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When is a market not a market? When it's SDN or NFV, says Gartner

Stop asking for magic quadrants, say squares

Gartner is sick of being asked to craft magic quadrants for software-defined network (SDN) and network function virtualisation (NFV), and isn't going to do so, even if enthusiasts hold their breath and turn blue.

The reason? According to distinguished analyst (our emphasis) Joe Skorupa, it's simple: SDN and NFV aren't markets. The first, he says, is an architecture, not a market; the second is a deployment option, not a market.

With a level of snark that suggests he might even be a reader of The Register, Skorupa remarks that “other firms” have produced reports on the “186 quadrillion Bitcoin market for SDN and NFV”.

Why is this wrong? Because, he says, such reports predict the sale of products and services, and that's the wrong way to look at a market such as SDN.

SDN capabilities like OpenFlow “can appear in Ethernet switches, but that doesn’t make them part of the SDN market any more than VLAN tagging makes those switches part of the VLAN market,” he writes.

“The market segment is Ethernet switches”.

Similarly, NFV doesn't describe a product segment, but rather, a new way of deploying existing products. A firewall, for example, can now be bought either embedded in the hardware appliance, or as software disaggregated from the hardware.

Therefore, “whatever the product category, NFV is simply a set of deployment options”, he writes, whether it's firewalls, application delivery controllers, session border controllers, and so on.

For such products, he says, Gartner might break out deployment options within individual product segments, but Skorupa reckons that to drop them all in a bucket marked “NFV” would simply distort understanding of the market. ®

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