SDxCentral staff onsite at the Open Networking Summit have been busy gathering newsflow to come up with the top 5 highlights for the day. For our readers who were not able to make it to the summit, stay tuned as we provide you with our daily wrap-up and observations from the ground. Without further ado, we present to you the highlights for the day:

Highlight  #1: Buzz and interest in SDN and OpenFlow continues to be high

Attendance at the Open Networking Summit was completely sold out!  We were also told that even after opening up an extra 60 seats for  Open Networking Summit 2012 (for total of 860 attendees) there are between 50 and 100 people still on the wait list.  The ONS Tutorial today was focused on Product Managers and Engineers, so unsurprisingly the vast majority of attendees were from networking vendors.  Most of the vendors in attendance were part of the Open Network Foundation (ONF), but some notable vendors who were not part of ONF but attending the Open Networking Summit include Alcatel-Lucent, Aruba Networks, and Ruckus Wireless.

Highlight #2: OF-Test to facilitate interoperability coming soon

Given the need for OpenFlow interoperability, and aiming the prevent the ICSA-testing interoperability issues of IPSec (we all know how easy it is to connect a Cisco IPSec device to a Juniper IPSec device today!), Dan Pitt from the ONF talked about how the ONF will release OF-Test in the July timeframe to facilitate interoperability testing to ensure standardization to enable market adoption.

Highlight #3: Carrier Wireline networks could be last to gain SDN traction

SDxCentral's (and Wiretap Venture's own) Matt Palmer made compelling points around where network vendors should and should not focus for Carrier Networks use cases.  Specific takeaways included:

• Carrier Wireline use cases are often the hardest use cases to gain SDN traction because they generate the most revenue, because SDN for these networks are a cost optimization value proposition
• Most compelling SDN use cases for Carrier Networks are at the mobile access layer, where hyper scale growth the mobile networks means that current approaches are unsustainable. However, given the complexity of building Carrier Networks, vendors should align their investment with the  2 - 3 year time horizon before broad SDN mobile-access layer deployments come about. It'll take that much time due to the complexity and maturity of the technologies involved.

Highlight #4: There are early SDN applications that solve real-world problems

Isabelle Guis from Big Switch Networks discussed some early applications on the Big Switch platform that they are hearing from early adopter customers.These include:

• Network Management Tools:  Apps built by Big Switch around network management and visibility
• Network Services:  Example like vArmour who can automate security and responsible security based on events in the network
• OpenStack integration:  Big Switch working with Dell to offer integrated OpenStack solution

What's most cool about these apps is that they are all being demoed at Open Networking Summit this week!

Highlight #5: Business impact of latency to non-financials - why SDN matters

Google talks about the business impact of a slow network and how they are using SDN to solve it.   One specific example Google shared was they found if a search query takes more than 400ms to execute, the number of searches from that person falls by 0.6%.  If a search query takes less than 200ms, then that same user increases their number of searches by 0.3%.   This has significant impact on Search revenues and shows how SDN is critical to their business even taking into account the costs of deploying SDN.  We're confident that over time, Google will share more use cases where they use SDN to drive additional adoption and use of Internet-based applications.