Day 1 Wrap-Up with John Furrier and Stu Miniman at Open Networking Summit 2014 @thecube #ONS2014 Establishing open standards is an urgent priority for the industry, so much so that even sleeping giant Cisco has entered the fray. As Miniman notes, "Cisco isn't the first company when I look at open source, but they do have a lot of people involved in it." The vendor is an active contributor to a number of open source projects, including OpenDaylight and OpenStack. "Cisco is always tagged with 'well, they just kinda do their own thing and maybe they're proprietary', but I've always found that Cisco usually moves technologies forward, and they work closely with the standards community," he observes. The company is investing heavily in SDN as part of a push to regain solid footing in the data center, where the service catalog is being extended into the networking layer as fast evolving user expectations put increased pressure on CIOs to make their IT organizations more agile. "The networking [industry] is getting their act together to innovate for dynamic provisioning, push-button provisioning, with the users now as developers," Furrier highlights in a follow-up discussion with Miniman at the conclusion of the Open Networking Summit. "DevOps is on a collision course with networking, you're seeing virtualization open up a range of creativity." SDN presents an opportunity to cut costs and speed up information delivery, but Miniman highlights that the bottom line benefits are still overshadowed by reliability, which remains the top factor in data center network buying decisions. It's up to the ecosystem as a whole to address everyday challenges while keeping the innovation momentum going.