| SDN use case | Business value | When applicable |
| Network state awareness | Decrease costs of overprovisioning and risks of misconfiguration | Operations, brownfield deployments |
| Automated network optimization | Decrease costs of overprovisioning | Operations |
| Real-time telemetry | Enable network state awareness and proactive network optimization | Operations |
| Automated vendor-agnostic service provisioning | Enable network state awareness and proactive network optimization; enable new revenue sources, e.g. through differentiated service levels; decrease operations costs; reduce supplier/outsourcer power | Operations, vendor swaps |
| Automated vendor-agnostic resource provisioning | Reduce supplier/outsourcer power, decrease deployment costs, reduce time to market | Greenfield deployments, further vendor swaps and device replacements |