8 Networking Vendors Catching Fire In 2016

Technology is growing in leaps and bounds. We outlined the top trends across the IT spectrum, but now we'll drill into the networking industry specifically. What's likely to make news and what companies should you keep tabs on in the networking space this year?

First, expect to hear a lot more about software-defined wide area networks (SD-WAN). Gartner predicts, "By year-end 2018, 10% of enterprises will have replaced their WAN routing with SD-WAN-based path forwarding, up from less than 1% today." SD-WAN offers benefits in both price and performance, particularly in cloud environments that are spurring increasing interest in the technology.

Second, don't expect the adoption of software-defined networking (SDN) to slow down anytime soon. IDC has IDC has predicted that between 2014 and 2018 the SDN market will grow from $960 million to more than $8 billion -- that's an annual growth rate of 89.4%.

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Finally, going hand-in-hand with SDN is network function virtualization (NFV) technology, which is also growing adoption at a very rapid pace. IHS forecasts that the NFV market will climb from $2.3 billion last year to $11.6 billion by 2019.

While industry heavyweights like Cisco, VMware, HP and Dell are all getting involved with these three key trends, much of the pioneering work on this new technology is being spearheaded by younger, smaller companies. This slideshow features nine of companies -- listed in alphabetical order -- that are at the forefront of the new developments in enterprise networking technology.

(Image: alexsl/iStockphoto with modification)