As customers embrace cloud strategy to build an agile data center, one of the key pillars is openness. Why openness? To move fast, accelerate time-to-market, drive higher level of innovation and avoid vendor lock-in are some of the benefits to openess. What does open mean? In this case, open source, open standards, open interfaces, open API's, open tools set including automation, orchestration and DevOps.

Come and join Cisco at ONS June 15-18, 2015 to learn how we've been in the forefront developing and contributing to the open source community. Hear our speakers Tom Edsall Data Center SDN Solutions  June 18 @ 2:00 pm, Mike Cohen at the partner theater June 18 @ 12:40 pm and others

See demos in Cisco's booth on OpenStack, Group Based Policy GBP that enables capturing application requirements directly rather than converting the requirements into a set of infrastructure configuration updates, Open Dayligt, and more. In the solutions showcase section, you'll see a service chaining demo with Avi and One Convergence.

What else are we doing to drive openness in the data center? BGP-EVPN control plane to define how VxLAN tunnel endpoints map MAC addressed to IP addresses in a multi-vendor environment, Network Service Header NSH offering a method to identify network service path, OpFlex is an extensible policy protocol designed to exchange abstract policy between a network controller and a set of smart devices capable of rendering policy, open SDN with ACI  and many more.