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Cisco's Rumored Quasi-Proprietary SDN Strategy Irks Some, Surprises Few: Page 3 of 3

While the ONF decision-making process is driven by end users--that is, companies that want to deploy SDN on their networks--its membership does include networking vendors, including HP, Cisco and Brocade Networks.

Brocade, like HP, supports open standards for SDN.

"We see open standards as one of the ways that our customers can really get the simplification in their network and the agility of the network to really meet their business requirements," says Daniel Williams, director of product marketing for service provider and application delivery products at Brocade.

But there's an obvious business reason why vendors push standards-based technology, notes ZK Research's Kerravala. If Cisco has proprietary networking equipment installed at customer locations, competitors such as HP can't go in and sell them HP as an alternative. If it's an industry-standard product, they can make a sale.

"HP's desire is to be very self-serving so they can talk about industry standards, but, ultimately, if it doesn't go that way, they will struggle to gain the share that they want," he says.

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