Vendors in Australia will increasingly deliver solutions over software defined networks with traditional connectivity and hardware revenues having limited growth potential, according to a new market report.
"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," says 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 the WAN is supporting mission critical applications in over 80% of Australian organisations and network availability, mean time to repair and application performance are the top ranked service level requirements.
{loadposition peter}And 79% of organisations are using the WAN to access cloud services, and 69% for videoconferencing services, with IDC expecting to see non-critical classes of traffic move from traditional MPLS based WAN connectivity onto the public Internet enabled by the SD-WAN solutions that are coming to market.
The report says the cloud will make a strong showing with over half of organisations surveyed preferring a cloud managed SD-WAN solution and over three quarters expecting to leverage professional services from a third-party firm when implementing an SD-WAN solution.
"The stars are aligned for SD-WAN at present" says Horrell. "Almost 9 out of 10 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."
IDC says it expects switching and routing hardware revenues will remain flat through to 2020 as more efficient capacity utilisation is achieved “not just due to the uptake for software defined solutions, but also less physical on-premise equipment being deployed as compute moves to the cloud”.
But there is, however significant upside in wireless LAN equipment as the modern workforce demands mobility and ubiquity of access in the workplace and on campus.
Horrell says IDC expects to see the Australian WLAN hardware market by 2020 to have grown by more than 80% compared to 2016, approaching the $300 million mark.