Big Switch Networks is looking to turn the spotlight on SDN. The virtual networking start-up launched its Open SDN product suite on Tuesday. SiliconANGLE Founder John Furrier called Software-Defined Networking the hottest new segment in the tech business right now. “This is the big trend. We are seeing a massive inflection point where software is the center of all the value around the hardware platform.” He said the old way was Cisco-Juniper, and the new way is Arista Networks, Brocade and now Nicira and Big Switch.

Big Switch co-founder and CEO Guido Appenzeller said “SDN is the most disruptive and transformative trend to hit the networking industry in over 20 years.” Furrier wholeheartedly agrees with this statement, reiterating that network virtualization is a whole new emerging category, with software, networking, storage, servers and compute all coming under one umbrella. He referred to it as “software-led infrastructure.” Furrier observed that VMware is one of the leaders in software defined data centers.

Furrier recommended that CIOs involved in SDN should go to wikibon.org and sdncentral.com, as they have very active communities on this topic. He said they need to view this as a mandate around what the coming changes are. It’s a trend where new solutions can take existing infrastructure and make them more scalable and more operational, rather than spending alot of money and costs on managing networks. He said some of the innovations around Big Switch are taking existing infrastructure and making it work better.

Furrier also discussed mergers and acquisitions going on in the SDN industry. See the entire segment with Kristin Feledy and John Furrier on the Morning NewsDesk Show.