Event organizer Layer123 is expecting more than 1,500 conference-goers from around the globe to attend the company’s 2016 SDN & OpenFlow World Congress next week at the World Forum in The Hague, Netherlands.

Organizers say that pre-registration is strong and they expect attendance to surpass the 1,500 attendees that came to last year’s show in Dusseldorf, Germany.

The four-day event will begin Monday with a Workshop Day, featuring content from the Open Networking Foundation (ONF), the European Workshop on Software-Defined Networks, and the ETSI NGP Next Generation Protocol Forum. The ONF workshop includes case studies and customer briefings. In addition, the ONF will provide an overview of its open source projects.

The Congress officially opens Tuesday, Oct. 11, and several familiar names in the software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) ecosystem will be speaking at the event, including Matt Beal, director of innovation and architecture at Vodafone; Axel Clauberg, VP of aggregation, transport, IP, and fixed access at Deutsche Telekom; and Shawn Hakl, VP of product and new business innovation at Verizon.

For Grant Lenahan, partner and principal analyst with Appledore Research Group, the conference is a reality check for the industry. "I think we are approaching a point in SDN and NFV where we are moving from proving the most basic technology, to proving the ability to operate the technology efficiently," he says. His research firm, in particular, is looking at the onboarding of NFV services, the automation of those services, and next-generation virtual service assurance, which Lenahan believes has not received enough attention from the industry.

Here’s a link to the full agenda. And if you aren’t able to attend but still want to hear some of the speakers, Layer123 will be live-streaming the presentations. Here’s a link to register for the webcasts.

The Hague is about 30 minutes from the Amsterdam Schiphol Airport and 20 minutes from Rotterdam — The Hague Airport. Conference organizers say that Dutch trains, trams, and taxis are fast and reliable, so attendees shouldn’t have much difficulty navigating from the airport to the conference. They also recommend using fast check-in and check-out procedures to help save time. If you are flying into Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, turn left once you leave the airport and head toward Den Haag.

The SDN World Congress will be held at the World Forum, an international convention center that can hold about 5,000 visitors.

The World Forum successfully hosted the Nuclear Security Summit in 2014, which was the largest summit in the history of the Netherlands. The event was attended by the leaders or heads of state of more than 50 countries and attracted about 5,000 delegates to The Hague.

SDxCentral Co-founder Roy Chua and Managing Editor Craig Matsumoto will be attending SDN World Congress. Check the SDxCentral website next week for all the latest news from the event.