Vendors and network administrators are starting to embrace SDN (software-defined networking) because network operators need more control over their infrastructures and want to customize them more for their own needs, said Jonathan Heiliger, who resigned as Facebook's vice president of technical operations last month. He spoke on Wednesday at the Open Networking Summit at Stanford University, where discussed technology that controls networks independently of the underlying hardware infrastructure.

Just as the telecommunications industry once moved to IP from specialized systems such as ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode), it will adopt SDN in place of unique network architectures for each vendor, Heiliger said. Adopting a common standard for SDN will help vendors to compete, just as IP did, but it will also help carriers deploy new services and even allow their enterprise customers to implement services between their own sites over the carrier network, he said.

Because of those motivations, the migration to SDN will take less time than the gradual move to IP, which took several years, Heiliger said. But it won't begin for another 18 to 24 months, he added. The entire software stack for SDN needs to mature first, he said.

Before he left Facebook, Heiliger helped to found the Open Networking Foundation, which is developing OpenFlow and other standards for SDN. Heiliger announced his plans to leave Facebook earlier this year and is now an entrepreneur and investor.

OpenFlow grew out of a joint research project between Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. With OpenFlow, a programmable controller is in charge of determining routes and priorities throughout a network. The controller implements the network configuration and settings via flow tables that reside on the switches in the network. OpenFlow is the common protocol for communication between controllers and switches from various vendors.