Top 5 Highlights from Open Networking Summit, ONS 2013 - Tutorial Day

The SDxCentral team is in full force at the Open Networking Summit (ONS) at the Santa Clara Convention Center and been catching up with old friends, making new friends, meeting with the movers and shakers of networking, and handing out free SDxCentral t-shirts (Visit our table next to the registration booths for your t-shirt tomorrow – while supplies last).  We also got to finally meet Jim Metzler who's delivering a 13 part series on the SDN Journey on SDxCentral and check out the stage and prepare for SDN Idol.

A lot has changed since ONS 2012 (read ONS 2012 highlight here and here), and wanted to share our top 5 observations from today’s sessions

ONS 2013 Highlight #1:  Buzz and conversation centered on OpenDaylight

Everyone is talking about OpenDaylight (finally) and what this means for customers.   A couple of interesting nuggets:

• Cisco (and others) have open-sourced not only the SDN Controller – but also a number of SDN applications – which essentially take the price for those SDN applications to zero.  We heard about a number of security and visibility apps (such as Tapping) that will be provided for free under OpenDaylight.  Like we mentioned in our post last week – this doesn’t appear to a focused attack on start-ups that some people want us to believe – and instead happen to be collateral damage in a bigger war of everyone vs EMC / VMware.  Though I continue to be glad I didn’t join an SDN Startup or raised significant capital.
• General consensus from people we spoke with was that OpenDaylight is for ‘real’ (and that time will tell).  It was also articulated to us that the biggest customer benefit for OpenDaylight is customers will be able to take OpenDaylight and purchase integration and support services from their trusted vendor of choice.

ONS 2013 Highlight #2:  SDN is about Services – not Software

Interestingly we had multiple conversations around the implications of SDN to the network services market.  We define network services as a combination of professional services to  a) design, b) build, and c) operate networks for either enterprises or service providers..  Given our experience and research we’ll be announcing soon – we are starting to view SDN as Services-Driven Networking.

Rational:  SDN is a software business – and integrating networking software with other software systems to drive automation is going to require a significant amount of services work.  When we look at SDN and OpenDaylight under a services lens and view SDN technologies as more similar to enterprise software or service provider BSS / OSS software than traditional networking boxes -- where every software deployment is custom, it appears the service opportunity for SDN maybe even larger than the software implications to the over all networking market.

ONS 2013 Highlight #3:  NFV is the new OpenFlow

Another hot topic is Network Functions Virtualization or NFV.  Given the buzz around NFV, it feels like the buzz we had around OpenFlow this time last year.  The number of vendors claiming NFV 'support' and capabilities in the exhibit hall was staggering!

ONS 2013 Highlight #4:  2013 is the year of the Network Virtualization POCs

SDxCentral’s own Roy Chua made compelling points about the state of the network virtualization market based on our experience design network virtualization solutions for our clients.  Roy maintains that 2013 is the year for network virtualization POCs and initial production deployments occurring in 2014.   We will post Roy’s slides for download shortly….

ONS 2013 Highlight #5:  Service Provider SDN Gaining Traction

For the last 9 – 12 months most of the SDN conversation has been dominated by a data center networking discussion.  Today, literally every conversation we had was more focused on service provider use cases (beyond the data center uses cases) than ever before.  Additionally – we continue to see that service provider SDN is not likely domain for start-ups – and instead is the purview of larger, more established companies including our public companies as well as late-stage private companies that have survived the 10-year telco qualification cycle.