OpenDaylight: Understanding the Value Propositions

The announcement today of OpenDaylight is big news.  Industry leading companies are partnering via Open Source to serve an emerging set of market needs:

Operators: want affordable real-time orchestration and operation of integrated virtual compute, application, and network.

Application Developers: want a single simple interface to the network.  Underlying details such as “router”, or “switch”, or “topology” can be a distraction they desire to abstract and simplify away.

Equipment Vendors: want a stable forum to interwork a plethora of Application interfaces with a plethora of nascent Network Device programmatic interfaces.

OpenDaylight members understand that the industry will grow fastest if there is a recognized venue to interwork everyone’s code. They also understand that there can be many ecosystem winners here — winners chosen based on competition for new end-user value.

This ecosystem will extend beyond the Data Center.  OpenDaylight Controller and Service Adaptation code is equally applicable to Enterprise and Service Provider markets.  Therefore you should expect future code contributions in areas which today are not even associated with SDN.  In fact, we expect a much broader ecosystem to spring up around OpenDaylight with companies providing services, support, tools and applications built on or around OpenDaylight.

From Cisco’s point of view, its founding membership status, its contribution of Controller code, its funding, as well as its dedication of Open Source developers demonstrates its continuing industry leadership and the expanding role of Open Source in Cisco’s software strategy  Put simply, we are reiterating our commitment to:

Innovation, and speeding value to end-users

Commitment to standards (whether in long-established bodies, or via emerging Open Source consortiums)

Providing the latest technology advances to customers and partners

We are proud to play a role in this next evolution of the industry.

There will be ups and downs as OpenDaylight moves forward.  But the foundations of OpenDaylight are sound.  Controllers are sure to grow in relevance to the network if for no other reason that the explosion in virtual devices demands new operational paradigms.  With this announcement we have made a real step forward in serving these needs.

So what are you waiting for?  Learn more from Dave Ward’s post and  get over to OpenDaylight to find out how to contribute!