Opportunity For All

"A big 'a-ha' moment for us was seeing how many plan to look to non-incumbent network vendors, including third-party SDN vendors, open source vendors, existing virtualization vendors and others," Grossner said in a statement.
Solution providers agree, saying there is enough space in the SDN market for many players to make money as well as large investments to be made.  For example, in January the SDN startup Pluribus Networks nabbed $50 million in just one round of funding.

The report also showed that data center orchestration software represents a huge opportunity for third-party SDN vendors and existing virtualization vendors.