Software-defined networking is clearly the wave of the future. For some reason, at least a couple of the big telecom equipment manufacturers initially had their SDN efforts cordoned off in from the rest of their business in separate startups. For example, Alcatel-Lucent (News - Alert) has Nuage Networks, and Cisco had an 85 percent stake in Insieme.

 However, the urgency to move aggressively on SDN and the related network functions virtualization seems to be building. And that apparently prompted the move by Cisco (News - Alert) this week to announce it will buy the part of Insieme it doesn’t already own.

The deal could cost up to $863 million, according to The Times of India, which reported that the final price will be tied to sales targets, which have not been publicly disclosed.

 Cisco and Insieme this week also unveiled an SDN architecture and some related products. New are the Application Policy Infrastructure Controller and a new Series 9000 switch line targeting the SDN opportunity. They are part of the new Cisco Application Centric Infrastructure, or ACI, for the data center.

 “ACI gives every administrator, whether they are focused on networking, security, storage, platforms or network services, the same view and the same single point of management for the whole IT infrastructure,” Cisco leader John Chambers (News - Alert)  blogged yesterday. “Crucially, this single point of management extends to both physical and virtual networks.

 It was important for Cisco to come out strong with an SDN message and solution set sooner rather than later, as rivals like Arista Networks and VMware, which last year bought SDN startup Nicira for more than $1 billion, have been nipping at its heels.

 Indeed, The Rayno Report earlier this month in a posting headed “Arista-Cisco Brawl Heats Up,” wrote that Arista’s high-powered data center switches directly target Cisco as the competition and says “this is going to be an epic battle.” The Rayno Report calls Arista “the current wunderkind of networking technology in Silicon Valley” and says Cisco “is looking older and less spry by the month.”

 Cisco helped Insieme get off the ground early last year with a $100 million investment; Insieme then raied $35 million in a round a year ago this month. Some had expected that Insieme would unveil its SDN solutions in August at Cisco Live in Orlando, but Cisco said that was never the plan. Still, when the summer event didn’t yield news on the SDN front some industry-watchers expressed frustration.

 In another recent signal that the established datacom/telecom vendors are being pushed to move faster on NFV and SDN, Juniper Networks (News - Alert) late last month announced it was dropping work on its MobileNext enhanced packet core product line for mobile operators, saying a virtualized solution would better fit the bill.

 Since buying Contrail Systems in December and detailing its SDN strategy in January, Juniper more recently has unveiled new software and services aimed at mobile service providers. That includes the new Juniper Networks Junos Space Services Activation Director application, which enables service providers to provision thousands of seamless services, including MPLS and Carrier Ethernet for mobile backhaul. Also new is the Juniper Networks Mobile Control Gateway running as a virtualized function on the JunosV App Engine to provide signaling and control functions on 2G, 3G and LTE networks. It was developed in partnership with Hitachi (News - Alert). And Juniper’s JunosV App Engine centralizes the development, provisioning and management of Juniper Networks and third-party applications on a common platform.

 Juniper says that, based on data from ACG Research, it expects customers of these solutions will see up to 65 percent in opex and up to 54 percent reduction in total cost of ownership.