SDN has become a popular topic -so much so that this year's MPLS/Carrier Ethernet/IPv6 World Congress in Paris added an SDN Summit component. It's an area of high interest for Cisco as we develop our Open Network Environment, a portfolio of Cisco technologies and open standards which brings programmatic control and application awareness to the network, combining the benefits of hardware and software across physical and virtual domains.

While at the show we caught up with our own David Ward, CTO of Engineering and Chief Architect who gave one of the keynotes.

He's got some interesting thoughts on MPLS SDNs, along with how SDN and programmatic interfaces will impact the cloud and network function virtualization. Dave also reveals how the acquisition of Cariden (now part of the Cisco Quantum? suite) fits into our long term SDN strategy.