[This article originally appeared in Carrier Ethernet News]
The who’s who of Carrier Ethernet Europe gathered last week in Munich for the annual Light Reading Ethernet Europe. Collocated with the MEF’s quarterly members’ meeting, this year’s event lived up to its billing as the premier Carrier Ethernet event in EMEA.
My schedule only allowed for a couple of brief visits into town which naturally included the requisite visit to the legendary Hofbrauhaus, for a few um-pa-pa’s, a very large stein of beer and some rockin’ pretzels.
But the real highlight of the week was Carrier Ethernet. In this post, I’ll recap a few highlights from the event.
The theme of the recent Ethernet Europe 2013 - held in Frankfurt, Germany - was “SDN, CE2.0 and Cloud Convergence.” In our busy, multi-tasking world, it seems the trend is to extend that frenzy to industry conferences as well. This annual Light Reading conference was co-located with the MEF's quarterly face-to-face meeting. Holding conference sessions on cloud convergence and CE2.0 in one session while right next door, the MEF technologists were hammering out the latest details of the next generation of specifications created an energetic vibe and opportunities to network during the breaks. Nan Chen from the MEF provided good-natured jabs aimed at the hype surrounding Network Functions Virtualisation (NFV) and Software Defined Networking (SDN) before hinting at a forthcoming announcement from the MEF around cloud services. In hallway discussions between sessions, the audiences seemed to agree that Chen's foreshadowing was focused on the MEF work on new Carrier Ethernet features designed to make it easier to implement and manage dynamic capacity services. 
People talk about the cloud as if it were a specific destination or set of destinations (“My music is in the cloud.”). In fact, the answer to the question “Where is the cloud?” is “everywhere”. The cloud is no longer limited to virtualized storage and services in a datacenter. It is now a metaphor and model for distributed applications built on low cost hardware using Virtual Machines (VMs). 
I always look forward to the Light Reading Ethernet Expo in New York. The city and the staff of Light Reading deserve a lot of credit for pulling off this event a week after super storm Sandy. And people were excited to be at the event because there was a lot to discuss and debate. There has been a lot of change since last November, with the introduction of Carrier Ethernet 2.0 and the rise of Software Defined Networking (SDN), and the most interesting ideas centered on their relevance to the cloud. 
It has been a whirlwind week in New York for Light Reading’s Ethernet Expo event. My company, Overture Networks, was there in force to meet with dozens of customers and partners at what has easily become the largest Carrier Ethernet focused event in North America.