Hewlett-Packard’s new SDN App Store creates a marketplace environment for SDN. In a live interview with theCUBE, Michael Zhu, Senior Director of Global Solutions and Alliances at HP, describes the innovation App Store brings to SDN. “This is the industry’s first enterprise-grade SDN app store,” Zhu said.

Zhu explained that “App Store is more than a catalog” because it addresses the specific needs of enterprise-level users. “We actually built enterprise services listed as apps into the store.”

The application layer enables a devops-like environment, allowing partners to take advantage of APIs that can communicate with the SDN-enabled infrastructure.

Describing the app structure, Zhu uses the example of an app called a link optimizer. Microsoft created an SDN API that talks to the link optimizer to lower the latency between desktop sharing connections. It does this by creating a priority queue between devices, releasing resources back into the system when they are no longer needed.

“All this can be done dynamically,” said Zhu. “This is unthinkable before the era of SDN because manually that’s a lot of work.”

HP plans on growing the app store ecosystem by engaging the developer community, and Zhu says they are currently working on 35 new applications that have not yet been released into the SDN App Store.

Watch the full interview with Michael Zhu here: