Enterprises are facing new needs and challenges; those may translate into new opportunities for Managed Service Providers. But, are telecom providers well positioned to capture those opportunities?

SDN has reached a phenomenal resonance in the network industry … to the point where everyone and everything recognize himself/itself in this new “thing”.

But what is this ”thing” really? A technology? A use case? A framework? An architecture?

For me it is an architectural paradigm that opens a debate for all pieces of the infrastructure, from the access network to the datacenter. It is a recognition from the industry that we should ask ourselves if what we built is the right thing to accelerate innovation, maximize the flexibility and reduce cost.

Here are two technologies that show a lot of promise, with not a little hype thrown in.  SDN promises, among other things, agility and automation.  Seamless MPLS, once you get past the deep technical stuff (important, to know this is implementable and deployable) promises, among other things, rapid service delivery, service chaining and service flexibility.  Can these marry to form a real, useful solution?  I believe so, and the goal of this presentation <link> is to convince you of this as well.

Looking at the MPLS & Ethernet World Congress agenda, I’m still amazed how after 15^th years our industry can still innovate in this area. Well, the (L)abel (S)witching basis of MPLS remain the same but the (M)ulti(P)rotocol piece is, after 15 years, it is much more important now, than ever before. It’s not just IPv4 or IPv6 over MPLS. In fact is not even IP or packets, but also circuits over MPLS. It is also fascinating how over the 15 years MPLS has been here to solve different problems: ATM transport, IP VPNs, Carrier Ethernet, Multicast, Data Center and Cloud connectivity, mobile networks... and now MPLS is getting ready for SDN.

If there’s one thing that transforms my city every year it is Mobile World Congress. For one week, MWC is at the very top of the agenda for all press, politicians, hotels, restaurants, taxis and unfortunately even pickpockets! And of course, 1,500 exhibitors and over 67,000 visitors from 205 countries have a positive impact to the city.

As the Christmas lights go on and Christmas Carol’s begin to fill the air, what better time to look forward to the year ahead and pick out a few key trends that may have an impact on our industry.

Despite the plethora and variety of products and solutions out there, in many ways technology developments, whether in networking or applications tend to follow a pretty well worn path from hype to religion to reality.

2013 will be a year where in a number of areas we will see key transitions along that path that end users should be on the lookout for and figuring out what conclusions and actions to draw from the claims, noise and reality on offer.

When the automotive industry found out, in the middle of the 60s, that most of their customers weren't particularly happy to drive the exact same vehicle as everyone else, this started a revolutionary change. Luxury cars had this problem solved with their traditional approach of almost hand-made models, but of course not everyone could afford that. The conventional manufacturers adopted a new concept: mass customisation.

As an attendee at a recent conference on Software Defined Networking (SDN), it was quite telling that many of the presenters opened their discussion with their interpretation of a definition for SDN. Given some of the hype and recent industry activity (such as VMWare’s acquisition of Nicira), it is easy to forget that this is still very much a rapidly evolving area of development in the IT industry. Even some notable presenters such as Bruce Davie (VMware/Nicira) made light of this fact in describing the SDN “bubble” in that whilst everyone is talking about “it", what "it" actually is has not yet quite been agreed upon.

I suspect I am not alone as a relative newcomer in trying to figure out what the actual practical use-cases for SDN actually are (worth seeing Pradeep Sindhu’s discussion of the topic on YouTube). For me, it is identifying the application of the benefits that this new technology brings to real-world deployments that is most important to understand - Google appear to have been able to figure this out, but how does this translate for the rest of us?

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.

Last week Juniper was the lead sponsor at Cloud Net, London, co-hosted by the Open Network Foundation. When it came to the role of SDN and OpenFlow, there was some lively debate. Here are my takeways, what were yours?