SDxCentral is in Dusseldorf, Germany (actually the neighboring city of Neuss) for the 2014 SDN & OpenFlow World Congress, one of the biggest events of the year for software-defined infrastructure (SDx) and network functions virtualization (NFV).

This page is where we'll compile all the headlines from the show. Feel free to bookmark, and check back during the week — we'll be updating as the conference continues.

Ciena & Ericsson Make Their Bid for Multilayer SDN: Nearly all of the optical transport vendors are brewing SDN plans that tie the optical and packet layers together.

4 Insights (& 1 Cisco Bit) from the SDN & OpenFlow World Congress. "Just give me the [expletive] number," and the state of Tail-f.

Q&A: Dan Pitt, ONF Executive Director, Talks OpenFlow and Open Source SDN. Why OpenFlow will be a "default," and why open source has been disappointing.

NFV Group Will Gently Push for Open Source Help. OPNFV will try to rally open source projects to the NFV cause. How well will these worlds mesh?

NEC Aligns With Dell & Drops SDN Controller Pricing. ProgrammableFlow is now priced to move. It's just one of a few SDN-related moves NEC is making this week.

Dell's OpenDaylight Participation Turns Platinum. Another vote of confidence for the open-source SDN project.

The conference was preceded by a one-day Open Networking Foundation (ONF) workshop and a clutch of vendor announcements.

What NTT Docomo Wants from NFV. It's less about new services and more about capex savings and service resilience, as NTT expands its experiments with NFV in LTE networks.

Can Coriant Transcend With Its New SDN Strategy? Optical networking vendor Coriant had been quiet about SDN until today, when they announced the first “true SDN implementation.”

Amdocs Makes a Play for NFV Orchestration. One of the big names in OSS/BSS announced its plans for NFV Orchestration. Find out what NCSO stands for.

SDN & OpenFlow World Congress: Dell, HP, and Cumulus Reach Out to the Masses. New products from Dell, HP, and Cumulus oh my! The next step in new data-center technologies show vendors reaching out to the mass market.

(Photo: Dusseldorf View by Sergey Sokolov.  Use under commercial creative commons license.)