IBM announced Tuesday it will be keeping its Software Defined Networking for Virtual Environments (SDN VE) after all — in a revised form using work from the OpenDaylight Project as a foundation.

With IBM selling its networking hardware to Lenovo, there was a bit of speculation that it might give up its software as well, although analysts expressed some doubt about that. At SDxCentral, we'd also caught speculation that IBM, a founding member of the OpenDaylight Project, would ditch SDN VE in favor of an OpenDaylight-based platform (which might be what happened; it's not immediately clear how similar SDN VE is to its original form).

SDN VE works with VMware's virtualization environment and with the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) hypervisor.

If a sale of SDN VE was ever a possibility, IBM's rumored $1 billion asking price might be a reason why it didn't happen.

SDN VE is a platform that includes a controller — now based on the OpenDaylight code release, named Hydrogen, that's also coming out Tuesday — plus virtual switches, gateways, and open APIs. It uses both the overlay model and the OpenFlow flow-based model.

Hydrogen and SDN VE will both debut at today's OpenDaylight Summit in Santa Clara, Calif.