This week,  the Rayno Report hosted another social chat on the rise of Software Defined Networking (SDN) technology in service-provider networks, referred to on Twitter as #carrierSDN. The goal of the chat was to define what global service providers need to do to adopt integrate SDN technology with their existing IP and optical networks and how it can improve their business.

The discussion was wide-ranging, covering both technical as well as business concepts of integrated SDN, optical networking, and Internet Protocol (IP) across service-provider networks. The most popular thread in the discussion -- which ran live on the CrowdChat platform and could be followed on Twitter (see transcript here) -- was a question posed to the crowd about the future of dynamic network optimization.

Dynamic network optimization is the concept that bandwidth and networks can adjust on-demand, in real-time, to changing conditions. Service providers have real challenges with the explosion of mobile data, video, and social networking content. They hope that SDN technology will enable them to build more robust networks that can intelligently respond to demand.

"Adding capacity to an inter-data center link (or network) to meet temporary higher capacity demands," is one of the first requirements for #carrierSDN, according to Paul Parker-Johnson, an analyst with ACG research (@pj4cloud).

Heidi Adams (@hra99), a Senior Director of Product Marketing with Alcatel-Lucent , said that "recovering stranded bandwidth to enable placement of services that might otherwise be rejected by the network" would be an important goal. (Disclosure: Alcatel-Lucent was the sponsor of the chat.)

Anthony Cochenour, President of Hoplite Industries (@ajcochenour), said that "SDN opens the door to fuse together app/network/security layers together that were previously impossible to manage together."

The most popular thread involved how service providers can launch a new service such as Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) and make it profitable. "How does #CarrierSDN make on-demand services like Bandwidth on Demand (BoD) profitable?" I asked the audience. You can see the start of the thread in the image below.

Another questions to the crowd was: Where are we in creating dynamic, automated #serviceprovider nets? 2nd inning? 4th inning?

Some of the crowd joked that we are still in the very early stages. "Batting practice," Tweeted @pj4cloud. "Still in the parking lot," said @ajcochenour.

More seriously, an accurate representation is probably the 1st or 2nd inning, according to Alcatel-Lucent's Adams. "Mobile networks are there today - but moving business services/datacenter connectivity/others to this paradigm very early days," she Tweeted.

The full discussion included more than 152 messages and reached nearly 500,000 timeline views on Twitter. You can still read the transcript here.