A new infographic from Pica8 reveals that while the research and education sector is at the forefront of software-defined networking adoption, with service providers not too far behind, companies in traditional industries like retail and manufacturing are struggling to keep pace. The Palo Alto, California-based startup is doing its part to bridge this chasm with a low-cost SDN Starter Kit designed to help practitioners get their feet wet.

Pica8 offers an open source switching platform that enables customers to turn their network infrastructure into a programmable fabric that is simpler to provision than legacy architectures. Since the system is hardware-independent, it’s more cost effective than property switches from Cisco and Juniper.

The company’s Starter Kit comes with a pre-configured PicOS device, a guide that covers the “10 simple steps needed to configure a test bed and then start sampling network traffic,” and a CD loaded with a network tap, the SNORT intrusion detection solution and NTT Labs’ open Ryu controller.

The package will become available on January 13, 2014 starting at $8,895.

“As SDN looks to move from being ‘the next big thing’ which companies like Google use to a mainstream solution geared for the enterprise, there is a need for simplified offerings like the Pica8 Starter Kit to help with the onramp of the various new pieces.” says Wikibon Sr Analyst Stu Miniman. “Users desire an agile and cost effective network that can keep up with the rest of the software-led infrastructure and this requires a significant change in equipment and operations. Solutions like this are targeted at shifting dollars from keeping the lights on to innovation and improving the business.”

Earlier this year, Pica8 introduced an SDN framework that aims to bring cloud providers one step closer to the software-defined data center. The platform supports the OpenFlow SDN protocol and Open vSwitch, which was originally developed by Nicira and acquired by VMware.