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Readers’ Guide and Update on the Data Sets Provided in ACG’s Data Center SDN Product Revenue Forecasts

Developments in the broader cloud computingand networking segments of the information and communications technology industry are introducing profound and impactful evolutions in the way operators’ data centers and the workloads they support are deployed. Use cases and workloads are expanding to include a wider range of real-time, continuously operating applications, along with enhancements in analytics, automation and networking capabilities deployed broadly in their distributed infrastructures. The number of locations in which the data centers are deployed is expanding to support this wider set of applications and to optimize their implementation on a wide range  of metrics. 

The set of stakeholders in the value chains for a given set of services is evolving on multiple dimensions as well; cloud providers, communications service providers, new types of operators in emerging niches, and new application and product suppliers are all interacting to define a more diversified landscape of stakeholders and deployment models under the broader umbrellas of fully connected, cloud-native, automated operations.

Within this context the technologies enabling data center operations are evolving to support the new applications and their operation. This includes the networking technologies employed in the operators’ data center environments, which are the focus of ACG’s software-defined data center networking research. As developments in the broader data center market have occurred, the nature of the solutions being deployed in the networks supporting them has evolved as well.

ACG's Paul Parker-Johnson has created a readers' guide that highlights the way in which the data in ACG's industry forecast reflects the nature of the evolutions that are occurring and to describe in more detail some of the additional dimensions of analysis that we have introduced to shed light on the developments. We provide an update and the definition and meaning of the data in the tables and charts we supply in our data center SDN product revenue forecasts.

The data in our forecasts (and corresponding vendor market share analyses) depict the quantitative outlines of operators’ spending for their software-defined data center networking infrastructures. Within those outlines there are specific developments that determine where the spending is done and why. We dig into those developments and their implications in companion reports to these quantitative analyses in our service. In coming quarters we will explore each of the following areas of evolution and their impact:

  • Incorporating service and application intent into software-defined data center networks
  • Supporting multicloud deployment in data center networks
  • Increasing scale and efficiency with multisite data center network fabrics
  • Increasing use of white-box hardware and open networking software in data center networking

For more information about the report or to speak with the author Paul Parker-Johnson, contact him at pj@acgcc.com.

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