Cisco's Reactive Networking and UC SDN

If you haven't seen David Ward's (Cisco CTO and SVP of Engineering) keynote at the Open Networking Summit in March 2016, then please take a look at what he is stating. His vision of a reactive network is exactly what we have been working on within International Multimedia Telecommunication Consortium (IMTC) and Open Networking Foundation (ONF).

Cisco's model of a reactive network is:

1. A given end user application sets a machine-machine intent for a specific workflow.
2. An orchestration system and/or SDN controller consumes the intent and uses logic to perform specific use case scenarios.
3. A given set of network domain(s) are programmed with the rights rules and polices to meet the logic and intent.
4. The network streams back raw network information of all sorts like stats, events, etc. to a big data analytic engine (see Cisco's PaNDA project coming out http://panda.cisco.com/)
5. The analytical engines process raw network data to provide machine learning based predicative outcomes.
6. The analytic engines feed back this knowledge to the end user application so that it can do what it needs to do to preserve the quality of experience to the end user.

Source: Cisco ONS 2016 Keynote on Reactive Networking

Now compare what we have been working on in UC SDN within IMTC and ONF and you will see that UC SDN and Cisco's Reactive Networking are very well aligned. In fact, in my last article I wrote how we have a new open source project starting up called Project Atrium Enterprise. We have evolved the project to allow external vendors to plug in modules into a framework model so that Project Atrium becomes more about a platform for innovation in UC SDN and Reactive Networking.

If you are an enterprise that wants to provide requirements or a vendor that wants to innovate in UC SDN, then please feel free to participate in Project Atrium Enterprise by joining the conversations at [email protected]

Source: ONF Open Source SDN Project Atrium Enterprise

Next month, please stay tuned for some exiting news on a new use case emerging on UC SDN from IMTC for a UCaaS offering.