[November 18, 2014]

SDN Adoption Increases Along with Concerns According to Packet Design Survey

At the recent SDN/MPLS International Conference in Washington, D.C., Packet Design (News - Alert) surveyed more than 60 service providers about SDN adoption, business drivers, and concerns. Compared to the same survey the company conducted in 2013, here are the key findings:

• Production SDN among service providers has grown by nearly 200 percent (53% vs. only 19% in 2013).
• More service providers see SDN as a way to increase agility (up 150% as the top business driver) and support new services.
• At the same time, service providers are more concerned about lack of industry standards (56% vs. only 23% in 2013), SDN complexity (53%; up 13% from 2013), and not having adequate management visibility and control (32%; up 30% from 2013).
• Nearly 70 percent believe their network teams do NOT have the skills and experience to implement and manage SDN (new question for 2014).
• Almost 100 percent of service providers said that SDN requires new management tools and that some of their existing tools will not work with SDN.

"The survey shows that more service providers are moving beyond the SDN test phase but concerns persist about industry standards, tools, and staff readiness," said Steve Harriman, senior vice president of marketing for Packet Design. "SDN presents unique challenges that traditional management processes and tools cannot address. New SDN analytics and orchestration tools are needed to give service providers and enterprises alike visibility into whether or not the network can handle SDN application requests and how to provision them optimally without adversely impacting other services."

For the full results, visit the Packet Design blog at www.packetdesign.com/blog/sdn-deployments-worries-rise-among-service-providers

For more information about SDN management challenges:

• Watch the video "SDN: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly" with Jim Frey, Vice President of Research, Enterprise Management Associates, and Cengiz Alaettinoglu, Packet Design CTO: www.packetdesign.com/access/sdn-good-bad-ugly
• Download the "SDN: Management and Orchestration Considerations" white paper: www.packetdesign.com/access/software-defined-networking

About Packet Design

Founded in 2003, Packet Design has pioneered route analytics to address today's network management challenges. The Route Explorer System monitors network-wide routing and traffic, providing operational alerts to failures and anomalies. Analyses and DVR-like replay capabilities speed troubleshooting, and routing and traffic modeling helps network planners predict the impact of changes and new workloads. Packet Design's unique real-time routing intelligence will be a critical enabler for the programmable and dynamic software defined networks of the future. The world's largest telecommunications companies, mobile operators, MSOs, service providers, enterprises and government agencies use the Route Explorer System to improve network availability and performance while maximizing the return on assets. Visit www.packetdesign.com for more information.

Follow us on Twitter (News - Alert) at: @packetdesign (www.twitter.com/packetdesign)

Connect with us on LinkedIn (News - Alert) at: www.linkedin.com/company/packet-design

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