These organisations find that bandwidth utilisation on their networks can fluctuate wildly. "In some locations, you see just 20 percent, but in other areas, you have 120 percent," said Amol Mitra, vice president and general manager, HP Networking, HP Asia Pacific and Japan.

Mitra was identifying the verticals that are most actively adopting SDNs in their network infrastructures. He was speaking at the enterprise technology showcase and conference Interop in Tokyo on 15 June, where HP Networking presented a case study on its customer Dreamworks Studio.

The allocation of bandwidth resources had to be manually configured, and the standard response would be to keep buying bandwidth, said Mitra. Providers like NTT in Japan and SingTel in Singapore are actively looking at how they can efficiently utilise network bandwidth as well as storage and processing space.

SDNs enable a single point of control for network configuration and application provisioning. The SDN virtualises the network by separating the control plane from the physical infrastructure and templates that profile the application. It performs automated orchestration that optimises the network to enforce service-level policies and enable dynamic provisioning. This means that administrators can focus less on managing infrastructure and more on connecting users to applications.

Another vertical that will experience strong SDN adoption is the manufacturing industry. Manufacturers tend to have multiple locations in remote areas and deploying network resources can be a tricky affair. One answer is to use a SDN platform to centrally manage the widespread network, said Mitra.