Lisa Caywood recently joined The Linux Foundation as the director of Ecosystem Development at the OpenDaylight Project (ODL), which is the leading open-source platform for programmable, Software-Defined Networks (SDN). Widely adopted by service providers, telcos are using ODL to disentangle key network obstacles that are related to automated service delivery; network resource optimization; Cloud and NFV; research, education and government; and visibility and control.

Caywood was interviewed by John Furrier (@furrier) and Lisa Martin (@Luccazara), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, at the OpenStack Days: Silicon Valley 2016 conference held in Mountain View, California. This week’s Women in Tech spotlight features Caywood, who explained the value of ODL and how the open-source community is rallying around it.

Early adopters

Opening up the interview, Furrier pointed out that ODL doesn’t get much attention from the community, but he stated that early adopters are having success. He asked Caywood to share some of the successes. She explained why the platform is critical to telcos.

“There has been a fairly predictable wave of adoption. The really early adopters tend to be telcos for a variety of reasons. The real reason for people to go through the trouble of adopting SDN … is if the network is really critical to their business. And for carriers it obviously is; they are under tremendous competitive pressures … [such as] Web 2.0 companies from one side and new business models from cloud providers. They’ve needed to get agile quickly, and SDN is something that they have very readily embraced.

“The telco market, in particular, has really been very excited about open source. AT&T never loses an opportunity to tell people that they are going the open-source route. They can do that because they have a lot of developers on staff. What’s been really interesting, especially with the upcoming release for OpenDaylight, is that many of the projects within the next upcoming release were actually proposed by user organizations, mostly telcos. There’s this whole ecosystem that is starting to emerge based on all of that early work and early innovation within the user community.”

The feedback loop

Martin was interested in the collaboration of the group, and she inquired as to how feedback is used to enable others to be successful. Caywood talked about just how open this project really is.

“One of the things OpenDaylight did early on, which I thought was really important, was they set up a user advisory group. That was important because early on a lot of the users were in wait-and-consume mode. They were waiting for developers to actually put stuff together that they could use. They weren’t necessarily directly getting their hands dirty themselves, but they wanted to have input.

“Because it’s an open-source project, there was an obvious opportunity to do that. So we bring the advisory group together, we put them together with the project leads within the community and it’s just a very open session. All the sessions are open to the public. Anybody can go and look at the minutes, look at the call, and so that feedback loop is not just within those [participating in the meeting]. It’s not stuff that is happening behind closed doors, but it’s out in the community, it’s out in public, and that can help spur further ideas in the broader world at large.”

The value proposition

As OpenDaylight gains momentum, Furrier asked Caywood about the value of an open SDN as opposed to a private SDN. She walked through some of the challenges it solves and its benefits.

“I would look at it from a couple of different lenses. One is an acquisition model. That is the obverse of how SDN is approached in the market. There is, shall we call it, hardware-defined SDN that is locked. There is SDN that is sheet metal, and you have to buy a new switch in order to get the software capabilities. So that’s one model.

“The other is software, but proprietary software. It’s been packaged with a whole software stack that goes along with that. Open source in general and OpenDaylight in particular, because it was intended to be a general platform, splits the difference between those things. It’s purely software; it’s something that is completely agnostic. OpenDaylight was intended to be multi-vendor, to solve the interoperability problems with multi-vendor networks, so there’s value at that level.

“Then on top of that, it’s [questions such as]: ‘Do I have to rebuild my entire network architecture because I have to go buy this new sheet metal? No, I don’t. Do I need to buy this entire software stack and re-architect my entire management stack? No, I don’t. I can buy piece parts. I can buy a solution from a particular provider that solves a particular need that happens to have OpenDaylight in the core. I don’t need to care about that or if I want to get into the nitty-gritty because I have a specific need or specific feature that I happen to have … and I don’t have a vendor who is willing to do that for me. I can go do it for myself.’”

The future for OpenDaylight

Furrier wanted to know how Caywood views the ecosystem and what she predicts for the future. She mentions Internet of Things (IoT) and interesting verticals among the forecast.

“IoT is definitely coming up. Telcos were early adopters, but we are starting to see larger enterprise, transportation, financials. Before I joined Linux, about a third of the people I talked to were K through 12 school districts. Totally unexpected, but there was a very clear and specific need there.

“We’ll start seeing more and more verticals join the fray, and fortunately the ecosystem is already starting to build itself around it.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of the OpenStack Days: Silicon Valley 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE