We’ve had a lot of people pass through the Cisco ONE Platform area in the show this week. Many of them are new to the concept of Software Defined Networking (SDN), and most agree that although the possibilities seem endless, nobody is quite sure where it will lead.

Sure there’s the threat of change - for example, the threat posed to a primarily hardware-oriented supply-chain which may become commoditized - but there’s also opportunity.

We’ve done a lot of demos of transaction routing now, and one thing that’s coming out of it is that it’s a great use case for SDN. We hadn’t really anticipated this, thinking more that we’d need to explain transaction routing itself.

But it’s turned out the other way. People can understand what a transaction is. In our demos, we use a receipt of money needing to be posted to a bunch of ledgers.

The useful thing for several people has been that they see how the transaction router actually drives an SDN configuration, just in time. And that’s a great example of how SDN can be used in real life, rather than an abstract description of the capability.

So for us too this has been a really interesting and eye-opening event. Thanks to all the folks at Cisco who organized the Milan event, it’s been a real success and has helped guide a lot of people towards what the future of networking can be.