Last summer, Marc Andreessen, Netscape’s co-founder and long-time tech industry luminary, proposed an idea that almost instantly became the catchphrase of the new boom.

According to Andreessen, who is now a venture capitalist, software is poised to replace the value chain of traditional industries, ranging from aerospace and automotive to retail and telecom. Andreessen describes this process as “software eating the world.”

Today, software took a small bite out of networking. A group of companies led by Verizon, announced one of the first real-world demonstrations of a concept called “software defined networking” or SDN, by a major carrier. The idea behind SDN is to uncouple traffic management from the physical hardware-based elements it has heretofore depended on.

“Software defined networking is a game-changer for the way we think about networking and opens the door to the next generation of network architecture, which promises to give us higher performance at significantly lower cost while supporting a broad range of services,” Stu Elby, vice president, network architecture and technology, Verizon, said in a press release.

Eric Johnson, CEO of ADARA Networks, said “Software defined networking provides the freedom to envision any behavior or service” as well as the operation tools to make those services a reality.

The demonstration, which includes ADARA Networks, HP and Intel, will be held at the Open Networking Summit in Santa Clara. It hopes to show how an industry protocol called OpenFlow can reduce the cost of delivering complex, personalized consumer services and optimize the movement of large volumes of data between data centers.

A number of network switch and router vendors have implemented the OpenFlow protocol—include Brocade Communications, Arista Networks, Cisco, IBM, Juniper Networks and Hewlett Packard. But there are still lots of questions about how it can be commercially applied to data centers and carrier networks.

Last week, a consortium of the world’s leading networking companies announced the opening of the “Open Networking Research Center,” (ONRC) which will focus on supporting SDN with a solid foundation of research and also on ensuring the development of open interfaces and open-source software.

“ For two decades, networking has remained essentially stagnant and networks are far too expensive, complex and difficult to manage,” said Scott Shenker, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at UC-Berkeley. Shenker is also the faculty director of the ONRC along with Nick McKeown.

The ONRC’s founding sponsors include: CableLabs, Cisco, Ericsson, Google, Hewlett-Packard, Huawei, Intel, Juniper, NEC, NTT Docomo, Texas Instruments and VMware.

Source:http://www.forbes.com/sites/eliseackerman/2012/04/17/software-eats-the-world-takes-a-bite-out-of-networking/

Software application developers love community. The existence of forums, developer programmes, user groups and now social networks have always formed an intrinsic part of the way programmers come together.

But why is this so?

It could be an inherent mistrust of the vendors’ technologies, which they have to engineer with on a day-to-day basis. It could be because they feel that they speak their own language and they like to form a social clique. Or it could be just because it’s a cool way to stay connected.

From early BBS bulletin board services dedicated to the sharing or exchange of messages or other files on a network — right through to social networks in the form that we know them today, these “systems of collaboration” have always appealed with particular popularity among the developer cognoscenti.

So where does this leave us in 2012?

While it used to be sufficient for vendors to host developer programme sites with technical support options, so-called “knowledge base” information and hard and fast tooling options including SDKs, now – “two-thirds of developers want and expect social networking features to be included in developer relations websites.”

These are the findings of the Evans Data’s Developer Relations Survey, 2012.

The survey of over 400 software developers also found that developer activity in social networks has increased by over 60% in the last two years and that 74% visit social networks at least several times a week.

“Social networking transformed the landscape of the web and developers have embraced the paradigms that define a social network.” said Janel Garvin, CEO of Evans Data, “We’ve seen the interest level in social features rise dramatically among software developers in the last two years, until now any vendor with a developer program had better be providing features to stimulate an active social community”

Source:http://www.computerweekly.com/blogs/cwdn/2012/03/software-developers-demand-social-networking-tools.html