Asking ‘What’s the Point of SDN?’ and the Impact on Adoption

Mike Fratto

Summary Bullets:

• Many enterprises are struggling to find a reason to invest in SDN when what they have in place works well enough.
• There will not be a killer app for SDN.  Rather, enterprises will adopt SDN as their data centers needs evolve over time.

I recently attended and presented at the SDN and OpenFlow World Congress in Bod Homburg, Germany, and while I was there, I had a chance to talk to some enterprise IT attendees who were investigating SDN for their organizations.  The common question through most of the discussion was: “Why should I use a SDN?”  Luckily, I started my talk with that very question.