ESG Blogs

At the Open Networking Summit, many were talking about open-source, but there were some contrarian views which made the conversations interesting. So let's discuss that.

I also saw some surprises, where companies that I thought were firmly in one path were making bold moves in another direction.

Last week I attended the Open Networking Summit and was able to listen in on a few keynotes, talk to a number of end-users and vendors, and even manage to host one of the panels. Overall the time was well spent as industry buzz is still very high around SDN and this show provided some good examples of how organizations were evaluating, testing, or even deploying SDN solutions. Here are some of my takeaways.

While many are gearing up for another season of IT shows, those of us in the Northeast as still digging out from a very snowy season. The idea of escaping the polar vortex for San Francisco, Barcelona, or San Jose (RSA, Mobile World Congress, or Open Networking Summit) sounds really good to me. Fortunately, I have the privilege to chair a session at ONS this year along with some great speakers from Tail-f, Intel, Goldman Sachs and ONF, so I will be able to get away - for at least a few days!

We attended Open Networking Summit 2013 this week at the Santa Clara convention center and I wanted to share a few takeaways for the network service provider space, and Bob Laliberte may do the same for enterprise and data center. Related, Wayne Pauley covered openstack-analyst-day-4152013-portland-oregon/index.html" target="_blank">OpenStack in Portland, Oregon.

This week I attended the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara with 900 of my closest friends. Okay, maybe I am contributing to the hype around Software-Defined Networking (SDN) with a statement like that. It wasn't 900, there were only 899 in attendance (over 100 on a waiting list) and they were not all my friends, but I did meet a lot of really smart people and had a lot of great conversations. Those in attendance ranged from network engineers from large health care providers, senior executives from large service providers, hardware and software vendors, and more than a few venture capital and money management firms. The show seemed to be a good mix of speaking sessions that covered existing implementations, tools, vision for the future etc., as well as expo/demo time to review offerings and better understand the current state of commercially available solutions.