This week's OpenDaylight Summit opens today with news that Tencent, the Chinese social-media giant, has not only adopted the OpenDaylight Project framework but is using it for one of the core reasons intended: because it was a faster way to get software-defined networking (SDN) to work.

The details are outlined in a blog posting today by OpenDaylight Executive Director Neela Jacques, who is also delivering today's opening keynote at the Summit.

Tencent started a homegrown SDN project in 2013, aiming to improve its data center interconnect, Jacques explains. But as SDN ideas proliferated, the possibilities for the project began to spin out of control.

The answer was for Tencent to stop trying to do everything itself and to opt for the head start that OpenDaylight could provide. By March 2015, Tencent was meeting with Baidu and Alibaba to discuss each company's experiences with OpenDaylight code.

Tencent announced its SDN plan in April, describing the use of a logically centralized controller that uses the Path Computation Element protocol (PCEP) to calculate forwarding paths.

Jacques' blog includes some more detail provided by Marty Ma, senior director of Tencent’s technology and engineering group. What it all adds up to, though, is that OpenDaylight has found some believers among some of China's biggest network operators — a nice bit of bragging rights.

As for why Tencent was looking at SDN, the company was concerned about its data center interconnect, where its expensive WAN links were sitting underutilized. The company is now implementing SDN in a phased approach; more detail can be found in this blog entry, written by He Zekun, senior architect at Tencent and posted on Huawei's web site.