The future of networking is … no one knows. Because it’s the future. Duh.

While we don’t have a crystal ball, what we, or rather VMware has, is the clout to bring some of the smartest networking brains in the world together and ask them what they think the future of networking will look like. VMware’s been doing this for the last three years at its annual Future:Net event, which happens at the tail end of this week’s VMworld in San Francisco on Aug. 28-29.

One of these brilliant networking brains belongs to Albert Greenberg, corporate vice president at Microsoft Azure Networking. In an interview leading up to the event, he told SDxCentral that the future of networking is SDN, disaggregated architecture, and it requires a diverse group of talent to remain future proof. But more on that in a minute.

First: Future:Net. VMware started the event in August 2016, about four years after it acquired Nicira, which became the basis for its NSX networking platform. VMware was still known as a virtualization company, and the joke at the time became “I went to VMworld and a networking show broke out.”

What Is Future:Net?

VMware hosts the event, but Future:Net remains vendor agnostic, said Ambika Kapur, VP or product marketing for VMware’s Networking and Security Business Unit. She’s also the chief architect of Future:Net.

“That has always been the case,” she said. “Future:Net was meant to be, first of all, VMware agnostic.” The event has since grown, and it includes speakers from Microsoft, Google, Facebook, Cisco, and Arista Networks. “We really want to make sure it’s a melting pot of ideas. These speakers aren’t there to share the points of view of their companies. It’s their take on what’s happening in networking. And likewise, we’re not shying away from controversy.”

The event will be a little different this year, Kapur said. For one thing, it’s audience will be primarily network architects, directors, VPs, and C-level networking execs.

Additionally, the format will be more un-conference inspired. “Formats that actually allow us to have more of a back-and-forth with the audience,” Kapur explained. “Lightening rounds, audience polling, debate-style formats with point and counterpoint, this keeps the flow going and allows the audience to participate. It brings opinion into the mix.”

Kapur also wants to make the event “live beyond the show,” and by that she means not limiting it to a one-day event, once a year, in one city. Instead, she envisions several, smaller events in different cities across the U.S. Maybe digital events, too. “Why limit it to a single point in time? How do we make Future:Net an ongoing thing so you have, maybe roundtable dinner events in different cities, on an ongoing basis,” she said.

The Future Is SDN

Microsoft’s Albert Greenberg is a panelist at Future:Net, and nothing short of an SDN legend. He got his start at AT&T Labs where he helped build the systems for engineering and managing AT&T’s networks. He moved to Microsoft in 2007, where he works on data center networks and cloud infrastructure.

He’s also speaking on a Future:Net panel titled “The wizards of networking predict architectural shifts to happen by 2025.” He’ll be joined by fellow networking wizards Arun Gupta, principal open source technologist at Amazon Web Services (AWS); Stanford University Professor Nick McKeown; Pere Monclus, CTO of network and security at VMware; and Vijoy Pandey, VP and CTO of Cloud and Distributed Systems for Cisco Cloud.

Greenberg attended Future:Net in the past, but this is his first time as a panelist at the event. “The idea is to bring together, in an open context, the future of networking and then have a good dialogue between experts across the industry, in an open way, about what’s working and where things are going — the future of networking.”

The future of networking will open up bandwidth and increase exponentially what “we can do with the cloud and networks in general,” he said. SDN and disaggregated networks pave the path to this future.

“The scale of cloud networks and the scale of change in cloud networks is so much [larger] than any previous networks,” he said. “We’ve built all this SDN and it’s enabled us to go farther. The SDN platform you can bank on now and that allows us to innovate much faster.”

The Future Is Diverse

But to continue innovating at this rapid pace and to future-proof networks, companies must include a diverse talent pool. This includes diverse disciplines: “Hardware and optical engineers who are comfortable and good at software,” he said. “Data scientists who also can write software, engineers and software engineers who want to work on large scale systems.”

It also includes women and other underrepresented groups in tech, and Greenberg says he’s proud of the inclusivity of his team at Microsoft. “We need to have a team that is problem solving, creative, strong, diverse, and loves challenges, and responds and adapts,” he said. “We need a process that makes us future-proof.”