Jim Frey is Vice President of Research, Network Management for Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) and is a featured guest blogger.

As the dust begins to settle from the hype storms around Software Defined Networking (SDN), one result is clear – we will never look at IT infrastructure, and networking in particular, in quite the same way again.  And while much of the sniping and scrapping has been aimed at those seeking to commoditize the lowest layers of the network thus far, the long range objective of SDN is to bind network function more directly to the needs of the application layer in a secure, policy-oriented manner.  While the essential enabling technologies have been proven out in a few high profile large-scale deployments, mainstream adoption will be gated by the maturity at the touch points between network consumers (a.k.a. applications and services) and the new network control architecture.