The global deep packet inspection (DPI) market is projected to grow to $972 million in 2015, up 15% year-over-year, according to IHS.
IHS said this is expected as communications service providers (CSPs) continue to use DPI as a key tool for bandwidth management and the creation of new services and features.
“While the major DPI suppliers are tackling the virtualization trend head-on, moving aggressively to introduce virtualized versions of their products and forge relationships within the NFV ecosystem, their customers are slower to jump on the bandwagon,” said Shira Levine, research director at IHS.
“Performance concerns remain an issue, and operators continue to be conservative with deployments of virtualized DPI technology,” said Levine.
Levine added that DPI is playing a key role in another hot area—analytics—with operators increasingly interested in leveraging network intelligence gleaned from DPI as part of their larger “big data” strategies.
IHS also said there is renewed opportunity for DPI suppliers to address operators’ security concerns, leveraging their solutions to tackle network infrastructure threats such as distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks, worms and viruses on a real-time basis.
More than half the world’s internet traffic is likely to be encrypted by the end of 2015, driving interest in DPI systems that leverage heuristic classification to identify encrypted packets.