The networking landscape is in a state of flux. SDxCentral’s data reveals a significant reader shift away from legacy approaches and vendors. Outdated network architectures are crumbling under the weight of their inflexibility, manual processes and bolted-on security. By looking at our reader engagement data, combined with conversations with network leaders, experts, operators and CEOs of leading networking and security companies, it's clear that traditional networking solutions are no longer sufficient.
Read more: The network and security landscape is shifting — who will survive the chaos and thrive?

Our reader data provides three insights:

  • Legacy networks are inflexible, manual and insecure: Traditional networking solutions are struggling to keep pace with the demands of modern enterprises. These dated architectures are no longer viable in today's rapidly evolving threat landscape.
    Read more: Why Juniper, HPE Aruba and VMware are losing SD-WAN ground to security vendors
  • Automation and artificial intelligence (AI) are the aces in the hole: AI-driven infrastructure is poised to revolutionize networking, promising increased efficiency, reliability and security. However, vendors must move beyond mere “AI-washing” to deliver tangible solutions that harness the full potential of automation and AI.
    Read more: AI will drive the next infrastructure refresh
  • Security consolidation is inevitable: Managing a multitude of security products from various vendors is unsustainable. As with compute and networking before it, security infrastructure is consolidating to a handful of primary vendors that offer integrated platforms. This consolidation is essential for scaling security operations and effectively combating cybersecurity threats.
    Read more: Security shakeup — Palo Alto Networks, Cato, Crowdstrike, Zscaler take the lead
Customers of legacy networking vendors struggle to compete

Our data shows that these outdated technologies and architectures have burdened network infrastructure consumers with significant technical debt, requiring substantial resources to maintain. Consequently, CIOs, CISO, CTOs and network operations teams find themselves unable to prioritize innovation, despite the demands from their CEOs and line-of-business executives.

Constrained by this inherited technical debt, IT leaders faced termination, perpetuating a cycle of turnover and burnout in IT leadership roles. No surprise, this model sets everyone up for failure — from the CEO to the technical leaders, architects, engineers, operators and even technology suppliers. When compounded with declining budgets, vendor and technology consolidation, and the new imperative for AI-driven business transformation, it becomes evident that the riskiest path for a technology leader at a large enterprise or service provider is to maintain the status quo. Stated more boldly, the status quo is guaranteed to fail.

How I came to this conclusion

Our analysis is based on member engagement data generated exclusively on SDxCentral. 70% of the SDxCentral audience are what we call leaders, experts, and operators (LEOs) (LEOs) at enterprises, governments, hyperscalers and telecoms with 1,000+ employees). I personally analyzed site engagement data and segmented by geo, industry, organization and persona to come up with data-driven conclusions.

First, over the last 90 days, the networking content that drove the most LEO engagements are pieces that provide insight to help network operators thinking about future purchases, emerging use cases, cope with vendor consolidation and content about new entrants and solutions.

Second, I looked at the data to identify which networking vendors were the most read over the last 90 days in articles that are about networking, excluding any mentions that were not about networking. The most popular companies were the following:

I then looked at which networking vendors were the most researched for the last 90 days and the last 365 days in our company directory. First, people are increasingly researching directory pages — as evidenced by 28% quarter-over-quarter and 120% year-over-year pageview growth. The data shows that the networking companies that experienced the most growth last quarter and last year are networking upstarts. Taking 10 years of directory pageviews into consideration, what's most interesting is interest (via pageviews) in new companies is unprecedented. The following companies experienced greater than 100% growth in views over the last 90 days:

  • Nile
  • Cato
  • Aviz
  • Versa
  • Comcast (due to its new DataBee division)
  • Cloudbrink
  • Graphaint
  • Prosimo
  • Meter
Observations

The decline in interest in traditional industry giants like Cisco signals a shift towards disruptors and innovative solutions. Cisco’s product announcements used to drive significant user engagement on SDxCentral. However, looking at pageview data, here’s recent Cisco product coverage by SDxCentral that garnished less than average traffic among SDxCentral readers:

To put this in perspective the page view data shows that our coverage of Fortinet’s OT network announcement featuring switches, AP and gateways as well as Zscalers’ SD-WAN launch each had more engagement than the five articles listed above.

One big surprise from the data was the lack of engagement with Netskope. Netskope did not garnered significant audience engagement when I expected it to. The data showed that it was notably absent from the secure networking conversation for both overall page views and directory research metrics.

These two data points underscore the unpredictability of market dynamics and just what new players will emerge as the new leaders.

Takeaways

You can almost smell the industry momentum shift. If for no other reason than networking, LEOs are realizing that they are guaranteed to fail by sticking with the status quo. We are entering an era when sticking with your legacy vendor and approaches is more risky than trying something new. The transition will be led by new use cases that allow networking LEOs to minimize risks. For the first time in years, networking upstarts are everywhere and it’s not just startups, it's also large public companies like Zscaler.

For networking leaders, the call to action is to find one place in your network where you can run an innovative proof-of-concept in 2024 and get started. Find the low-hanging fruit to do something fast.

Quantifying the shift

Our readership metrics demonstrate a growing interest in new approaches and suppliers, surpassing even the heyday of software-defined networking (sdn). This surge in interest reflects the frustration with legacy approaches and the burden of technical debt on network operations teams. While legacy vendors may attempt to adapt, history has shown that few survive the transition (remember Sun, Compaq, Tandem, and IBM (Token Ring) and many more), emphasizing the urgency for organizations to embrace change.