 It's The Cube. Here is your host, Jeff Crick. Hi, Jeff Crick here with The Cube. We are on the ground at the Santa Clara Convention Center at the Open Daylight Summit, the second Open Daylight Summit that they've had going on, about 800 people here talking about networking, next generation networking, and so we're excited to come down, let you know what's going on. So our first guest tonight is Bala Thakadath. I get that, right? Yes. Awesome, director of product marketing from Ericsson. Welcome. Thank you. So you got to kick off one of the big keynotes today. So for the folks that didn't make the keynotes, tell us a little bit about what you guys were talking about at the keynote. So I was today part of the keynote with Intel. So Intel was talking about how SDN is moving into mainstream deployment. How 2015 is going to be the year of SDN deployments today. And what I was there to, as a proof point of, was the collaboration that the industry is having in taking SDN to being a mainstream technology. And a lot of these works, people who are working on these technologies, they have point solutions. But we are all coming together here in a collaborative way, just to make sure that whatever we are doing is not a point solution. It's a broader framework into which we plug this solution so that it can be taken into service-provider networks, which are not heterogeneous equipment. It's not homogeneous equipment. It's a range of heterogeneous equipment, multi-vendor, multi-technology, multi-generational. So we want to make sure we are creating solutions that are applicable to a broad range of service-provider scenarios. And that's the only way to accelerate deployment of SDN into this technology, into the networks. So one of the key ideas was, yes, SDN is going, that I touched further to what John was talking about is SDN is a big part of the operator transformation. But it is a part of a larger journey that includes SDN, NFE, cloud, the OSS transformation. And when we think about getting SDN as a mainstream technology into service-provider networks, we need to think about all the other pieces of the infrastructure that need to fall into place, to make it really, really into the network, to make it a mainstream part of the operator mindset, to the point that they don't think about SDN, it just is there, taken for granted. So there's a lot of collaborative work that is happening in the layers below and above the SDN control, in the network infrastructure, in the data center infrastructure layer with the virtual network function communities like the OP and NFE, and even one-on-one collaboration that vendors like us have with Intel and other partners. Then there's the management and the orchestration layer, where actually these consumable services are created across hybrid infrastructure. There's parts of the network that are already transformed, there are parts of the network where we are getting these technologies in. But when we create, when operators create consumable services that they want to sell eventually, it has to be a service that runs across an entire hybrid infrastructure. And then there's a lot of work that is going on in user groups and advisory panels on actually taking this and monetizing it, to talk about use cases that are being enabled, to see the impact of this on end user experience. So in order to get SDN to its rightful place in the network, we need to make sure that all these pieces of the puzzle fall into place. And typically when operators are making these decisions on any of these layers of technology, they're thinking about four key things, business priorities. What are their business priorities with that technology? Is it reducing their optics? Is it increasing their revenue? Is it being more relevant to the customers that they serve? Then they think about, what is the infrastructure life cycle of that layer in their network? Is it something that they've just put in and they don't want to uproot and throw away? Is this something that is near the end of their life cycle? There are operational processes. They think about how flexible are their processes to change? How easy for them to change and go to a new model? The organizational capacity and considerations on people competence and people culture. So my take was that when we in the SDN community here in Open Daylight community make any decisions for the broader community, we should always keep in mind these four key factors that our customers are looking at it. And if we always keep that in mind and look at the place of SDN in the broader network infrastructure, then we will make it much easier for those guys to take the decision to push SDN into the network. So how does it work having Open Daylight as a platform really to collaborate on some of these things in an open source framework versus kind of everybody building their own? I think that, like I said, the greatest advantage we see with being part of a community like ODEAL is the reduction in time to taking some of these things to market in a much broader way. We could create point solutions, but then if you want to take that solution and apply it across service providers throughout the globe, all the way from the ranges of AT&T to somebody setting up a small telecom network in a small city somewhere in a different part of the world, if you want to create solutions that are relevant to this broad range of scales and capabilities, then I think we need to have the only way to take it forward in a much faster way to get that innovation in a much broader ways to have a collaborative community development. So that's why our own, we actually had a SDN solution before Open Daylight kicked off and then we stopped that effort and we have put all of our effort now into just creating products on top of the Open Daylight project. And then talk about the promise of SDN. You know, we always talk about a lot, we had a lot of shows, right? Software's eating the world, software to find everything, but it seems like the network was kind of the lagging last layer. I mean, what type of opportunities do you guys see to really transform what networking be with SDN? So that's the real promise of SDN, is that it is transforming the network into a programmable and automated infrastructure, right? I mean, there's a lot that has been done already in the world of cloud and virtualization where we could now spin up applications much faster. And the real promise of NFV was that, oh, we'll be able to spin up applications much faster and we'll be able to move it around to where you need it so that you are really optimizing your resources. But that really happens only if the underlying infrastructure which we're using to move these functions are equally agile and programmable. Otherwise, that falls short, right? I mean, you could have an intent to move an application closer to a customer, but if the connectivity infrastructure is not there to be able to do that in real time, then you kind of, you know, it's the promise of that agility is only as fast as it's weakest link, right? And today it is a network. The goal of SDN, the promise of SDN is to make that network much more programmable in real time so that when you select the type of services you need, you can also define and say, what is the connectivity requirements I have? And that gets automated and activated in real time. And it's not just applications. Once you have that infrastructure, it can be given to consumers and enterprises on a self-service portal. And the more power you give to people and consumers to choose their own choice of network requirements or network services or connectivity requirements, the much more empowered they are, the better user experience they have, and it will be a great user experience. Right, right. They really support this kind of developer-centric world, right? Because it's all about the developers. We're at DockerCon and you want to be able to develop the application on your laptop, roll it into AWS, do a little test and dev, roll it back into my own data center and then potentially roll it out all over the place. So you need software-defined infrastructure to do that. Absolutely. Awesome. So what's kind of the next big thing that you're working on if we come back here next year? What will you have accomplished from this year? What's the priorities? Two things. Getting this actually, like John said, this is now the year when we are starting to move this into the network, right? So we have proven the fact that it works in a limited environment. So next year we hope to be here and talk about wider deployments for SDN. It's actually in the network in a much scalable way and people are actually making money of this technology in the operator world. Awesome. Well, Bala, thanks for taking a few minutes to stop by. Congratulations on the keynote. Thank you. I'm Jeff Frick. We are on the ground here at Santa Clara Convention Center at Open Daylight. You're watching theCUBE. Thanks for watching.