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Here’s our gathering of the week’s news bits around software-defined networking (SDN), network functions virtualization (NFV), and related topics.

… Oracle king Larry Ellison stepped down as CEO yesterday. Mark Hurd and Safra Catz will take over as co-CEOs, but Larry’s not going far: He still owns a quarter of all Oracle shares and will serve as executive chairman and CTO.

… In other CTO news, Juniper confirmed that Christofer Hoff was named CTO of security. He'd been Juniper's chief security architect.

… Brocade added two more names from Juniper. Brian Levy, who had become a point man for NFV at Juniper, will now be senior director and head of technology for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA), working with European CTO Curt Beckmann. In the past, Levy had been CTO for the media and communications business at HP, and he'd also been Group Technology Officer for British Telecom.

… The other Brocade appointment: Eric Yu, formerly Juniper's vice president for greater China, will now run that region for Brocade, reporting to Adam Judd, the company's Asia Pacific president. For more on the brain drain flowing into Brocade from Juniper, see here.

… VMware announced general availability of NSX 6.1 amid a slew of other new or enhanced products for software-defined data centers. NSX 6.1 promises advanced network microsegmentation, a scale-out NSX Edge, and improved hybrid cloud connectivity. VMware also released vCloud Suite 5.8, the latest version of its integrated offering for building and managing SDN-powered vSphere private clouds.

… ATIS created an NFV Forum to develop use cases for emerging NFV and SDN business opportunities. Use cases such as virtual network operator and service roaming will focus on interprovider technical requirements, including a catalog of APIs to expose functionality, mechanisms to discover available services, and tools to combine services from multiple providers.

… The Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF) and the Open networking foundation (ONF) are wrapping up their transport SDN interoperability tests and demonstrations. Nine vendors and carriers took part in the tests worldwide. ADVA Optical Networking, Alcatel-Lucent, Ciena, Coriant , FiberHome Technologies, Fujitsu, Huawei, NEC, and ZTE tested transport SDN in cloudbursting or application-based bandwidth-on-demand scenarios. OpenFlow extensions in both CDPI and CVNI forms were included in the tests. The OIF and ONF plan to release a report on test results next month.

… Cisco launched ASA firewalls beefed up with Sourcefire code for what it’s calling the industry’s first “threat-focused next-generation firewall.” Cisco ASA with FirePower Services combines the Cisco ASA 5500 Series firewall with malware protection and next-gen intrusion protection systems (intrusion prevention system (IPS)) technology from Sourcefire, which it acquired last October for $2.7 billion.

… Facebook, Google, Twitter, and a host of other tech Goliaths are throwing their weight behind open source. Facebook is leading the charge, this week introducing TODO — which stands for Talk Openly, Develop Openly — an organization for companies to collaborate to make open source easier. The company also launched a new open source router: The mcrouter scales memcached deployments and is capable of handling almost 5 billion requests per second, Facebook claims.

If you missed them, here are the other top stories from SDxCentral this week: