Indeed, Cisco sees OpenFlow's role contained to academia/research as a way to perform network "slicing," or partitioning. Academia/research is but one of the five markets -- enterprise, service provider, cloud service provider and data center being the others -- where Cisco is aiming its Cisco ONE programmable networking architecture.

"This interface ... between the controller and the network being controlled is intended to be an open standard interface," Sindhu said. "This piece is very, very important. OpenFlow is one possible proposal for this being the open standard interface ... an early proposal for the open protocol between the controller and the network."

OpenFlow 1.0 is on Juniper's MX routers and EX switches today. OpenFlow 1.3 will be on the MX, EX and QFabric QFX lines next year. Juniper also plans to add production-ready path computation and real-time topology tools, like and , to its systems next year (see graphic).

Having multiple controllers deployed and interacting through "east/west" interfaces is also key to scaling an SDN, Sindhu notes. And the northbound interface from the network to the orchestration systems is vital for synchronizing network operations with those of compute and storage resources also resident in the data center, he said.

Juniper pledges that its northbound and southbound interfaces, whether or not OpenFlow is employed, will be open.