In the past few years, as the SDN and network virtualization (NV) market have evolved from PowerPoint concepts to working products, the market has matured into a multibillion-dollar business. The NV demand is now poised to accelerate as managers look at virtualization’s role in building a more flexible and scalable networking platform for business.

Let’s take a closer look at how this is unfolding – and why. Server virtualization took a decade to drive the cloud market. Now, in just a few years, SDN and NV are driving networking. In 2013, we published an infographic hinting at the size of the SDN and NV markets-- which called for $35 billion in SDN spending and $1.2 Billion in data center network software spending by 2018. Not only do these numbers now appear realistic, but actual sales documented in the market reflect this growth.

The easiest way to track real-world spending on data center virtualization technology is to look at the numbers of the two market leaders -- Cisco Systems and VMware. For its second quarter of fiscal year 2016, Cisco Systems reported 1,100 new Nexus 9K customers, bringing the total installed base to just over 6,000. Of course, the Nexus 9K is a hardware platform, but Cisco says that it now has 1,400 customers using Application Centric Infrastructure (ACI) software architecture. It puts the total market of ACI, driven by the Nexus switching line, at a $2 billion run rate.

For the extended article on business agility driven NV demand, Click Here.