With the Thanksgiving season upon us here in the United States, we thought it might be a good time to run a fun little competition at SDxCentral. In the past 24 months, with all things SDN and NFV, we’ve all seen our fair share of both highlights and lowlights in the space. In private conversations, I’ve heard numerous remarks about SDN initiatives, products, and frameworks being ridiculous, not well thought through or poorly executed. And in the spirit of shining the spotlight on some of these, so we as a community can learn from them, I’m offering up a friendly competition for our favorite Turkeys of SDN. Of course, I’m using the word Turkey here in the pejorative sense, meaning something that is extremely or completely unsuccessful.

Perhaps you didn't like the direction an open-source project took? Maybe a proof-of-concept at a customer failed spectacularly? Or perhaps a vendor overhyped an SDN or NFV product that was a major letdown when it finally shipped? Or didn't ship? What about that startup that raised so much money but delivered nothing to customer and investors in the end? Whatever it may be, I'm sure we all have our favorite turkeys to root for.

The key to making this type of competition useful and not a descending spiral of negativity is to ensure that we offer suggestions on how to fix our turkeys as part of the contest submission. I would also suggest that we don’t submit individual’s names, and instead focus on projects, products, standards, and frameworks. And finally, I ask that the supporting information submitted be concrete and not just a rambling diatribe of your opinion or snide persnickety remarks on why something should be construed as a ‘turkey’; nevertheless, if you can make it entertaining, that would be all the more appreciated by our readers.

[No longer taking submissions] Enough talking, let’s start with the submissions. We’ll be collating and tabulating the entries and will put together an article next week that highlights the winners: the most popular and our favorite submissions. You are welcome to put your name on your submission but we’ve made it entirely optional.