Open Network Featured Article

Today’s networking climate is undergoing an evolution as mobile device usage accelerates at an unprecedented pace and the cloud finds serious traction in the enterprise space. One of the underlying principles of networking these days is that different networks, devices, applications and services need to play well together to survive.

That means the days of proprietary specifications and vendor lock-in are rapidly disappearing, just as open standards and systems are being embraced. Vendor consortia and organizations dedicated to open standards and best practices for various networking philosophies and technologies are popping up all over the place as well, and the smart vendors are making their participation well known.

Some call it an outright war of the platform, with companies like Microsoft (News - Alert), which made its bread and butter on highly proprietary software, making the switch to open networking and the cloud over the last several years. The folks embracing Linux and Apache years ago understood the importance of open standards networking, and the Open Networking Summit recently commented on the phenomenon in a blog post.

“The networking industry is seeing a new era of significant transformation and disruption with SDN and NFV network operators are confronted with the business challenge of accelerating services deployment to capitalize on explosive growth in network traffic,” wrote the group, which brings together open networking proponents and enthusiasts for educational events and business networking opportunities. “Service providers, enterprises and vendors are embracing open source SDN and NFV to reinvent their business models to drive business agility and overall simplicity, enable rapid deployment and scaling of application and services.”

Other groups and events making noise in the open source networking space include the TM Forum Live, a telecommunications event centering on digital transformation and open standards. The Mobile Ecosystem (News - Alert) Forum (MEF) is focused on promoting specific open source initiatives while OPNFV is obviously geared toward promoting network functions virtualization (NFV).

With even more devices and applications expected to flood already busy and overtaxed networks, vendors will need to embrace open source networking out of necessity. Customers, in the form of individual and enterprise users, expect high levels of service and support, no matter which device they are using and which network they are riding on. The companies that can provide that seamless experience will have a strong competitive advantage moving forward.