IHS forecast that the global market for carrier software-defined networking (SDN) software, hardware and services grow from $103 million (€92.4 million) in 2014 to $5.7 billion in 2019. The growth will come as service providers seek service agility and operational efficiency in their networks to stay competitive. The company predicted that service providers around the world will increase their spending on SDN software by 15 times from 2015 to 2019. "We're still early in the long-term, 10 to 15 year transformation of service provider networks to SDN. Momentum is strong, but we won't see widespread commercial deployments where bigger parts of -- let alone whole -- networks are controlled by SDN until 2016 through 2020," said Michael Howard, senior research director for carrier networks. Release