Uptake of SDN routing hurting conventional sales

"We're at the beginning if the S curve [in SDN] with Google, Facebook, Amazon, and NTT adopting and a few others actively deploying it, but it will be several years before it is mainstream," said Guru Parulkar, the chair of the event and executive director at the Open Networking Research Center that works on SDN.

"We will build network infrastructure with white boxes running merchant silicon, open-source network OSs, and services. This will not happen overnight, but it will come."

In the SDN vision, many tasks will be handled as applications running on Linux servers, said Dan Pitt, executive director of the Open Networking Foundation behind the OpenFlow protocol: "The future of the network is Ethernet, x86, and OpenFlow -- nothing is controlled by a single party, it's all community based."