Given the changing nature of enterprise networking, Riverbed decided to survey attendees of the recent VMworld conference about their companies’ current plans for these emerging technologies. Riverbed surveyed 260 attendees face-to-face, from a variety of roles and with a median company size of 2,300 employees.
Software-Defined wide area networking (SD-WAN) is getting a lot of attention these days. But just how common is SD-WAN in the enterprise? To find out, Riverbed sponsored a survey of networking professionals at the 2015 VMWorld show in San Francisco …
We interviewed 260 networking professionals at VMWorld as they walked the show floor. We gathered 260 responses. Here is what we found …
We’ll dive into each of these findings in more detail in a minute, but at the highest level we found that SDN adoption is gaining strong interest in the data center, but it is early days for extending SDN out to the branch or remote offices. In addition, the survey indicated that SD-WAN is following just behind SDN and emerging as the next wave of network innovation in the market.
Let’s look at these results in more detail …
First, we found that enterprises are beginning to move the needle in terms of SDN adoption, with most (77 percent) currently involved in some way with SDN adoption. Why? The top reasons cited include the ability to deploy new apps and services more quickly, reducing costs and reducing the mistakes made when deploying these new apps and services.
That said, adopting SDN is not without its challenges. The most commonly cited were performance, reliability and the fact that most enterprise IT departments lack SDN experience.
What about the branch and remote offices? Are enterprises extending SDN beyond the data center?
Not very common, as it turns out. Less than a third (29 percent of all respondents surveyed) are currently involved with SD-WAN, with most of those still in the discussion stage. In fact, just 1 in 26 are currently implementing SD-WAN.
It seems that SD-WAN is in very early stages. That said, there is sizable interest in this early-stage technology and Riverbed believes SD-WAN is following in the footsteps of SDN as the next big wave of network innovation in the enterprise.
*117 out of 260 total respondents answered [What is your organization’s involvement with SD-WAN]. See slide #16 for the breakdown.