You won't have noticed the Swedish vendor making any SDN acquisitions or declaring any SDN spinoffs, and the company says that's because it's already got more critical pieces collected than its rivals.

Funny then, that Ericsson has been comparatively less noisy about SDN than, say, Cisco Systems Inc. or, more recently, Juniper Networks Inc.

That's changing, as Ericsson has begun claiming its substantial mobile-network presence as an advantage in the development of SDN -- or of whatever more flexible, more dynamically provisioned type of network emerges from the SDN craze.

Next week's Mobile World Congress will be the grand soapbox for Ericsson's newfound SDN preaching, and the company has been busily setting the stage.

Last week, Ericsson deluged journalists with MWC announcements, which as a whole skewed towards cloud and network functions virtualization (NFV) capabilities.

Now it's getting more specific. On Monday, the company hosted a further pre-MWC briefing that included a declaration of Ericsson's first SDN product: It will add an OpenFlow 1.3 controller to the SSR 8000 router in the fourth quarter of 2013.

It's easy to think of Ericsson as an SDN player, says Brad Casemore, an analyst with IDC.

"It's a question of whether they want to productize it," Casemore says. "I know they've been tinkering with it for a long time."

Radio days
The important points about SDN and its potential go beyond OpenFlow, covering an end-to-end network view that requires knowledge of the radio network, Ericsson officials argue.

That's because a lot of what's being talked about in SDN -- including the ability to quickly provision network services and move network connections -- has already been accomplished, at scale, in the mobile network, says Erik Ekkuden, Ericsson's head of technology strategies.

"Yes, we have to change everything in the network, but we do that all the time. If you look at the speed of modernizing mobile networks, if you look at the speed of cloud -- the speed is already there. So if you just take that speed that we are used to every day, we are taking that into the [fixed] network," he says.

To put it another way, he says Ericsson is already adept with the mobile network and the cloud -- the two sides that are pushing the need for SDN in service-provider networks. What's needed, then, is a service-provider SDN (the catchphrase Ericsson will be repeating throughout MWC) in between the two.

Like a lot of players, Ericsson thinks SDN has to be considered as a network-wide architecture -- with the difference that Ericsson is big in the radio access network. Others "are talking about the need for a holistic view, but they're not using all the parts of the network that are already in place," Ekkuden says.

"When you do this from the data center all across the network, [through the] radio domain, transport domain, the IP edge, all the way to the data center, that's when you get the value. The value is not really in the data center," he says.

For more

• Ericsson Gets Trendy for MWC
• Early SDN Customers Urged to Seize the Day
• Juniper's SDN Will Build Service Chains
• Cisco Extends Its SDN & Cloud Plans
• Alcatel-Lucent Has a Top-Secret SDN Startup!

— Craig Matsumoto, Managing Editor, Light Reading