SDN: A First Shot Fired...

Our inboxes and voicemail have been filled in the last few days with inquiries of all types, including career, customer, partner and investment inquiries! We thought this would be a good opportunity to share a few thoughts on the first acquisition in our space of Software-Defined Networking (SDN): VMware is buying Nicira.

First, it's fantastic to see that networking is hot again :) As one analyst said today, “SDN was hot, hot, hot, and now it’s really on fire!” This is a great announcement for the whole SDN ecosystem because it validates the market potential and quiets the naysayers who said the enterprise market wasn’t ready. Customers understand the power shift and are speaking out, and large vendors are attempting to respond. Google shared at the Open Networking Summit in April that SDN technology is ready for huge-scale production and now VMware has confirmed that this is a top priority from a market/customer perspective.

Second, we believe these are very early days in the SDN revolution, and we're seeing the beginning of a vendor war of physical and hypervisor switches: VMware has just fired the first shot and has taken an early player off the table, one that has often claimed that physical switches are not a priority. Other hypervisor and physical switch vendors are re-evaluating their timing with renewed commitment as this announcement has galvanized the SDN ecosystem.

Finally, let's think about what's best for customers, many of whom, have both physical and virtual switches in their networks today. They want flexibility, control and choices. No one wants to be boxed in. As the leading, independent SDN company that works with both physical and hypervisor switches, we remain focused on driving open standards and building an ecosystem of partners to deliver these options to our customers.