That whooshing sound you may not have heard on Sept. 17 was the noise that occurs when an industry goes over a tipping point. On that day, AT&T announced the introduction of “the first software-defined networking solution of its kind in the United States …”

This is part of AT&T’s User Defined Network Cloud service that is designed to cut the time for service provisioning from months to days and provide for self-service provisioning to business customers. Following testing at the University of Texas, Austin, this past summer, AT&T will make its Network on Demand services commercially available in that city by the end of the year and in other areas during 2015.

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It’s fair to say there was a fair amount of skepticism back in early 2013 when the OpenDaylight Project was announced. Why, some wondered, was there a need for a vendor-supported project – albeit under the auspices of the Linux Foundation – to foster open standards around Software Defined Networking (SDN) when the user-driven Open Network Foundation had been plugging away at SDN open standards for more than a year?

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The words “data center” may still conjure up images of so-called big iron processors, but that world is getting increasingly soft, and I don’t mean flabby.

Even processor king Intel says the move to software-defined infrastructures is critical and inevitable. Many view this trend as crucial to bridging physical and cloud-based data center infrastructure, where virtualization plays a commanding role and evokes dreams of a software defined data center (SDCC).

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A continuing string of customer wins for Brocade’s Ethernet fabric products is focusing attention around a core data center networking issue: hierarchical switching doesn’t cut it with today’s VM-heavy data center architectures.

The Singapore Advanced Research and Education Network (SingAREN) recently launched its SingAREN-Lightwave Internet Exchange (SLIX), a 100 Gigabit per second community network with a Brocade MLXe-4 router at its core.    

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Network decision-makers basically have had to choose between two options for equipment acquisition: purchase or lease. But in this era of infrastructure-as-a-service, where you can essentially rent much server and storage capacity as you need at any given time, why should network devices be exempt?

Over the past couple of years, Brocade has been offering network infrastructure under a new “capacity-as-a-service” model, in addition to its purchase and lease options. The Brocade Network Subscription allows organizations to add capacity at will, as well as to reduce or terminate the agreement with minimum notice. In 2013, Brocade expanded the program so its partners can offer financing on a complete customer purchase -- including all services, support and third-party equipment

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Welcome to the disaggregation of the big networking box!

According to a report by Bloomberg, “Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Verizon Communications Inc. and Coca-Cola Enterprises Inc. are telling the world’s largest networking-gear maker that they won’t keep paying for expensive equipment, when software can squeeze out more performance and make the machines more versatile.”

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SDN uncouples network logic from the hardware, so you can in theory run your networking software on any commodity server. That – along with breaking away from proprietary big box networking devices – is plenty to get an enterprise decision-maker excited.

BizTech magazine writer Ricky Ribeiro recently wrote that software-defined networking (SDN) is a wise choice for the financial services industry where, he noted, it’s data, not money, that is worth its weight in gold.

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Part of the compelling appeal of today’s networking architectures is the growing ease of locating data in remote data centers. But for companies whose footprints spread across international borders, that flexibility became a lot more complicated when Microsoft lost a bid to quash a subpoena that requires it to hand over to U.S. prosecutors customer emails housed on cloud-based servers in Ireland.

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It seems like government is everybody’s favorite punching bag these days, and its use of technology doesn’t provide much cover. When it comes to cloud, though, the U.S. government was early to promote a Cloud First policy back in 2010 and looked to be on the cusp of major transformation. Since then, not so much.

A recent survey of federal agencies found that progress is slow and halting, with a majority of respondents saying their agencies are not yet making cloud a priority. There’s also broad sentiment among those respondents that agencies are missing out on savings by focusing on private cloud over public, hybrid or community clouds.

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The Open Networking User Group board of directors comprises some heavy hitters in the corporate enterprise market. They recently published their first white paper, Open Networking Challenges and Opportunities, showing they intend to put their clout to good use in migrating the industry toward software-defined networking.

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There’s a lot vendor activity these days – not always moving in the exact same direction – with regard to standardizing SDN (software-defined networking). But, if that’s not enough to make a network planner’s head spin, how about upping the ante with a dose of NFV (network function virtualization)?

When there is so much going on that can impact future network investment decisions, it’s easy for paralysis to set in. But, thankfully, this is not a zero sum game where enterprises have to choose between Software Defined Networking and Network Function Virtualization, nor do they have to commit to one to enjoy the benefits of the other.

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Agility and flexibility are two of the most popular words to describe the attributes expected from IT in helping achieve future business objectives. But how do you apply those attributes to what many large enterprises still consider the linchpin of IT infrastructure – the data center?

There are not, yet, many companies like Condé Nast, which recently shuttered its data center to go "all in with the cloud." Let’s face it, if you’re a content company, albeit one of the select few with a still thriving print business, transforming to an all-cloud strategy makes a lot of sense.

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IBM announced that profits were up even as revenue was down as it continues to shift away from hardware business lines and tries "to convert the future of technology into an opportunity rather than a threat." Microsoft announced its largest layoff ever as it continues to "become more agile and move faster" toward cloud and mobile hardware!

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In early 2014, as many media outlets such as NPR reported, security services vendor Proofpoint claimed to have detected the first IoT-based cyber attack involving “more than 750,000 malicious email communications coming from more than 100,000 everyday consumer gadgets such as home-networking routers, connected multi-media centers, televisions and at least one refrigerator that had been compromised and used as a platform to launch attacks.”

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