Software-defined everything: Businesses prepare to jump ship

2016 has marked the landfall of multiple events in the IT industry, especially in terms of increasing adoption of software-managed IT environments, which is now seen as a large part of the modern IT world. IT leaders believe that software-defined anything (SDx) is more of a concept than a reality at present, but the idea is quickly gaining ground.

Businesses are seeking to transform their environments and capitalize on opportunities that the digital era has to offer for this year and the next. As the pressure of transformation escalates, businesses are considering adopting SDx and related technologies as a part of their business modules.

According to a report by a market research firm, MarketsandMarkets, the global market of SDx is set to grow at a CAGR of 31.72 percent from $3.89 billion in 2016 to $28.09 billion, by 2022.

Advancements in the SDx technologies, which includes software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined datacenters (SDDC) and software-defined storage (SDS), will rapidly drive the growth in the software defined market. Dynamic provisioning of networking resources, unified cloud resources, reduced operational costs, and easy Quality of Service (QoS) implementations, will also help in driving the growth.

Currently, the telecom and ITeS sectors combined, own the largest SDx market share, as they adopted the technology in the early stages of the market evolution. These industries have been aggressively implementing and deploying SDN, SDDC and SDS solutions to gain a centralized control of their datacenter resources, such as cooling facilities and power consumptions.

The report also says that out of all the SDx services, consulting will have the highest CAGR until the year 2022. This aims to provide guidance for setting up and managing datacenters, thus increasing revenues by minimizing risks and providing optimum resource allocation.

It’s a software world

Businesses are gradually warming to the idea of adding software-defined infrastructure (SDI) to their datacenters. According to a report from an analyst firm, 451 Research, over two-thirds of enterprises worldwide are going to increase their spending on SDI in 2017.

According to the report, 65 percent of enterprises believe agility and flexibility are the two main drivers of SDI adoption. This will result in a total of 14.4 percent increase in overall spending on SDI, including virtualization of all hardware resources, elastic scaling and management automation.

The SDI-related spending increased 10 percent in server virtualization and hyper-converged infrastructures, 8 percent in OpenStack, and 7 percent in virtual desktop infrastructures, from last year. The report also states that approximately 51.2 percent of implementers find SDI to be complementary to the public cloud, while 37.6 percent consider it to be a path to hybrid cloud.

Although currently, a low percentage of businesses are using SDI, those who have used it are seeing enough benefits, leading to an increase in their spending budget: 37.4 percent increase in SDN, and 26.9 percent increase in SDS. Despite these figures, currently, only about a fifth of worldwide enterprises are using any SDI at all, which shows that there’s still a long way to go for the technology to make a mark in the enterprise scenario.

APAC catching up

Regionally, APAC has the highest growth in CAGR because of increased awareness and adoption of software-defined architecture (SDA) and related technologies especially in China, Japan, and India, says a report by MarketsandMarkets. It is expected to grow at the highest CAGR between 2017 and 2022.

Increasing technological innovations and growing datacenter traffic are the two main driving forces for this rapid growth, which provides huge opportunities across industry verticals. Asia-Pacific region is also aggressively adopting SDI.

The report also says that, among all the geographic regions worldwide, North America is considered to be the largest market for SDx solutions, followed by Europe. Early adoption of SDA-related technologies in the region has acted as one of the major drivers for the growth of the market.

SDx definitely promises to change the way businesses are strategized, managed and operated. However, it is likely to take a few more years to play out well in the enterprise.