In today’s innovative world, we often look to invent new and advanced hardware, but a fairly young company named Nicira has a different perspective: using software to build networks.

The idea, as described on their website, is to make use of (current or new) networking equipment to create a “general pool of network capacity” which can then be controlled by software to create and deploy individual networks.

Nicira is the leader in the evolution of virtual networks. Large enterprises such as eBay, AT&T, Rackspace, and others, are already using this technology. They understand that deploying a new application following the traditional methods require several days, and often weeks, to complete, as a non-virtualized network involves searching and purchasing the switches, manually configuring them, etc. Nicira, on the other hand, offers a solution that takes only seconds or minutes to deploy the same application.

According to Nicira’s website, one of the main benefits is the savings in network infrastructure, just as is the case of server virtualization; virtual networks are created on demand, and thus reduce any over provisioning which otherwise goes to waste if not used.

VMware wasted no time and has acquired Nicira because they recognized that this solution offers the greatly desired scalability, flexibility, and security that will help gain all the benefits of the cloud by virtualizing every aspect of the infrastructure in a datacenter.

It’s exciting to think about what may happen soon in this journey to the next generation of networking a solution built for the cloud. What would you like to see?