LAS VEGAS. In October of 2014, Guido Apenzeller, one of the luminaries of the early OpenFlow and Software Defined Networking (SDN) movements, left his startup Big Switch to join former student Martin Casado at VMware. In an interview with Enterprise Networking Planet at the Interop conference here, Apenzeller explained what he’s doing now and why the future is very bright for SDN.
Apenzeller said that he spends about half his time talking to customers about SDN and then also works on long-term direction for VMware’s network virtualization efforts.
“I’ve spent all my life in startups. This is the first job I’ve had in a company that I didn’t start myself,” Apenzeller said. “It has been a wild ride.”
Networking as a whole is currently undergoing a transformation from a hardware system industry to a software industry. From an SDN perspective, Apenzeller said that for much of SDN’s existence, the conversations were about how to convince organizations to try out the new approach.
“Over the last nine months or so, I’ve seen a paradigm shift where customers are no longer asking – if SDN, but how SDN,” Apenzeller said.
Watch the full video interview with Guido Apenzeller below:
Sean Michael Kerner is a senior editor at Enterprise Networking Planet and InternetNews.com. Follow him on Twitter @TechJournalist.
