The BusinesInsider notes that analysts at investment bank Citi (C) have issued a new research report, that takes a look at 10 disrupting technologies, According to BusinessInsider, these technologies will change the way we do business. The firm which took $300 billion dollars taxpayer-funded bail-out looked into practically every sector you can think of: energy, entertainment, IT, manufacturing, and transportation among them to identify disrupters.
Software-Defined Networks
One of the information technologies that Citi called a disrupter is Software Defined Networks (SDN). SDN’s simplify IT networks by separating the Control Plane (the intelligence) from the Data Plane (the packet forwarding engine). “Instead of having intelligence distributed across the network in separate boxes, SDN centralizes the Control plane in an overriding software layer which disseminates instructions to each router or switch.”
Citi claims that SDN is too cheap to resist. They cite data from IDC that says Software Defined Networking is expected to grow from just under $360 million in 2013 to $3.7 billion in 2016. Revenues are likely to be split between startups, traditional network vendors like Cisco (CSCO), and big IT vendors like IBM (IBM), HP (HPQ), and Dell.
Software-as-a-Service
The prognosticators at Citi also identified SaaS as another disruptive opportunity. The article explains that Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is Internet-based software delivery. Basically, customers can use software that they’d otherwise have to buy via downloads or at a store. Examples include Google (GOOG) Apps, Microsoft (MSFT) 365, and Amazon (AMZN) web services.
In 2012, the SaaS market grew 26% to become an $18 billion market according to market research firm IDC. According to Citi’s survey, SaaS has already captured 8% of their software wallets so far and firms expect to increase spending to 70% of their budget over time — a 9-fold increase.
rb-
The Citi prognosticators are so smart, they are at least a year behind the Bach Seat. I have covered cloud since 2011. I think we all know that cloud computing and software-defined networking are information technology disrupters. Thanks, guys.
Related articles
- IDC: Cloud, mobility exposing limitations of existing networks (computerworld.co.nz)
Ralph Bach has been in IT long enough to know better and has blogged from his Bach Seat about IT, careers, and anything else that catches his attention since 2005. You can follow him on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter. Email the Bach Seat here.