As businesses increasingly look for the most effective and efficient technologies to power their operations, software defined networking continues to become more popular within the larger enterprise and cloud service provider markets in regards to data center networking.

SDN refers to an innovative architectural model that delivers network virtualization, automated provisioning and network programmability to enterprise networks and data centers. Companies are quickly realizing that SDN offers tremendous value to tech-based organizations, and the technology has shown itself to be a driving force for change and innovation in the sector. While SDN is still fairly new to many companies, the landscape of the technology is likely to change in the next three to four years as vendors continue to make large investments in the area and enterprises keep acquiring the technology, according to Cloud Times.

"SDN is taking center stage among innovative approaches to some of the networking challenges brought about by the rise of the third platform, particularly virtualization and cloud computing," said Rohit Mehra, Vice President of Network Infrastructure at International Data Corporation. "With SDN's growing traction in the datacenter for cloud deployments, enterprise IT is beginning to see the value in potentially extending SDN to the WAN and into the campus to meet the demand for more agile approaches to network architecture, provisioning, and operations."

Global SDN market expanding rapidly
A study conducted by IDC predicted that the enterprise SDN market will grow by 89 percent annually, increasing from $960 million in 2014 to $8 billion in 2018, due in large part to the implementation of software virtualization, physical infrastructure, network controllers and security services. A separate report published by MarketsandMarkets estimated that the software defined data center market will rise to $5.4 billion over the next four years. The growth in that market is mostly attributed to more frequent use of network virtualization and the practice of corporate data center consolidation. The study also found that network controllers and switches will also contribute to higher market share.

According to MarketsandMarkets, the major industries driving the SDN market are financial services, government, telecom and education. All of the sectors most commonly utilizing SDN can benefit from the technology's simplified network designs and operations, directly programmable network control, ability to increase the network's agility in adjusting to traffic flow and single interface management capabilities.