With almost with the same regularity as I drink tea, I can’t seem to get through a business day at the moment without discussing either SDN or Openflow.  Whether that’s an internal discussion, meetings with partners, customers or press / analysts this is a topic that is clearly gathering momentum.

Before going on, I should declare my position and interest.  From what I have seen so far, what the proponents of SDN are evangelising has an appeal – often networks today are too complex and rigid and have fallen behind the apps / virtualisation world in terms of their agility.  In an increasingly on-demand cloud centric environment, clearly that is something that has to be fixed. 

The early proponents of SDN are articulating an approach that creates a new virtual control plane layer outside of the current networking equipment layer.  That virtual control plane is being positioned as more flexible, dynamic and agile than what currently exists.

I recently attended the Carrier Ethernet World Congress Europe in Amsterdam, once more an interesting reality check of this industry segment. It is a great to hear from the Service Provider community the way they are using the Carrier Ethernet technology.

In this blog I share my observations in how this industry is evolving.