Who invented SD-WAN?

A single individual or company did not invent SD-WAN – the term ‘Software Defined Wide Area Network’ was referenced by Gartner in 2014. Before SD-WAN, the term SDN (Software Defined Networking) was initially discussed in 2007 as a technology to separate the control plane from the data plane. The reason for this separation was to allow software programmers to change how network traffic flowed by writing code. At the time, the Operating Systems of many WAN vendors were complicated and relied on slow incremental upgrades. Where requirements are non-standard, many IT teams and network administrators could not inject code into the vendor’s OS – SDN essentially made this possible. With SDN, the theory was that any programmer could write code to affect the network flow.

The Open Networking Foundation brought together companies, including Microsoft, HP and Google to form an alliance in developing SDN.

The creation of SD WAN by Gartner was used to create a commercial product category which defines how the Enterprise can purchase SDN services from service providers and vendors.