Digital Lifescapes

As more multinational companies plan for their digital transformation, most are assessing their communication network capabilities. Meanwhile, the enterprise software-defined networking (SDN) market is maturing, and increasing adoption indicates that it's gaining momentum. SDN early-adopters are completing proof-of-concept trials and shifting to production deployments, which will transition into mainstream market adoption between now and 2020, according to the latest worldwide market study by Technology Business Research (TBR). "SDN will become a substantial contributor to the overall network infrastructure market," said Krista Macomber, data center analyst at TBR . Production deployments have started within large-scale enterprise environments, and will spread as international standards bodies finalize their work and SDN vendors expand into new use cases. According to the TBR assessment, previously a small number of large vendors dominated networking standards, bu...

The ongoing shift to next-generation data center architectures continues to impact the legacy vendor community. The advent of cloud and mobile computing -- as well as exponential growth in data variety and velocity -- is upending the traditional data center innovation model. This shift drove average gross margin down 60 basis points year-to-year to 41.9 percent in the second quarter of 2014 for server, storage and networking original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) tracked by Technology Business Research (TBR). "OEMs willing to share intellectual property -- and profits -- with ecosystem partners are setting themselves up to reap the benefits of tapping niche innovation, driving partner loyalty and remaining in-tune with customer's evolving application requirements, all while reducing up-front investment risk," said Krista Macomber, data center analyst at TBR . These benefits will include more stable bottom-line hardware performance, as well as higher-margin, higher-...

The introduction of open source software platforms and bare-metal systems into the legacy enterprise network realm will eventually disrupt the status-quo for leading vendors that have previously benefited from the lack of unruly innovation. Meanwhile, established vendors can still take advantage of the apparent resistance to change within many traditional IT organizations that depend upon the conservative leadership of cautious CIOs. Results from the latest market study by Technology Business Research (TBR) indicate growth in the enterprise networking market is accelerating, as demand for cloud, mobility and security solutions -- particularly in developed markets -- escalated and major suppliers leveraged their dominant market positions to capture customer spending. Total enterprise networking revenue among the benchmarked companies grew 4.3 percent year-to-year in the first half of 2014, that's more than the 0.9 percent growth in second half of 2013. Vendors capitalized on...