"Working with silicon vendors like Broadcom to accelerate our SDN, to accelerate the security capabilities, that's extremely interesting,” VMware's Tom Gillis said.

The multi-vendor project relied heavily on open standards and interfaces to simplify network management.

Datadog found strong growth in the use of managed container platforms that take advantage of serverless concepts.

"Security is always a high priority item," Rust Foundation Executive Director Rebecca Rumbul said.

Vendors can also save time and resources as they do not need to “build unique platforms for every single one of their telco users and their customers.”

The new project is designed to provide operators with “declarative, intent-based automation.”

Ninety of the Fortune 100 companies are running the NSX platform as their SDN services, VMware SVP Tom Gillis claims.

“Cloud AI is a big differentiator for Juniper right now because we do have a clean foundation to work on,” compared to Cisco and Aruba, Juniper's Bob Friday said.

“The goal and the outcome are the same," Cisco SVP Jonathan Davidson said. "The key is we all want to get to open RAN."

Competing motivations are abundant in open RAN, and most of these groups are shoving the technology in a direction that best serves the goals of those leading the charge.

Yuliana Havryshchuk builds data pipelines for her colleagues at Zillow. Learn about her experiences in this data engineer profile.

Open source is making an impact on the software layer of 5G networks, but the vision for open source networking is much more grandiose.

A look at how open source intersects with SD-WAN, how openness could help, and whether open source will come to the networking tech.

Open Networking Summit (ONS) 2019: reflections of an industry in transition.

Who's the wicked queen in the data center switch merchant silicon business?

Long time passing. Where have all the SDN Controllers gone? Long time ago.

Can applying NFV and SDN principles to a telco organization yield better results?

The never-ending and quixotic quest for the universal networking fabric.

Is curated open-source still open source?

IT operations teams need to get ahead of Kubernetes deployments that will soon span the extended enterprise.

A collaborative approach from service providers might yield better results than one that seeks to disempower the vendors.

Service meshes could displace many L4-7 networking functions. But will they?

Companies are rebranding their SDN products as SD-WAN, dynamic networking, agile networking, or cloud-native network to avoid being part of the SDN hype.

The analyst firm also predicts that by 2023 more than 90 percent of WAN edge infrastructure initiatives will be based on SD-WAN.