Software defined networking (SDN), as well as moving “beyond the cloud”, are two of the seven technology trends which will change the game for enterprise, according to the latest industry report.

For companies looking to take the next step and move ahead of the competition, establishing a sophisticated digital strategy is paramount. This much we already know of course, but IT consultancy firm Accenture has gone a step further and noted the trends underpinning it – with SDN featuring heavily.

This could be the start of a real paradigm shift. Companies are certainly noticing that simply migrating to the cloud isn’t enough to be a business game changer – it’s what you do with it that counts.

And this is reflected in the Accenture paper. “The value lies in putting the cloud to work,” the report notes, adding: “No vision would be complete without commenting on the cloud.

“The technology is here, so the conversations should now turn to how these tools can be used to differentiate a company’s business, helping it get to market faster and respond more flexibly to opportunities and obstacles.”

Step forward the hybrid cloud. The report, again correctly, notes that legacy software systems will still be around for a long time. But with enterprise architecture being a completely different proposition to that of a few years ago, the landscape changes with it – “a hybrid world demands hybrid skills”, as the report states.

It’s important to stress, however, that the opportunities for cloud expansion are underdeveloped; Accenture notes that more than one in three enterprises are currently not in the cloud.

The story is similar with SDN where this time, Accenture notes it’s the next step for virtualisation. “In a world that demands constant change, SDN enables IT to unleash the power of virtualisation and makes it easier to move to the cloud,” the report adds.

CloudTech recently spoke to Brocade’s enterprise pre-sales manager Simon Pamplin about how SDN was an embryonic, emerging architecture, meaning not everything will run smoothly.

It’s a message which resonates with the Accenture report. Yet the stakes are high: SDN is “the zenith of interoperability”, although the report cautions that SDN is complex because “it requires tools and frameworks that are still developing”.

What does this all mean? It confirms what many in the know already suspected; the hybrid cloud and SDN are the hottest areas in cloud – and companies need to make sure they’re on the right track.

The other trends featured in the Accenture report were relationships at scale, design for analytics, data velocity, seamless collaboration and active defence.

The full report can be found here. What do you make of the results?