Open Networking Foundation

Overview
The Open Networking Foundation (ONF) is a nonprofit organization formed in March 2011 by Deutsche Telekom, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Verizon, and Yahoo!. ONF hopes to promote a new approach to networking called Software-Defined Networking (SDN). SDN hopes to create technology standards that can be leveraged for cloud computing purposes by creating the switching mechanism to support the OpenFlow interface.

OpenFlow enables networks to evolve by giving a remote controller the power to modify the behavior of network devices, through a well-defined "forwarding instruction set." This growing OpenFlow frontier includes routers, switches, virtual switches, and access points from a range of providers.