Today marks the debut of OpenDaylight, a new initiative meant to combat fragmentation in the rapidly growing software-defined networking space.

The project is led by the Linux Foundation, and the formidable contributor list includes almost every prominent networking vendor: Cisco, Brocade, Juniper, NEC, Arista, Ericsson, Fujitsu, Dell and IBM. Intel, Microsoft, Red Had, VMware and Citrix are also chipping in along with a few emerging SDN startups, namely Big Switch Networks, Nuage Networks and PLUMgrid.

Jim Zemlin, executive director at The Linux Foundation, said in a recent interview that these companies approached his organization because of its “experience providing a wide range of projects”, the most notable of which is of course Linux.

OpenDaylight is an open source SDN stack that is expected to become generally available sometime in the third quarter of 2013. It consists of three components: a controller platform that enables the creation of a programmatic management layer, APIs for handling apps and orchestration, and interfaces for managing physical networking devices and protocols. It’s essentially a centralized controller framework that makes it possible to piece together different technologies using a highly-abstracted administration layer.

Wikibon senior analyst Stu Miniman believes that “if the competitive challenges can be overcome, there is a lot of good that can come from the collaboration. While it is useful for SDN to help overcome the manual operations of the networking physical world, the real opportunity for this initiative is if there is the creation of a broadly adopted platform for a new class of networking applications.”

Miniman suggests that enterprises with “immediate need for the benefits of SDN” shouldn’t wait for OpenDaylight to deliver. He adds that the networking community should make sure that the project does end up meeting its goal of accelerating innovation, rather than becoming a “roadblock to startups.”

See more on software-defined networking here.

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