In fact, in aggregate, you gave what an unbiased observer might even describe as... hype. You can download the document and see for yourself, but here's the gist of it.

Most of you think you know enough to feel familiar with the concepts of SDN and NFV and you think the benefits, as described by both vendors and service providers, are real.

Your analysis of the main challenges facing service providers – rising costs, rising threats from OTT, increasing complexity and lack of agility – are exactly those problems that you perceive SDN and NFV have been designed to tackle.

As a result it’s little wonder that most of you see initial adoption within the next 1 to 2 years.

But this universal enthisiasm may have its downsides. Once you all agree on how important and powerful the concepts are, there is a slight problem: not everybody’s vision is aligned over the ‘how to do’ things and the ‘what is the most important factor to bear in mind’, and so on, as our discussion panels illustrate.

What is clear about the importance-marking is that wherever there is a strong preference for one thing - in terms of how many 5s (very importants) it gets - there is inevitably a significant body of opinion which either holds that its opposite is true (by marking it ‘1’) or that its alternative also deserves a ‘5’.

So while the aggregated scores show a clear preference for ‘Cloud’ as the leading service type to benefit from the application of the techniques, for instance, there is still a substantial body of people who rank M2M as a ‘5’ (very important) while others mark it ‘1’ or ‘2’ (of little or no importance). Those are diametric opposites, not just differences of opinion.

Then there’s the strange case of Captial Expenditure. CAPEX reduction is often put forward as perhaps the main motivator for SDN/NFV adoption, but in our survey, while it had its supporters of course, on aggregate it was marked down by most as being not very important at all.

But then, perhaps you're all right. Who cares about the money?

Download: SDN & NFV - the service provider impact