"SDN is more a philosophy than a product," Ahmad said. "OpenFlow is a product to make SDN happen, but there are other ways to do SDN as well."
Nonetheless, the company is bullish on SDN, the philosophy. Some SDN software could even be released as open source from Facebook itself, in much the same way it released its own performance improvements to the PHP language. The company is hoping that, as with Linux and other open source projects, programmers can add more functionality to networking than any single vendor could.
"Networking needs to come out of the dark ages, or the closed era, and come into the open. Gone are the days of the tightly integrated stuff. We need to leverage the large developer base out there to get networking moving a lot faster than it is today," Ahmad said.
Joab Jackson covers enterprise software and general technology breaking news for The IDG News Service. Follow Joab on Twitter at @Joab_Jackson. Joab's e-mail address is Joab_Jackson@idg.com
