The Role of Standards in the SDN world

Recently Cisco released their Application Centered Infrastructure (ACI) product line so all of the vendors in the SDN industry started to criticize them sharply for delivering both an hardware centered designed as well as being proprietary. What is going in the SDN world in terms of following standards? First of all Cisco is part of all the major standard bodies and is quiet very active.

Lets put this another way; are there any standard solutions out there in the market today? People talk a lot about VMware NSX but that is not standard its based on VMware own APIs and implementation of protocols. Taking that into consideration, what Cisco is doing is not so far off from the rest of the SDN industry. 

Openflow is suppose to represent what is considered pure SDN but only smaller players like Big Switch and larger Cloud operators like Google are really embracing it full on. In fact, it seems that the mainstream vendors are way behind in this space. Broadcom recently released the OF-DPA SDK libraries that would allow better implementation of Openflow in hardware and solve some of the main challenges faced by the standard. However, I think the bigger question is whether the larger network vendors would step up and release complete solutions around this standard.

The moral of the story is that no one today is really embracing open standards in their solutions. Having an ecosystem is not being open and this in fact a challenge for the industry going forward. We should continue to push for standard and open solutions which allows full inter-operability based entirely on standards.