IT Players Plans, and Buyers’ Thoughts, on SDN and NFV

One of the comments that was posted on one of my blogs (on LinkedIn) was that it was surprising that the IT vendors were not heard from much regarding SDN/NFV.  I agree at one level; IT is the obvious beneficiary of this whole software-defined-stuff initiative set.  However, there are IT vendors involved in the process and some might even be considered quasi-active.  It’s just not totally clear what their intentions are.

One example of this is Open Daylight.  Among the big IT names, IBM, Microsoft, and Red Hat are platinum members, and Dell, HP, and Intel are Silver.  Certainly this would qualify for a form of SDN support.  In the NFV ISG we find IT giants HP, IBM, Intel, Oracle, and Red Hat, so it would seem that the IT guys are aware of and involved to some extent in both activities.

Where the intentions stuff comes in is that my perception is that a lot of the IT companies are on the bench rather than on the field.  It’s not that they don’t support the notion of SDN or NFV as much perhaps as they aren’t ready to step up and do something specific.

Arguably, Pica8 has an interesting notion (for SDN) that could be applied to both SDN and NFV—a “starter kit”.  Many of the IT players sell packaged configurations, so why not sell an SDN or NFV stack or package?  Operators in my fall survey told me that they would like to see NFV offered by an IT vendor.  Enterprises still think the network vendors are the best source of SDN and they have no significant current interest in NFV.  I think that they’d be interested if someone painted an enterprise-centric NFV picture (which is actually quite easy to do) but they’re not seeing that now.  A kit for either one could be a game-changer if it was correctly formulated and offered by an “expected” source.

Correct formulation?  It has to be something that plugs into current network/IT systems with clear points of integration and manageable efforts.  It has to be “play” as well as “plug” meaning it should include a sniffing component that figures out what’s there and makes recommendations.  It has to have multiple points of application within a network, be capable of starting off in any of them, and still eventually build and coalesce into a unified end-to-end strategy.  Islands of SDN or NFV don’t cut it according to my survey.

Expected source?  Enterprises want network revolutions extended by network vendors or at least by vendors with a strong network story.  They’d love Cisco or HP because both have network gear and servers.  They’d largely accept VMware or Brocade or Dell as well.  Network operators want, as I noted, IT players because they’re far from convinced the big network vendors are sincere, so they’d like to see HP and IBM and Dell and Red Hat do something, in that order.

According to both enterprises and network operators, their hopes of a plug-and-play solution to SDN and NFV is vain so far.  In the operator space, only a bit over 10% say they are aware of a cohesive SDN or NFV strategy from a major IT vendor (HP gets the most mentions for one).  In the enterprise space, the “I-know-of-one” responses are in the statistical noise level.  Which is interesting given that some of the IT vendors actually purport to have at least an SDN story for enterprises.  HP again gets the nod in terms of the most mentions, but as I said the data is in the noise level for the enterprises at this point.  Most of them are still seeing SDN as a network play and looking to their network players.

The plug-and-play idea suggests that a big problem with both SDN and NFV is the fear of integration.  Buyers do not perceive either technology to be mature enough to be installed without specialized skills and even modifications or customization.  Despite the fact that arguably a successful NFV implementation would make installing virtual stuff as easy or easier than installing real boxes, the buyers are not so far seeing it that way.  They may want that kind of easy transition but they don’t apparently think it’s currently available.

This, I think, is why almost three-quarters of enterprises and over two-thirds of carriers say that SDN did not advance materially in their shop in 2013 and fewer than half of either category believe it will advance materially in 2014.  This, despite the fact that both enterprises and operators say (by 90% or better) that SDN would be valuable for them and almost 100% of operators say NFV would be.  Among enterprises, the largest reason given for lack of progress is that “products aren’t ready”.  Among operators, it’s “lack of standards”, “management integration”, and “support from major vendors”, with all three getting almost identical scores.

So are we going to fix this in 2014?  I think it would be possible.  There are efforts underway to create cohesive implementations of both SDN and NFV that could be the foundation for a plug-and-play solution.  There may be enough competitive pressure placed on IT vendors to stimulate them to offer something, and of course any entre into the market by the IT guys would spur network vendors to do something too.  It’s one of those at-the-starting-gate-waiting-for-a-move moments, in short.  If one moves, all will.  If none moves?  Well, you can figure that out too.

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