Adrian Comley spends a lot of time thinking and talking about SD-WAN. The general manager of dynamic network services at BT, a United Kingdom-based telecom operator, says almost all of BT’s customers (current and prospective) are inquiring about SD-WAN. “That’s in every conversation we have, every [request for proposal],” he tells SDxCentral.

Part of what’s driving that virtually universal interest is that analysts and marketers are telling enterprises they need SD-WAN, but organizations also understand the need to gain more agility and flexibility in their networking services, he explains.

“Part of our role is to act as a trusted advisor is to give them independent advice on how this will work in their environment, what their cost savings are likely to be,” and to independently test out products rather than deploying what the vendor wants to sell, Comley said. “Our approach is to give our customers that independent view.”

BT’s SD-WAN portfolio includes preferred vendors — Cisco and Nuage — but it also collaborates with Riverbed, InfoVista, and others to deliver managed applications and services to its customers. BT aims to assist its customers through the journey to SD-WAN, and for some organizations that requires sophisticated networking requirements or technical capabilities, hosted SD-WAN controllers on BT’s network, or a less intensive managed application service for traditional apps that can act as a stepping stone to more full featured SD-WAN deployments, Comley explained.

While SD-WAN dominates the conversations Comley has with BT’s customers, he also heads up other SDN initiatives including NFV, edge computing, orchestration, and IoT. Of those, he ranks NFV near the bottom in terms of development and sophistication.

“Our experience here really is that [NFV is] immature. Customers aren’t really deploying this at scale. The conversations that we’ve had with a number of our customers have been around the exploratory stage,” he said. “I think the economics of the market are still lacking in terms of hardware, although that’s improving, but also software licensing isn’t really where it needs to be to tip this into a mass market.” He expects NFV to gain more traction in the next couple years.

Other areas of increasing interest are IoT, particularly as it relates to edge computing use cases in manufacturing settings, and the containerization of enterprise applications for security, Comley said. He expects containers to become especially pervasive in IoT because those devices increase enterprises’ exposure to the internet, thereby dramatically increasing the attack surface area for hackers.

“By putting them into containers then we can help protect if a hacker gets access to part of the end-to-end service chain,” Comley said. “You don’t want them to be able to access the SD-WAN and then getting access to the whole network, so by containerizing it we can see that helping us give customers a security solution too. I think that’s going to become increasingly common and aligned with this kind of end-to-end service including IoT.”