At least three times a week, I go for a five-mile run. I used to just try to beat my own PR (personal record), but all that has changed. Thanks to a new mobile app, I can now chart my performance against other local runners – and it’s making me more competitive. The application economy has disrupted my running routine, and I love it!

The word disruption often has negative connotations; but in today’s dynamic business landscape, disruption is more likely to enable than encumber. According to a CA Technologies survey, digital disrupters can expect to achieve twice as much revenue and profit growth compared with their mainstream counterparts¹.

 SDN hits the ground running  

Digitalization isn’t the only positive disruptive influence on the radar. Social, mobile, cloud and analytics are all driving beneficial change – both for the business and IT. In fact, mobile and cloud are spearheading the rapid rise of another disruptive enabler: software-defined networking (SDN).

It’s estimated the compound annual growth rate for the SDN market will soar by 61.5 percent between 2012 and 2018 as the need for more efficient network infrastructures intensifies².

With its abstracted resources and virtualized components, SDN doesn’t just deliver greater efficiency; it delivers greater agility too. SDN radically simplifies network provisioning, with pre-defined policies for balancing loads, responding to security threats and segmenting access controls.

As part of their SDN adoption roadmap, CIOs need to ensure that virtualized networking components can still be managed and monitored in the same way as their physical counterparts.

At CA World this year, Bell Canada and Intel will reveal how they plan to tackle these challenges by converting traditional infrastructure management systems to SDN/NFV Service Assurance.  And hear how three industry leaders (CA, Juniper and Tech Mahindra) are joining forces to deliver integrated solutions in the area of vCPE (Virtual Customer Premise Equipment), orchestration and SDN/NFV assurance.

Stay one step ahead     

Although SDN will revolutionize our current approach to networking, it doesn’t have to mean massive disruption for the datacenter and network operations staff.

By its very nature, SDN can be adopted in pockets and gradually expanded to support new digital workloads and application deployments. In fact, many organizations will find they already have everything they need to make tracks with SDN.

SDN/NFV Service Assurance helps deliver on the promise of network agility and flexibility, enabling a faster business response to emerging trends and disruptive influences. They will be able to digitize their processes, mobilize their workforces and monetize their applications.

As a result, they’ll be able to stay one step ahead of the competition. I just hope I can do the same the next time I hit the pavement in my running shoes.

Footnotes

1. http://www.slideshare.net/CAinc/are-you-ready-for-digital-disruption-ten-lessons-in-digital-transformation
2. http://www.sdnzone.com/topics/software-defined-network/articles/407451-sdn-market-will-reach-352-billion-2018.htm

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