“The basic value proposition of SDN remains the same — either you make money or save money,” said Dan Pitt, Executive Director, Open Networking Forum speaking at the opening of the Layer123 SDN & OpenFlow World Congress in Bad Homberg, Germany.
What has change in the past year since the last SDN World Congress?
Attendance at the event has nearly doubled to about 700 and the companies presenting at the event have increased in number and diversity as real world use cases become the topic of discussion.
From the perspective of the ONF, Dan Pitt said OpenFlow has established its value as the open, vendor-neutral standard made for SDN.
With new SDN use cases showing CAPEX and OPEX savings, Pitt said there is no doubt that SDN will have a big market impact on both data centers and carrier networks. The first signs of SDN hitting the mainstream press can now be seen in advertising from NTT Communications touting its software-defined capabilities.
Some of the ONF achievements for the past year:
- Numerous releases to OpenFlow
- Updates to OF-Config
- Launched a new Mobile and Wireless working group
- Launched a new Northbound Interface (NBI) working group
- Established 3 sanctioned conformance testing labs — Indiana University, Beijing Internet Institute and University of New Hampshire
- First OpenFlow-conformant product certification (NEC)
- Formed a Chipmakers Advisory Board,
- Launched an Open-Source OpenFlow driver competition.
- Added 30 new companies, bringing total ONF membership to 113.
- Goldman Sachs has joined rhe ONF Board.
- Established liaisons with other industry groups.