Since it's inception, indeed, since its earlier incarnation in Brocade, Lumina Networks, under its CEO Andrew Coward, has been a vocal and committed champion for and proponent of OpenDaylight, the collaborative open source project hosted by the Linux Foundation with the aim of promoting SDN and NFV.

Now the hype cycle is over, OpenDaylight is maturing and has become a reality. The emphasis is now on the daily ongoing task of making it scale, ensuring that it is completely secure and meeting the vast array of carrier-grade requirements that will permit OpenDaylight to proliferate in networks around the world.

Andrew Coward says that OpenDaylight is now in a "steady state" and that it is very impressive that the community has reached such a stable point in such a comparatively short time. He also explains that whilst this maturation phase has been underway OpenDaylight has developed into something that is eminently deployable and usable at tens and hundreds of thousands of devices.

Like many others, Andrew Coward accepts that network transformation, SDN and NFV have taken longer than originally expected to make their impacts felt but is sure that they are doing now. As he says, "Everybody gets the value of open source" but there has been a tricky problem to solve in determining which project should be first to deliver SDN control to work with existing networks in an automated way.

He adds that ONAP, (the Open Network Automation Platform which in essence is the platform that sits above the infrastructure layer that automates the network and permits end users to connect products and services through the infrastructure and allow deployments of VNFs and scaling of the network in a fully automated manner) has become massively important both in the OpenDaylight world and also the telco world at large.

Andrew Coward explains that, basically, all telcos face the same challenge which is to drive automation - and that means they have to abstract, to split business logic from device logic, if they are to be able and prepared to swap one vendor out from a network and replace it with equipment from another without having to re-engineer their entire business, and that capability is exactly what OpenDaylight delivers. And Lumina Networks SDN Controller is a pure-play open source software-defined network controller that is powered by OpenDaylight.

Filmed at SDN NFV World Congress, The Hague, 2019