Cloud industry big shots and big network owners, including Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon and Yahoo, have formed and joined a standard setting Open Networking Foundation with the aim to promote Software-Defined Networking (SDN) that makes networks programmable like computers. Additionally, they have also invited 17 other companies to join the foundation, which include Cisco, Broadcom, Juniper Networks, NTT, IBM, HP and VMware.

The group will be officially announcing on Tuesday, and has the target to standardize a few technologies pioneered at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley. They actually want to make all types of networks programmable, just a computer is programmed as this will give the owners and operators better control over their networks. So if everything goes well, we will get several changes to witness not only for global telecommunications networks and large corporate data centers, but also for small household networks as well. In fact, this will be in a positive tone as networks will be more flexible and hence less likely to get congested.

“This answers a question that the entire industry has had, and that is how do you provide owners and operators of large networks with the flexibility of control that they want in a standardized fashion,” said Nick McKeown, a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at Stanford, where his and colleagues’ work forms part of the technical underpinnings, called OpenFlow.

As cloud computing is getting much more important for enterprises, the need for more intelligent control systems is also increasing, especially to control the behavior of routing machines. Some designers also made a point that OpenFlow should open up the software-hardware systems to control flow of Internet data packets.

”This is a pragmatic solution,” said David Farber, a computer scientist at Carnegie Mellon who was one of the pioneers of data networking technology.“The idea of moving intelligence to the end points of the network was one of the original design points of the Internet,” Mr. Farber added.

The foundation will be headed by Google’s senior VP of engineering, Urs Hoelzle as President and chairman.

Open cloud developments are getting a lot of support these days as just yesterday we heard Juniper Networks joining the Eclipse Foundation, a leading open source community, having millions of users working towards an open development platform and complementary products & services. Joining this community will help Juniper extend open software development arm and hence capabilities to build applications on Junos software products.

Then there is Hadapt, getting nods for its launch through Hadoop, a MapReduce and Google File System-inspired software framework for data-intensive distributed applications. Hadapt started as HadoopDB project, a computer science project at Yale University. For additional insight, check out the complete interview session with Cloudera CEO Mike Olson’s take on the origins of Hadoop, here.