'OpenFlow' Takes Stage This Week

ISI Group’s Brian Marshall this evening put out a note musing on whether “OpenFlow,” an open-source networking effort, is about to get a big, big endorsement from Google.

As Marshall observes, the Open Networking Summit is taking place this week in Santa Clara, starting Tuesday morning. That conference is expected to draw a number of IT experts from Google, Juniper Networks, Cisco Systems, privately held Big Switch Networks, and other infrastructure providers. A focus of the conference, he writes, is what are called “software-defined networks,” or SDNs.

Using OpenFlow, SDNs link up various vendors’ routing and switching equipment in order to create pools of virtual computing resources inside large hosted data centers. Such agglomerations of routing and switching are seen as necessary to build “cloud computing” facilities.

Google’s head of technical infrastructure, Urs Hölzle, is set to give a talk Tuesday at 8:30 am, Pacific. Marshall thinks Hölzle’s may “will likely be viewed as a strong endorsement for the business models of emerging SDN startups like Nicira and Big Switch Networks during simultaneously interpreted as a long-term negative for the switching/routing incumbents.”

Marshall is not the only one to have had concerns about how OpenFlow may hurt established equipment vendors. Auriga‘s Sandeep Shyamsukha cut Juniper’s shares to Hold nearly a year ago on concerns it could be threatened by the innovation, only to restore the rating last September when he decided Juniper’s answer to OpenFlow, called “QFabric,” showed promise.

Blog on research investing written

Tech Trader Daily is a blog on research investing written by Barron's veteran Tiernan Ray. The blog provides news, analysis and original reporting on events important to investors in software, hardware, the Internet, telecommunications and related fields. Comments and tips can be sent to: techtraderdaily@barrons.com.