OpenFlow has been a controversial topic in the networking industry in part because of early claims that the goal was to commoditize switching hardware. Obviously, given that the protocol requires cooperation between switching hardware and controller software, this goal was something of a non-starter for the switching partners that needed to get involved in the effort. While this debate still goes on in some corners of the industry, most of the companies sitting close to OpenFlow have already seen that it is a way to accelerate innovation and actually differentiate their hardware and overall solutions.

The big picture is that OpenFlow and the larger movement in the networking industry called "" promise true disruption because they enable rapid innovation -- new networking functionality implemented as a combination of software applications and programmable devices, effectively bypassing the multi-year approval/implementation stages of traditional networking protocols. This acceleration is possible because of the layered design of the software/hardware architecture.

The most recent example of an industry being transformed by such architectures is the mobile industry and their app stores. Phones prior to this were monoliths: a single company made the phone, its OS and its "apps" -- an address book and maybe a couple of games. Today, we're in the era of "Software-Defined Mobile Devices." The new architecture has mobile applications on top of cleanly defined mobile development frameworks, and those frameworks provide an abstraction of the underlying hardware. This has spawned the creation of whole ecosystems of companies with new apps coming out constantly. Many of us have customized our devices with dozens of apps that make the device do exactly what we need them to do.

Now come back to networking, an industry ripe for this same sort of transformation. Today, OpenFlow architectures are starting to be deployed with a few targeted applications being rolled out. Over the next few months and years, we should see a steady progression of new networking software applications coming to market from new ecosystems of companies, delivering to customers exactly what they need from the network. That's the grand vision, and that's what's causing all the buzz!