Wikibon analyst Stu Miniman hosted a networking panel with three industry execs at VMworld this week. Big Switch’s VP of engineering Howie Xu, Broadcom vice president of storage and strategy Greg Scherer and Infineta’s Haseeb Budhani gave their take on what’s going on in the network today (full video below).

Xu, who ran VMware’s network business for over a decade before joining Big Switch, doesn’t see the software-defined networking as a trend that just emerged over night. It’s the answer for a recently reached critical mass of enterprise requirements that can only be addressed with a more agile, cost-efficient network, and SDN architectures are proving to be an extremely viable means of achieving just that.

Stu passed the ball to Broadcom’s Scherer, a repeat guest on theCube.  He took the opportunity to talk about his company’s VMworld product announcements.

The first big addition to the company’s portfolio is the second generation Trident switch, which is touted as the only ASIC on the market that can drive more than a hundred 10GE ports from a single chunk of silicon. It also supports VXLAN with a built in transit chip and gateway – that’s the SDN standard that Broadcom helped develop together with VMware and Cisco. Later in the interview the executive made a big reveal about his company’s plans for the standard and NVGRE – a competing architecture.

Some time down the road, Broadcom will be looking into taking advantage of the technical similarities between the two protocols and integrate them, making the vendor’s solutions compatible for both types of environments.

The second new product that the firm debuted at the conference is a new service network virtualization technology called NetXtreme, which can speed things up by as much 55 percent.

Budhani expanded on this angle and gave the Infineta perspective. His firm runs its software on Broadcom hardware, and the main reason he cited is that it provides a lot of maneuvering room as far as software-based management and agility go. He also made an interesting forecast that internal IT will, at least at first,over-use the network resources freed up by SDN – for that and the full insight from the other panelists, check out the video below.