Old World. New News.

Nov 7, 2013

An overall recap of the SDN & OpenFlow® World Congress.

ONF co-hosted the second Layer123 SDN & OpenFlow® World Congress in Bad Homburg, Germany last month. Attendance more than doubled from last year to over 700 event attendees, including many network operators and users. As co-host, we were privileged to offer a workshop on the first day and granted a number of speaking slots. (Note that we neither render nor receive funds for being co-host.)

As this has become our premier international conference venue, we like it to be a place where news is announced. So we ourselves made three big announcements during the four-day event: the chartering of the Northbound Interfaces and Mobile & Wireless Working Groups; the addition of the third international testing facility to ONF’s OpenFlow® Conformance Testing Program: the University of New Hampshire InterOperabiity Laboratory [UNH-IOL]; and the awarding of the first Certificate of Conformance under this program to a product of a member company: NEC Corporation. (The conformance test was conducted by the Indiana Center for Network Translational Research and Education [InCNTRE]).

Day One was largely devoted to the ONF Workshop, organized by the ONF Market Education Committee and expertly run by MEC chair Marc Cohn. No longer just a tutorial, the workshop offered presentations by carriers and cloud providers and an analyst panel on the state of SDN. The day was as informative and fascinating as any in the conference. Two of the event days were marked with parallel tracks. One day consisted of “Software Defined Networking (SDN) Cloud and Data Center” along with “Infrastructure and Transport.” The second day featured “Network Functions Virtualization (NFV),” “SDN Cloud and Data Center,” and “Enterprise SDN.” Perhaps most impressive were the two large halls of demos – one of which was devoted entirely to the NFV World Showcase.

My biggest challenge in Germany was balancing my time among the great talks and panels, catching demos, networking with attendees, and meeting with press and analysts to discuss the progress of SDN (and ONF). Most everyone felt similarly, with too many exciting things going on at once to catch them all, so overstimulation was the rule of the day.

I am grateful to this incredible SDN community for helping propel this movement. My keynote highlighted ONF's progress since last year's Congress, and I surprised even myself at all we have accomplished together thanks to your efforts. You can see slides and videos of all the ONF-organized talks below. It’s almost like being there.

Workshop Welcome and ONF Snapshot
Dan Pitt | October 16-18, 2013
123LIVE! at SDN & OpenFlow® World Congress