The Open Networking User Group (ONUG) will be taking more road trips next year, co-chairman and co-founder Nick Lippis said today during his state-of-the-union address at the ONUG Fall 2015 conference.

“We’ve been hearing from our audience and community that they want more year-round activities,” Lippis said, opening the conference at New York University. In response, ONUG is planning 24 meetups next year, including events in Japan and London.

ONUG is also going bi-coastal in 2016, with its spring conference slated to take place in Mountain View, Calif. ONUG will back in New York City for the fall conference next year.

ONUG had somewhat humble beginnings, given that most of its members are large banks. The first ONUG Conference in Boston in 2012 was mainly about white boxes and data centers, but ONUG's focus has widened to keep pace with the evolving IT environment. Lippis highlighted ONUG’s work to date across its eight working groups, which included eight white papers published during the past 18 months and 154 participants in the working groups.

The three main talking points at this week’s ONUG conference, which is the sixth, are: the impact of the changing consumption model in the IT industry, the demand for new skills in the IT industry, and the migration to a software-defined infrastructure in the context of open IT frameworks.

SD-WAN Moves Fast

During ONUG’s spring 2015 conference, attendees were polled about their companies' interest levels in adopting SD-WAN and network virtualization/overlays. Of those polled on SD-WAN, 60 percent said they were at some stage of deployment across 1,000 sites combined.

“That’s huge,” Lippis said. “I never thought it would move that quick.”

On the adoption of network virtualization and overlays, 42 percent of the respondents said they were in the deployment stage, and 42 percent said they were in the evaluation stage, with the rest of the results falling into the “not on the radar at this time” category.

Among those polled on network virtualization features, 90 percent replied in favor of service chaining between the WAN and data centers.