BARCELONA, Spain — Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins told a group of journalists today at a meeting at Mobile World Congress that “We will lead the networking industry in SDN.” He said Cisco will lead with a defined architecture for software-based automation.

But true to Cisco form, Robbins championed the continued value of hardware. “The Internet and the traffic that runs on the Internet I think is increasing,” quipped Robbins. “I don’t think increased traffic loads is going to result in a demand for less hardware. Software gives the capability to run these infrastructures in these networks in a more efficient and automated way. But I think there will always be a need for hardware.”

Driving home that point, Cisco made an announcement today with Indian service provider Reliance Jio. The operator has built an all-IP network in India.

“We have no circuit switches whatever,” said Mathew Oommen, president of Reliance Jio. “Today with Cisco we have 150,000 routers on the network. We believe it will double.”

Reliance Jio and Cisco say the all-IP network provides the programmable infrastructure to automate and virtualize core network functions.

At the same meeting today, Yvette Kanouff, general manager of Cisco’s service provider business, said “I think the term ‘SDN,’ for us, is morphing into the word ‘automation.’”

Whether Cisco uses the terms SDN, NFV, or automation, the company is winning network virtualization contracts.

Altice NFV

Yesterday, Cisco announced that it has a deal with the Altice Group for a long-term project to build a network functions virtualization (NFV) platform. Altice is a multinational telecommunications company with 50 million customers.

Altice’s French subsidiary, SFR, has been leading the project, transforming its mobile packet core infrastructure with an NFV platform. Cisco is working with the Red Hat OpenStack platform, in combination with Cisco networking, virtualization, and data center compute technologies that are part of its Ultra M product suite.