In its report "The SD-WAN Market and its Potential in EMEA," in collaboration with Telefónica and which includes a study of the perception of SD-WAN in Spanish companies, the group's premium research and analysis consultancy states that the growing maturity of the technology, the expansion of portfolios, and increased awareness are the three factors that will guarantee strong market growth as organizations adopt SD-WAN solutions in their search for the optimal combination of cost and performance for their websites and cloud services.
The obvious consequence will be a huge growth opportunity, with revenues rising by an average of 92% between 2016 and 2021 in the EMEA area to reach a total of 1.76 billion euros in 2021.
Currently, SD-WAN solutions include application and network visibility analytics that enable real-time response to changing network topology, link load, and circuit performance. According to IDC Research Spain, managed service providers will increasingly need to develop solutions that allow organizations to adopt SD-WAN capabilities more gradually.
“The main barriers that Spanish companies see when undertaking their SD-WAN projects are a lack of knowledge of this new technology and local infrastructures that are still being amortized before considering their replacement with newer ones,” explains Emilio Castellote, senior analyst at IDC Research Spain and author of the report.
As a connectivity service provider, Telefónica facilitates the adoption of this new SD-WAN technology by companies as a service within its portfolio, enabling them to benefit from its advantages. This ensures its evolution at the customer's premises and within their own core network, which is essential for truly efficient and secure data exchange of any type (IoT, SaaS, etc.) with the cloud. This allows companies to develop their AI (Artificial Intelligence) strategy in an orchestrated manner with a true end-to-end vision.
The report, "The SD-WAN Market and its Potential in EMEA," includes a survey of 201 companies that gathered feedback from key SD-WAN players in the Spanish market. Telefónica was the highest-rated provider and, along with IBM, is the company that offers the greatest guarantees for addressing this challenge.
Telefónica's experience in data networks and its enormous investment effort in both access networks and the modernization of the core network ensures that companies that rely on Telefónica as their data network provider will see their Private Networks service evolve as new functionalities and services are developed from the network itself.
Emilio Castellote concludes: “SD-WAN will accelerate the trend towards hybrid architectures and public Internet-based connectivity and will change the model in which WAN services are provided.”.
