The announcement of the OpenDaylight Project, an attempt by 18 vendors involved in the software-defined network (SDN) technology development to create a standard common base platform, is an interesting move writes Wikibon Senior Analyst Stuart Miniman. It could provide real value, particularly if it produces a standardized SDN platform that will empower the development of a new class of network applications. However, he warns in his Alert, “SDN Value is in the Applications, Can OpenDaylight Show the Way”, the effort faces serious challenges, and it could just as easily create a barrier to startups seeking to deliver value that disrupts the existing networking value chain. Meanwhile, the service providers and other organizations with high-growth, large-scale networks that make up the early SDN adopters, cannot wait for the slow process of industry standardization to run its course.

“In many ways,” Miniman says in his Breaking Analysis of the OpenDaylight announcement on SiliconAngle.TV, “This is the big players kind of banding together and saying ‘We’re going to own the thought leadership in the space. We’re going to drive this across the industry.’ This could be an important initiative. “If we are really going to have a renaissance of networking, there needs to be a platform that any application from developer can sit on top of.” The problem, he says, is that the OpenDaylight members do not have a unified vision of “what they want to sell and how they want to sell it.”

The first set of hurdles OpenDaylight confronts will be in creating a standard virtual switch that all the suppliers, including Cisco, IBM, NEC, and Nuage, can use. These all require use of a proprietary virtual switch as a control point for SDN at present. While Open vSwitch supports multiple hypervisors and could be the basis for that standard component, several important players do not trust it, concerned that Nicera, now owned by VMware, controls the code. The controller will be similarly contentious, Miniman writes.

If OpenDaylight can achieve its stated goal, it could create a lot of value by providing a platform for new network-based services, just as the standard Linux become the basis for Google. CIOs, he says in a SiliconAngle.tv Breaking Analysis Webcast, should educate themselves on the organizational impact of SDN as well as on the various technology choices, as the layer 8 and 9 challenges are often more difficult to sort out than the technical ones.

Like all Wikibon research, this Alert is available in full without charge on the Wikibon Web site. IT professionals are invited to register to join the Wikibon community. Membership allows them to post their own questions, tips, and research, as well as comment on published research on the site. Members also receive invitations to the periodic Peer Incite Meetings at which their peers present on how they are using advanced technologies to solve business and technical challenges.