IBM and Orange Business Services top the list of SDN vendors in the United Kingdom, according to a recent ISG report that evaluated the capabilities of 51 providers.

The report evaluated U.K. SDN providers across seven quadrants: managed WAN services, mobile network and additional services, SDN transformation services, SD-WAN equipment and services, security services, core software-defined network technologies, and mobile to edge software-defined network technologies.

The leaders in these quadrants represent providers that offer the most appropriate services to meet the needs of clients from the technological perspective as well as the business and market perspective, said Avimanyu Basu, team leader at ISG, in an email to SDxCentral.

IBM and Orange Business Services were identified in the report as leaders in all seven of the quadrants, while T-Systems and Vodafone led the field in six. In the middle of the pack were British Telecom, which led in five quadrants, and HCL in four. Cisco, Infosys, and Wipro all led in three. Bringing up the rear was TCS, which led in two quadrants. Dell EMC, Tech Mahindra, and VMware all led in one.

“The fact that Orange is rated across all of the elements is pretty impressive when you look at it from managed WAN, 4G, 5G, and transformation services, we're rated very highly,” said John Isch, practice director of the network and voice center of excellence for Orange Business Services, in an interview with SDxCentral. “I think that speaks to the depth that Orange has and the capability, the flexibility, and ability to customers regardless of what they're looking for.”

According to the report, enterprises in the U.K. are continuing to adopt SDN technology as a way to reduce costs and achieve greater flexibility despite ongoing challenges, complexity, and hype.

Data centers were one of the key drivers of adoption.

“In Europe and in the U.K., for the last few years, the data center side of SDN had more traction that other technologies like SD-WAN. From the data center perspective, the advantage is in the convenience,” Basu said.“Instead of first backhauling the traffic from the branch office to a data center and then using a direct connect or an express route to move into the cloud, the new technologies enable taking the traffic from branch towards the cloud.”

However, ISG identified several ongoing challenges holding up many from implementing the technology including architectural complexity, vendor restrictions, troublesome migration, application mobility, and portability.

Basu said many challenges are rooted in changing philosophies and marketing hype.

“For example, a customer coming from a private cloud legacy environment needs a philosophical shift of mind to understand the different stages and generations of SDN technologies that are available today, and how it will solve its network challenges,” he said. “That is why most of the service providers are taking a consultative approach for transforming the enterprise networks.”

Vendor lock in remains a particular concern for many enterprises looking to leverage existing investments while exploring SDN technology. The report found that some providers had begun exploring vendor-agnostic technology to address these concerns.

“The network is moving toward virtualization,” said Barry Matthews, partner and head of ISG U.K., in a statement. “Virtual network functions are key to unlocking meaningful automation and orchestration, and SDN-related technologies improve agility by completely doing away with racking and stacking devices.”