We just published the 2015 Networking and Communications Hype Cycle which tracks and analyzes the 35 most important networking technologies, product categories and services that network planners must account for. These networking technologies are emerging, becoming widely adopted and being heavily hyped. And yes, we recognize that in many cases, legacy still does run the world.
At the Peak…
At the top of this years’ hype cycle is cloud-managed LANs, joining prior years’ peak technologies such as NAC (2006), IPv6 (2007), In-the-Cloud Security Services (2009), 4G (2011), and SDN/NFV (2013). Remember those days…Good times! It’s been a busy year in networking, as there are many “new dots” including Brite-Box Switching, 2.5/5 Gbps Ethernet, 802.11ac Wave 2 and SD-WAN.
Where’s SDN?
Not surprisingly, this year SDN is near the trough. There is a lot of “SDN fatigue” in the market from end-users (note: this is Simon Richard’s very apropos term for it). This is the result of too much marketecture, and not enough real-world implementations as we estimate there are under 2,000 production SDN enterprise deployments. Maybe next year it starts up the slope of enlightenment. In the meantime, for more information, check out the full report:
Hype Cycle for Networking and Communications, 2015
http://www.gartner.com/document/3100229
Summary: Enterprises must transform their networks to support innovative projects such as data center virtualization, cloud connectivity, mobility and real-time application growth. As a result, Gartner assessed the technologies that are the most relevant to enterprise network initiatives.
Regards, Andrew
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1 Comment
This was a bit more than a year ago. Is there any consensus on where SD-WAN is now on the networking hype cycle? I wonder whether SD-WAN hype is reaching a saturation point and will follow the same trend as SDN where it reaches a fatigue point.