Given the advantages, do you expect to see service providers move to OpenFlow?

Well, we certainly hope so. What we're hearing from the large service providers is that it is difficult to scale and make money. With OpenFlow I think we've demonstrated how to make your network much, much more efficient.

So you've been at this for a few years already; what are the next steps?

The whole industry is just getting going. I think five years from now we're going to be able to look back with some sense of accomplishment. But we have the baseline for introducing new functionality and now we can do that much more rapidly than we could have otherwise. So for example, we have made the first steps in our optimization algorithms for managing traffic, but now we can deploy a whole range of new, more advanced optimization techniques. But at a technical level, we need to tighten the control loop. Today the time to measure, react and reprogram is a big challenge in software-defined networking overall because many of these software and hardware components weren't designed for having a tight control loop. So we have to address that.

Is your network controlled from a single NOC?