We’re happy to have Matthew Wallace joining us as a TFI2014 speaker this Friday.

Matthew Wallace is a veteran technologist with 19 years of experience in Internet services. He is currently working on bringing next-generation cloud services to life at ViaWest as Director of Product Development. He is the co-author of Securing the Virtual Environment: How to Defend the Enterprise Against Attack, published in May, 2012 by Wiley and Sons, and a frequent speaker on topics of cloud services and security.

He previously worked in Cloud Services Engineering at VMware as a Cloud Solutions Architect, where he worked on service provider adoption, cloud reference architecture, partner integration, and software development.

Matthew was the founding engineer of Exodus Communications’ Managed Security Services team, now part of SAVVIS, Inc.

Matthew was kind enough to answer some questions in order to get us all thinking before this week’s event:

What is SDN?

SDN is programmable networking. Marc Andreessen wrote “Software is eating the world” in 2011, and this trend continues to extend to infrastructure, as widespread adoption of cloud technologies and devops methodologies has led to an increasing expectation that all aspects of the datacenter will be controlled by programming and policy, not hand crafted and managed. SDN accomplishes this through things like overlay networking and network function virutalization.

Why are you excited about SDN?

We see a lot of customers where the need for physical one-per-customer connections (even within the datacenter) and hardware network functions, such as firewalls and load balancers, add expense to a final solution. SDN, to me, has the potential to deliver faster, more precisely controlled and “guaranteed correct” networking and network functions, at a lower cost.

How does the network of the future differ from today’s?

The future of networking is application-centric rather. In the past, we’ve seen a focus on wires, devices, netblocks, etc. The future is about delivering networking services – whether that’s basic connectivity, private connectivity, or network functions like firewalling and load balancing, intelligently to the application, controlled by software, with policies that migrate with and adapt to the application, rather than the other way around.

Now, go register so that you can join the conversation this Friday, 22 August in the Denver Tech Center at The Future of the Internet 2014: Defining Software Defined Networks!