Update 3/14/14: ONUG's verification testing results are available here. Excluding a few skipped tests, everybody passed!

The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) is gearing up for its spring conference this week, Wednesday and Thursday in New York, with plans to reveal the results of its first round of use case requirement testing.

Conducted by Ixia for the enterprise end-user trade group, the tests pit a variety of network overlay, software-defined WAN, and network services virtualization products against 10 key use-case requirements defined by ONUG members. Participating vendors include Big Switch, Cisco, NEC, Nuage, Pluribus, Riverbed, and many others.

Speakers at the ONUG event will include Facebook Vice President of Network Engineering Najam Ahmad and Adrian Cockcroft, who helped build Netflix's cloud architecture.

Since its founding just over two years ago, ONUG has grown from an initial core of financial services firms to include enterprise IT execs from companies such as FedEx, Gap Inc., and Pfizer.

"What all these companies have in common is scale and complexity," Nick Lippis, ONUG co-founder and co-chair, told SDxCentral in a recent interview. "They can't just build one IT infrastructure for one workload and optimize that. They've got to support a wide range of them."

With those requirements built into ONUG's use case testing, the results to be announced this week should carry significant weight with IT decision makers within ONUG and beyond.

Increasingly, enterprise executives are concerned with flexibility as much as with cost-cutting, says Lippis. "They're seeing fundamental changes in their business, and they need a different IT infrastructure to support those changes."

"The network is that place in the IT infrastructure that touches everything," Lippis adds. "If you can't change that quickly, then nothing changes quickly."

Photo via Flickr user JD Hancock.