Kenneth Research found that software-defined networking (SDN) is expected to maintain a compound annual growth rate of 37.4% by 2022, with the services and application segment taking on the lion’s share of the market in the same year. Forrester’s 2019 report on software-defined WAN (SD-WAN), a subcategory of SDN, says the technology helps to improve performance, optimise connectivity, and deliver reliability and resiliency.

These sound delightful, but the word on the ground is that SDN isn’t quite the hot ticket that everybody says it is. Its 10-year age card is putting it in the decrepit corner, along with other technologies that have been overtaken by innovation and evolution.