After attending ONS last week, I will say there is some doubt on if the OpenDaylight Project (ODP) team can execute (not just about the project in general), but at the same time there is an increased amount of optimism from the SDN community. I first posted about the ODP here when it launched and I can say I’m one of the optimists at this point. Borrowing Omar Sultan’s LinkedIn headline, I’ll cautiously call myself a skeptical optimist. You always need a bit of healthy paranoia/skepticism, don’t you?
The OpenDaylight project will offer the ultimate anti vendor lock-in at the controller layer for SDN solutions regardless if it’s Cisco’s or Big Switch’s code underneath. Aside for getting some good industry gossip, at the end of the day, it really won’t matter who actually produced the code for those that want to use and deploy the technology. What will matter is to ensure it remains open source and community-driven. Because there are so many vendors including start ups and incumbents working on ODP, it will be interesting to see the strategy each company takes with regard to their own commercial offerings, either based on OpenDaylight or their own proprietary controller such as Juniper’s Contrail controller, Cisco’s ONE controller, and Big Switch’s Big Network Controller, etc.
Has the controller already become commoditized?
What I really look forward to is how the OpenDaylight controller will be deployed, by which customer types, and who will support the controller? Why is this interesting?
Because open source is pretty new for the network industry at large. Open vSwitch (OVS) has been around for a years now and although Cisco does contribute to OVS now, it was initially largely led and created by Nicira. On the other hand, it is Cisco leading the charge for OpenDaylight. Because of that, it will get much more attention from the traditional communities of the network industry from users and operators to resellers and solution providers.
The vibe I am getting is that vendors want integrators to step up and support an open source platform like this, but this is not business as usual by any means. Typically, both customers and integrators rely on that official support/SmartNet SKU to resell just in case there is a problem.
I recently wrote here about CloudScaling, and they are worth mentioning again. They are already selling and supporting their own Cloud Platform based on OpenStack. Projects like OpenDaylight bring more opportunity for companies like them who aren’t necessarily relying on vendor support, but contributing code and offering their own product based on major releases/distributions of open source projects.
Just as incumbent vendors are figuring out their strategy and startups are emerging with new technologies, the same holds true for services-lead organization like Solution Providers/Integrators, and then product/services companies like CloudScaling. Incumbents will likely adapt while more companies like CloudScaling emerge.
As this happens, what does this mean for the vendors and their own software solutions?
Thanks,
Jason
Twitter: @jedelman8
Because open source is pretty new for the network industry at large. Open vSwitch (OVS) has been around for a years now and although Cisco does contribute to OVS now, it was initially largely led and created by Nicira. On the other hand, it is Cisco leading the charge for OpenDaylight. Because of that, it will get much more attention from the traditional communities of the network industry from users and operators to resellers and solution providers.
The vibe I am getting is that vendors want integrators to step up and support an open source platform like this, but this is not business as usual by any means. Typically, both customers and integrators rely on that official support/SmartNet SKU to resell just in case there is a problem.
I recently wrote here about CloudScaling, and they are worth mentioning again. They are already selling and supporting their own Cloud Platform based on OpenStack. Projects like OpenDaylight bring more opportunity for companies like them who aren’t necessarily relying on vendor support, but contributing code and offering their own product based on major releases/distributions of open source projects.
Just as incumbent vendors are figuring out their strategy and startups are emerging with new technologies, the same holds true for services-lead organization like Solution Providers/Integrators, and then product/services companies like CloudScaling. Incumbents will likely adapt while more companies like CloudScaling emerge.
As this happens, what does this mean for the vendors and their own software solutions?
Thanks,
Jason
Twitter: @jedelman8
RSS Feed
