In reply to Santanu Ganguly.

Santanu,

First, many apologies Santanu, for the delay in my reply - busy days indeed! Time will tell on OpenFlow - I personally can't see major deployments in SPs *in the short term" - for 2 major reasons
(1) It takes a long time for telcos to re-engineer their networks, they are focused on resilience and scale, and proving any new technology in these environments takes time.
(2) And .... purely because this technology IMHO still has to be proven at scale and in major corporations. While I appreciate Amazon and Google have good successes and are the "poster child" case studies, their range of use cases (partic I would argue Google) are somewhat restricted compared to SPs (e.g. Google is a search company, most SPs are offering a broad range of services).

Selective use of OpenFlow could be very interesting when combined with NfV approaches and may help re-engineering of CPE-based managed services, for example.

Of course, we've now seeing widespread interest in Cisco's ACI which is a game changer for re-thinking about data center networks, so look out for ACI having major successes in the data center.

Stephen