You said "My intent is to foster an open discussion about the future of the networking industry." Okay, then let's begin with some forward-thinking visions of progressive DevOps scenarios.

Within an Application Centric Infrastructure, can we envision a time and place where mundane policies become self-sufficient?

Do you see a future where networking automation of policies mean more than creating alarms or alerts that then require human intervention -- in order to take action based upon that trigger event?

As you know, there's an increasing expectation that CIOs and other IT leaders will evolve their roles (further up up the value chain), thereby devoting more time and effort to addressing the CEO's desired strategic business outcomes -- enabled by technology.

But as enterprise networks continue to grow in scale and traditional VM-based optimization approaches tend to plateau over time, the whole process of effectively managing very large deployments is still labor intensive.

I can foresee a more desirable future where lower-level tasks are routinely resolved by automated actions within an SDN operational model that incorporates robotic intelligence which goes beyond merely creating alarms or other alerts.

Can software defined networking software achieve this goal? Will software automation become more agile and actionable, just like the business processes that are intended to help humans harness its inherent capabilities?