If we use last year’s Interop as the OpenFlow/SDN coming out party, it took just over a year for Cisco to fully develop and announce a comprehensive multi-segment strategy.  Their SDN encompassing strategy is called Cisco Open Network Environment (ONE).  Congratulations, Cisco!  If they got David Ward back from Juniper sooner, maybe the strategy would have already been announced.  Joke…I really don’t have any insight as to who was or is responsible for the strategy, but would imagine it to be a fairly extensive team.

I think it was a good move to announce during Cisco LIVE.  Customers worship Cisco, not just for the products, solutions, architectures they develop, but also for this week long party where they receive gifts and gadgets, and soak up some of the most technical content in the industry, but most importantly can be around like-minded individuals.  That is the most important thing for those that are technically inclined and is often not understood by those who aren’t “down in the weeds.”

Greg Ferro does a nice job here directly stating the networking incumbents should step up with an SDN strategy.  I agree 100%.  Brad Casemore also chimes in with his thoughts.  If you aren’t already reading their blogs, I encourage you to do so because you’re missing out.

Several companies have announced they have OpenFlow-enabled switches, but for these companies, there is still no strategy and no reasoning as to why their switch should be used when deploying an OpenFlow based SDN.  Furthermore, they lack a strategy overall looking at the various components of a Software Defined Network.  From a hardware standpoint, some of the same features and characteristics  (buffers, table sizes, etc.) will still need to be compared as we already do today in traditional networks, but even that, isn’t documented in these announcements.  A lot of these vendors think they are on the offensive [vs. Cisco] announcing OpenFlow enabled switches (without a controller), but they really aren’t, in my opinion.