more broadly. It predicts the continued trajectories for current SD-WAN, NFV, and cloud connectivity trends in 2018, and advises enterprises and network service providers on how to consider services built on these technologies to meet their needs. SD-WAN is having an outsize impact on the networking industry. Some large enterprises see SD-WAN services as the next big thing; adoption is still relatively low but growing. Leading service providers cite dozens or scores of deployments for their managed SD-WAN services, but many are pilots or trials that have not yet scaled to hundreds or thousands of sites. But early managed SD-WAN deployment numbers tell only part of the story. Elements of SD-WAN features and concepts are finding their way across service packages, which is evolving hybrid WAN services into something more dynamic. SD-WAN is also a platform and tailwind for enterprise NFV: Enterprises look to SD-WAN for network transformation, and deploying it on NFV becomes an incremental step. Finally, there is the ongoing, complex interplay among cloud, network, and managed services. Enterprises have chosen to source public cloud services from specialists, while network providers have been pushed into a supportive role, specializing in cloud connectivity. Meanwhile, plenty of innovation is happening inside the data center and cloud services, including new business models that affect network providers. There, too, SD-WAN will have an effect: enterprises interested in SD-WAN will eventually want to cover all their locations, including cloud connectivity, meaning SD-WAN at the cloud edge and even inside the cloud. For enterprises, the new technologies should be positive changes, but they face the challenges of any new technology: uncertainty over when to migrate, how best to use new features and capabilities, and open questions over cost models. Enterprise executives may need to be convinced to pay attention to the new networking flexibility, visibility, and control. They are being asked to take the risk of leaving behind their conventional networks, which have long proved to be reliable if not dynamic." |
